The rain was beginning to soak into our spirits, so with a new resolve we swallowed the advice of our French friends and decided to head inland and slightly north, to a dry place that actually had things to see, as opposed to communities that survived by attracting tourists to beaches. The destination was a little town called Hampi, and our method of travel a rickety bus of hard vinyl seats and scratched windows that would refuse to open, or refuse to close, depending on what was least preferable for the time. The bus made a sound I will never forget, like enormous mechanical vultures of rusted steel, bickering in a wire nest.
The Journey was to take just over ten hours, but within just half of one, Steven was passed out in the corner his lower lip shaking with the vibration of the bus and his headphones still bouncing music into his unconscious ears.
The air was hot and moist, as it had been since we arrived but shortly after takeoff the intensity increased with our altitude as we wound up mountains not dissimilar to the Black Spur, except due to the nature of Indian traffic this was a road on which people felt compelled to overtake you no matter how steep the curve, or how blind the corner. I saw at least two trucks and bus that had lost their footing and were perched in ditches, their sides resting against a wall of mud and rock. I tried not to think about the vehicles that had fallen off the low side.
Hours swallowed hours and Steve's state of consciousness flinched only occasionally, but the world behind my eyes surged as I attempted to soak up the intricacies of the sounds and smells and images of the changing landscape.
Once over the mountain range the dense nature of exploding jungles dissipated into drier scatterings of shrapnel as the land settled and stretched to a near horizontal horizon. Despite the vibrations I read 'The Alchemist', a simple but delightful book, made difficult to read as the words shook with my hands and the letters jumbled themselves up often removing themselves from the page altogether and scattering themselves on the floor of the bus or the back of the seat in front of me.
Eventually we arrived in Hospet, a few kilometres from Hampi, and as the bus entered the station there was a knock from outside on the back window. A young Indian boy was already offering us his services as a rickshaw driver. We were the last to get off the bus as were enveloped by at least a dozen young boys "Where you Going?" , "Hampi?", "100 rupees", "90 rupees", "Which country?", "Don't trust him, I give you good deal". Their arms and hand and eyes like tendrils crawled over me. Steve just picked one and off we went through the light evening drizzle an hour beyond dusk. The boy asked us where we had been, we replied that we had been in the rain and were seeking relief. He informed us of the hopeful notion that the current drizzle was the first rain in ten days for Hampi. We exhaled as our hope was fed through words of a rickshaw driver (a rare thing).
It is a strange thing arriving at a new place under curtains of darkness. You have such limited information to gauge your environment, your direction or your position. You see flashes of lights and shadows but like scattered pieces of puzzle you cannot put them together in your mind. The upside of such things is that the new day allows the excitement of slotting together certain elements and slowly the missing pieces reveal themselves and make the picture that much more satisfying for the original denial.
And the new day was indeed satisfying. We followed a steep, white steel staircase to the rooftop restaurant where right in front of us, about 150 metres away stood an 11 story Hindu temple of about 600 years old carved and constructed from sandstone. In front of it and around it were various other structures, temples and courtyards. The sky was grey but the air was dry. We ate with a renewed enthusiasm. Finally, we were to actually see something, finally we could walk with dry shirts and light, languid footsteps... then we did.
We sauntered through though a massive doorway of a 9 story structure shaped like a steep pyramid, but with intricate carvings of humans and gods. Beyond it a large courtyard of stone pavers stretched out to its borders where pillars and pylons stood in front of sandstone walls and masked, dark doorways to halls and chambers. The courtyard was alive things beautiful and ugly; brightly dressed children who played, stared and gushed towards us, monkeys that swung and jumped across the eves of temples, dirty fly bitten dogs, the occasional deformed and emaciated beggar and many men who offered to be our 'guide'. We tried to evade them all, an impossible task, but after declining everything for five minutes or so and letting our western manners slip just slightly, most of them got the point and we wandered around these ancient ruins. At the time I had naught to compare it with. It was quite amazing, the age, the workmanship, even the technology. 'Technology' you ask? There was one small chamber through a slightly larger chamber which has a small crack in the wall that acted like a pinhole camera, and at that time of the day the silhouette of the front was cast upside down onto one of the walls. Simple indeed, but one had to admire the thought and care of the people who built this 400 years before our country was even colonised.
