Six Indians behind the counter worked at a furious pace, serving hundreds of patrons. Each worker had a separate job. Only one of them washed dishes, and cleanliness was not one of his finer points, for he looked as though he moonlighted as a gravedigger. Crusty black dirt trimmed the tips of his long fingernails; the lighter spots on his face and neck, on closer inspection, turned out to be streaks where sweat had washed off some layers of muck. After hundreds of swabbings from the same filthy water, his dishrag resembled what I imagined were mummy wrappings. The man wiped the filthy plates and utensils according to their immediate necessity right before the eyes of the customer.

Upon deeper consideration, I discovered that I no longer had any hunger. But Rodney Johnson, my new English friend, wolfed down the coffee and fried eggs without the slightest suggestion of discomfort. He seemed oblivious to the unsanitary conditions. I told him that I had never imagined British Colonial grit was the foreign matter found in their food.

A photo I took at the time — a sacred cow pulling a lawn mower

We hired a rundown taxi of a make I could not identify. Some sort of strange religious symbols hung from the rearview mirror, and the clear plastic seats immediately stuck to our bare legs as the three-hour trip to Agra began. The dozen books I had read on India had not prepared me for the panorama of horrors unfolding as we sped from the business district of New Delhi. By the roadsides I saw hundreds of rickety, bug-eyed children, and even a couple of emaciated corpses lying on the street, treated by passersby like so much refuse to be hauled away. The bargaining and squabbling of the marketplace were strange and annoying to my ears, and I could not get accustomed to the stenches. Sometimes the odors came from the fires made from briquettes of bovine and human dung. Amid the ruins and rubble lay intermittent piles of ancient garbage through which the starving picked in search of even the tiniest of rotting morsels.

Once in a while an old temple or structure would heave into view out of this sea of desolation and offer a brief glimpse into a high culture that had once flourished here. Visiting India for the first time, I decided not to be depressed by the ugliness and the decay, and gradually, in the midst of the ruins and putrefaction, I resurrected in my imagination the once beautiful, magnificent empire of India. I could feel the vitality and creativity that had ruled this land thousands of years ago. In my mind’s eye, see the farmers and tradesmen, the artisans and musicians, the road builders and architects, the noblemen and the warriors.