This he writes in 'Ghost Train to the Eastern Star' as he leaves India;his words punch me in the gut because he writes so bloody well, because his words drag me screaming and squemish (I'll check spelling in the morning) along its "hideous and impassable roads", because they're frightening:
"One day I saw a round fruit by the side of the road. It was crawling with insects, alive with big ants, blackened by them. Was it a coconut or a durian? Whatever, it represented a little world of hunger obscured by its eaters.
... "What sent me away finally [from India] was something simpler, but larger and inescapable. It was the sheer mass of people, the horribly thronged cities, the colossal agglomeration of elbowing and contending Indians, the billion-plus, the sight of them, the sense of their desperation and hunger, having to compete with them for space on on sidewalks, on roads, everywhere - what I'd heard on the train from Amritsar: 'Too many. Too many.' All of them jostling for space, which made for much of life there a monotony of frotteurism, life in India being an unending experience of unconsensual rubbing.
"And not because it was India - Indians were good-humored and polite on the whole - but because it was the way of the world. The population of the United States had doubled in my lifetime, and the old simple world I had known as a boy was gone. India was a reminder to me of what was in store for us all, a glimpse of the future. Trillions of dollars were spent to keep people breathing, to cure disease, and to extend human life, but nothing was being done to relieve the planet of overpopulation, the contending millions, like those ants on the rotten fruit." (p. 236)
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