Hours passed and photos were taken before a familiar feeling crossed my mind and then my skin. The pressure dropped, the wind picked up heaven started to melt above us. 10 days of dryness and we arrived as the rains arrived. I'm travelling with a man whose nickname is Sunshine, yet the actual experience of his namesake has eluded us every step. We spent the day drinking coffee and eating curry with our books and then retired to our rooms to continue the reading, when the power in the whole town went out. Steve slept and I darted through the rain to a cafe where a car battery or hidden generator powered a fluorescent light and there I sat, being eaten by the local insect wildlife and read about the economics of humanity.
The following day was the same but the rains started ever earlier and so we sat and read and wrote and smiled occasionally frustrated smiles at our fortune. Locals told us we were surrounded by 20 kilometers of storm on all sides, and although we desired to see the plethora of other temples ion the immediate region our desire for sunshine was too strong and we booked a bus further north. If there is one thing that India has in spades (beyond, people, poverty, cows, and curries) it is temples, and so we arranged some links in the transport chain that would take us to a place that would make everything we had seen in Hampi look like Legoland.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Shakespeare in India
The want of a market led us to a wiry thread of clinking buses that wove themselves through a tapestry of bending backstreets. Colva to Margao, Margao to Panjib, Panjib to Mapusa, and Marpusa to Ajuna, a town hailed for its beauty, rich with vibrant Goan flavours and a flea market of untold treasures. Several hours of bumps and screeching metal left us famished and with the restaurant at the guesthouse deserted we scoured the path to the beach and came to a 'T' in the road. "When in doubt, turn left" came the memory of an old quip and we obeyed with a cheeky footstep.
They sky was grey as it had been since we arrived and it mirrored the sand underneath our feet, dark and textured, stained with decay. The wind jolted and shook, and then hung for a spontaneous moment before shifting back to its awkward, blustering dance.
The light, which was on the cusp of beginning its daily withdrawals presented shack after shack adorned in the hand painted murals of beer and soft drink logos, but as each was reached and investigated, they yielded no more than huts wrapped up in tarps and the dead leaves of palms. On we walked with the turbulent, sandy waves of a beach disturbed, invading our shrinking walkway. With a unique blend of ignorance, hope and stubborn hunger we worked our way through several bays littered with refuse until the only path left was an impossible cement staircase away from the churning yellow sea. Further we walked under our deranged logic, finding barely a soul lingering in this ghostly grey paradise reminiscent of Luhrman's Verona in its own state of impending doom.
As the sun grew exhausted and surrendered to gravity behind our earthly shroud, the remaining tones of colour drained from all matter. Tree and rock, fence and building were all robbed of their essence and was replaced by a surreal arrangement of props fit for use in a black and white horror film.
Then it began to rain.
Our hunger had temporarily blinded us from the now obvious inevitability of such a thing and within seconds the most intimate of body curves were subject to the monsoon as we did an about face and squelched our way back. There is a point of saturation where you stop caring and accept that there is no dry spot to savor and nothing to hide from the penetrating deluge. But I discovered there is another point even beyond this where acceptance and resolve is dissolved into consuming irritation and with a glance of mutual but undirected annoyance we lifted our feet and ran blind down foreign and distorted paths to the place that we would tonight call home.
They sky was grey as it had been since we arrived and it mirrored the sand underneath our feet, dark and textured, stained with decay. The wind jolted and shook, and then hung for a spontaneous moment before shifting back to its awkward, blustering dance.
