Reverend Powell felt his seersucker suit sticking to him as it had even yesterday, but so filthy had been the hotel the night before that he had not dared change it. He leaned against the gray 1947 Packard with the new coat of paint, a car that would have been junked back in Jason, and looked at the driver, a brown-skinned man with Caucasian features. The driver had stopped for a large gray cow with a dangling, fleshy throat. Just minutes before he had refused to stop for a baby crying in the street, because it was what he called "an untouchable." Cows were sacred in India. Bugs were sacred in India. Everything was sacred in India, thought Reverend Powell—everything but human life.

Instead of waiting in the car's greasy back seat for the cow to pass, Reverend Powell had gotten out, and when he saw the ox cart of bodies go by, he knew he had to make a decision: go on, to what he felt now would be his death, or go back to Jason.

He still had several hundred miles along roads like these to reach Patna at the foot of the Vindhya Mountain Range, Patna on the Ganges up from Calcutta. Famine was upon the land despite gifts of American grain that rotted in warehouses of Calcutta and Bombay and Sholapur, despite even more grain that reached the people. Despite the most aid America ever gave any country it had not been at war with, India was still collecting its starved dead in ox carts while its sanctimonious ministers in New, Delhi, who presumed to preach morality to the world, lavished money on atomic bombs.

Reverend Powell said a little prayer and steadied himself. The cow had to move soon, and he must decide whether to go on up the road to Patna or go back to the airport and return to where he could breathe the fresh air of the piny woods or share a mess of catfish with his family or cry out his love of God before his congregation in the neat white church set off on the grassy slope by the old Snowy Mill.