The City of Joy [antikvár]

1He had the appearance of a Mogul warrior: thick shock of curly hair, sideburns which met the drooping curve of his mustache, a Strong, stocky torso, long muscular arms and shghtly bowed legs. Yet thirty-two-year-old Hasari Pal was merely a peasant, one of the five hundred or so miUion inhabitants of India who were looking to the goddess Earth for their livelihood.He had built his two-roomed hut with mud walls and a thatched roof; it was a short distance away from the village of Bankuli, West Bengal, a state in northeast India almost as large as the State of Indiana and five times as populated as Illinois. His wife, Aloka, was a young woman with a clear complexion and the look of an angel. The wing of her nose was pierced with a gold ring and her ankles were ornamented with bangles that jangled as she walked. She had given him three children. The eldest, twelve-year-old Amrita, had inherited her father's almond eyes and her mother's peach skin. Ten-year-old Manooj and six-year-old Shambu were two sturdy boys with black tousled hair who would far rather chase lizards around the pond than guide the buffalo into the family rice field. In the peasant's home there lived also Hasari's father, Prodip, a gaunt man with a lined face, barred with a thin, gray mustache; his mother Nalini, a bent old woman as wrinkled as a walnut; his two younger brothers with their wives and children in all, sixteen people.Openings set very low in the framework of the hut maintained a certain degree of coolness in the torrid summer, and a little warmth during the chilly winter nights. Shaded by red-and-white