I feel sorry for our troops in Calcutta, where the
Indian popula- tion is reminding the world how far their country has progressed towards political maturity. It is a depressing place at the best of times, especially in the hot weather. Refuse litters pavements stained with betel-juice, beggars and profiteers seem equally numerous and equally repulsive, there is an atmosphere of apathy and corruption and doom. During the war I sometimes had to fly from Calcutta to Chungking. This took a day. The streets of the two cities provided as vivid a contrast as you can find in Asia. Garbage, corruption, poverty, crowds, noise and a steamy climate were common to both. But it was hard, almost, to believe that the Bengalis and the Chinese were members of the same race. The brown men dressed in white looked listless, sullen, foolish, ineffec- tive, miserable ; the yellow men dressed in blue, swarming up and down the tortuous dark grey alleys clinging to the scarred bluffs above the Yangtse and the Kialing, looked exactly the opposite of all those epithets. You felt as if you had landed on another planet— more inconvenient, more expensive, if anything slightly smellier than the one you had left that morning, but a planet (and this was what struck you more forcibly than anything) with a sense If humour.
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