The light, which was on the cusp of beginning its daily withdrawals presented shack after shack adorned in the hand painted murals of beer and soft drink logos, but as each was reached and investigated, they yielded no more than huts wrapped up in tarps and the dead leaves of palms. On we walked with the turbulent, sandy waves of a beach disturbed, invading our shrinking walkway. With a unique blend of ignorance, hope and stubborn hunger we worked our way through several bays littered with refuse until the only path left was an impossible cement staircase away from the churning yellow sea. Further we walked under our deranged logic, finding barely a soul lingering in this ghostly grey paradise reminiscent of Luhrman's Verona in its own state of impending doom.
As the sun grew exhausted and surrendered to gravity behind our earthly shroud, the remaining tones of colour drained from all matter. Tree and rock, fence and building were all robbed of their essence and was replaced by a surreal arrangement of props fit for use in a black and white horror film.
Then it began to rain.
Our hunger had temporarily blinded us from the now obvious inevitability of such a thing and within seconds the most intimate of body curves were subject to the monsoon as we did an about face and squelched our way back. There is a point of saturation where you stop caring and accept that there is no dry spot to savor and nothing to hide from the penetrating deluge. But I discovered there is another point even beyond this where acceptance and resolve is dissolved into consuming irritation and with a glance of mutual but undirected annoyance we lifted our feet and ran blind down foreign and distorted paths to the place that we would tonight call home.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The rains
The clouds are of a grey so neutral they could define the term. They are the colour of a poker face, void of both warmth, cruelty, indeed any expression. They are free of complexity and nigh on free of texture and definition as they hide both sun and moon from our drenched skins and questioning eyes. They mask the face of heaven and invade the world like a soupy mist, so close you could almost inhale their contents, but one need not inhale as the contents find their way into your skin, your eyes and your moth soon enough. It is so wet that the skin on your fingers wrinkles and whitens from under shelter in mere anticipation of the fall. In this place rain is as reliable as change and as certain as death.
Uncompromising, engulfing and nigh on constant, Heaven's drainpipe rests above us shrouded in glowing white soup that cannot threaten as their threat is almost always being realised. There is no warning in the sky, no suggestion in the wind and no hint in the ever moist air. It starts, and finishes, and starts again like the whim of a spoiled but powerful child that seeks to flush away the world that has done it some unquenchable harm.
An almost infinite amount of single, invisible points manifest and follow their path towards our rock shielded by their size until they are almost upon us, finally taking form just feet above our heads or in the presence of headlights or a lonely streetlamp. When lit form the side and combined with its windy companion, it forms sheets as the minute beads roll into and off of each other in a frantic and chaotic dash to join their comrades that cut away at the earth. United in our world their laziness shifts and forms lumbering streams and searching tendrils that reshape our place. An endless escalator of glistening rungs rolls down a palm tree before melting into a river that flows where the path to my front door used to be. The rain is the landlord of this country and we are no more that a string of expendable renters who live in its house.
Uncompromising, engulfing and nigh on constant, Heaven's drainpipe rests above us shrouded in glowing white soup that cannot threaten as their threat is almost always being realised. There is no warning in the sky, no suggestion in the wind and no hint in the ever moist air. It starts, and finishes, and starts again like the whim of a spoiled but powerful child that seeks to flush away the world that has done it some unquenchable harm.
An almost infinite amount of single, invisible points manifest and follow their path towards our rock shielded by their size until they are almost upon us, finally taking form just feet above our heads or in the presence of headlights or a lonely streetlamp. When lit form the side and combined with its windy companion, it forms sheets as the minute beads roll into and off of each other in a frantic and chaotic dash to join their comrades that cut away at the earth. United in our world their laziness shifts and forms lumbering streams and searching tendrils that reshape our place. An endless escalator of glistening rungs rolls down a palm tree before melting into a river that flows where the path to my front door used to be. The rain is the landlord of this country and we are no more that a string of expendable renters who live in its house.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Arrival in Goa
Fifteen hours after that first textured hiss comes the grinding squeal that signifies our destination. Through the ravaging rains that invade the platform, a taxi finds us a place to sleep. Upon first light we examine our surroundings and seek out suggested accommodation. The 'Garden Cottages' is comprised of five self contained units. Fortunately two are vacant. Each room begs the rent of 200 rupees per night (AU$6) and are simple, private, off the street and come with their own porch and a pair of cockroaches (I named ours Basil and Henry). Our viewing platforms look out onto a shared garden of pots and ferns, with draping flowers of dusty sunsets and misty sunrises, and is a delicate refrain from the saturation of all other visible colours.Beyond our fence is a hut where chickens poke at ground and a little of small black pigs suckle at their mother's belly. Further beyond that are buildings several stories high in a state of being either half built or half destroyed. But despite their rise or fall people are living inside them, a fact apparent from the clothes lines draped in fabrics, simple and complex that swirl in the hot, wet breeze.
Our things secure, we brave the rain and head for a bar. We drink well and we drink cheaply as we open ourselves to each other and share thoughts and tales of both meaning and frivolity. For the first time so far I exhale. I smile. My fear melts and I just exist. I go to hunt down a conversation with a computer while the other move onto a bar down a dark and unknown street. When the drunken conversation with the keyboard is over I walk barefoot through the rain, rocks poking at my feet, water rolling down my spine, and sand wedging itself into my nails. My heart and mind are open as they shine and I smile a smile I have not smiled before. Up to my ankles in black puddles, my faith in my path serves me well and a distant fluorescent light presents the washed out image of my friends playing pool and laughing honest laughter whilst wandering jazz emanates from behind them. Another drink is followed by more of the same and soon we find ourselves on our porch playing music and talking nonsense aided by a bottle of $4 vodka called 'White Mischief'.
White mischief indeed.
Our things secure, we brave the rain and head for a bar. We drink well and we drink cheaply as we open ourselves to each other and share thoughts and tales of both meaning and frivolity. For the first time so far I exhale. I smile. My fear melts and I just exist. I go to hunt down a conversation with a computer while the other move onto a bar down a dark and unknown street. When the drunken conversation with the keyboard is over I walk barefoot through the rain, rocks poking at my feet, water rolling down my spine, and sand wedging itself into my nails. My heart and mind are open as they shine and I smile a smile I have not smiled before. Up to my ankles in black puddles, my faith in my path serves me well and a distant fluorescent light presents the washed out image of my friends playing pool and laughing honest laughter whilst wandering jazz emanates from behind them. Another drink is followed by more of the same and soon we find ourselves on our porch playing music and talking nonsense aided by a bottle of $4 vodka called 'White Mischief'.
White mischief indeed.
moving north
Another early rise but this time rather than moving off for a light cruise through the jungle we head towards a trains station to get some kilometers behind us. The monsoon season has only really begun but I have never seen rains like this; drenching and heavy, wide and white. It falls soft and warm and feels like a kind of velvety syrup on the skin.
We hoped to beat the rains by moving north to Goa, around a 12 hour train trip (or so we were told). But we would soon find that trying to been the monsoon is like running away from the dark an hour after sunset.
The station was all a commotion. Lines and 'Q's (as the signage indicated) wound through crowds that shuffled and shook in pursuit of their many directions. There was that sound in the air that is unique to hubs of travel; the crackle of loudspeakers before various announcements of numbers and locations repeated in dialects unknown and languages indistinguishable. The rattle and ramble of locomotion drawing in and out of this single link of chain webbing with a hiss and a grunt as they surge and creak like lumbering metal snakes that just dined on a crowd full of humans.
A tap on the shoulder and a French 'Allo' made us turn to see a couple we had met the day prior on our floating voyage. Our destinations the same we made our formal introductions as we had failed to mention our names on the chariot of cane. Sandra and Michael had been in India for the last month and as they entered their final week they, like us, desired the taste of warm sunlight and a brief reprieve from the sticky saturation of the monsoon.
With a textured hiss that envelopes outwards the station rolls away from us and within minutes the picture in the window morphs into a rich garden of exploding foliage and mirrored puddles. The air is so moist, the land so low and heaven's barrage so constant that nothing dries and soon every depression becomes a pool that fills and then rolls over itself aching to spread, divide and conquer the space next to it.
Just like the jungles of yesterday the frame presents an untamed land peppered with basic human development. Mud bricks, demented tin, recycled signage and royal blue plastic tarps are reflected through my eyes as they dance in their window near and far. The clothing of the local people is laid out on piles of rocks in an attempt to bake them into dry submission.
Flashes of people move through the brisk scenery like characters under a strobe light. What they are doing, where they are going and what is moving them inside their own hearts is a mystery to me, but I ponder it anyway with no need for answers, just the vibrating pleasure of curiosity itself.
As I delve deeper into such curious thoughts I see a dark hand waving to my left. I shift my attention and look towards the hand which is now outstretched and begging for a contribution. I follow the hand to its source where a crippled man sits on the floor. He lo0oks into me. He looks at me like I am naked before him. His eyes are black holes in which resides echoes of a painful life, the likes of which I should never know. I want to help the man but I shake my head. I don't think I can help the man beyond a meal but maybe that idea is just a facade to hide my own selfishness from me. I look away but hear his aching tongue follow me with words I cannot grasp. After a moment I hear him move on and my eyes return to see him shuffle off on his hands. It is only that that I see that he does not exist below the waist and that he drags himself by his hands, his deformed torso separated from the ground by a piece of newspaper that scrapes and scrunches across the sandy train floor. I shut my eyes. No tear appears and no tear falls, but my heart weeps silently in its cage.
We hoped to beat the rains by moving north to Goa, around a 12 hour train trip (or so we were told). But we would soon find that trying to been the monsoon is like running away from the dark an hour after sunset.
The station was all a commotion. Lines and 'Q's (as the signage indicated) wound through crowds that shuffled and shook in pursuit of their many directions. There was that sound in the air that is unique to hubs of travel; the crackle of loudspeakers before various announcements of numbers and locations repeated in dialects unknown and languages indistinguishable. The rattle and ramble of locomotion drawing in and out of this single link of chain webbing with a hiss and a grunt as they surge and creak like lumbering metal snakes that just dined on a crowd full of humans.
A tap on the shoulder and a French 'Allo' made us turn to see a couple we had met the day prior on our floating voyage. Our destinations the same we made our formal introductions as we had failed to mention our names on the chariot of cane. Sandra and Michael had been in India for the last month and as they entered their final week they, like us, desired the taste of warm sunlight and a brief reprieve from the sticky saturation of the monsoon.
With a textured hiss that envelopes outwards the station rolls away from us and within minutes the picture in the window morphs into a rich garden of exploding foliage and mirrored puddles. The air is so moist, the land so low and heaven's barrage so constant that nothing dries and soon every depression becomes a pool that fills and then rolls over itself aching to spread, divide and conquer the space next to it.
Just like the jungles of yesterday the frame presents an untamed land peppered with basic human development. Mud bricks, demented tin, recycled signage and royal blue plastic tarps are reflected through my eyes as they dance in their window near and far. The clothing of the local people is laid out on piles of rocks in an attempt to bake them into dry submission.
Flashes of people move through the brisk scenery like characters under a strobe light. What they are doing, where they are going and what is moving them inside their own hearts is a mystery to me, but I ponder it anyway with no need for answers, just the vibrating pleasure of curiosity itself.
As I delve deeper into such curious thoughts I see a dark hand waving to my left. I shift my attention and look towards the hand which is now outstretched and begging for a contribution. I follow the hand to its source where a crippled man sits on the floor. He lo0oks into me. He looks at me like I am naked before him. His eyes are black holes in which resides echoes of a painful life, the likes of which I should never know. I want to help the man but I shake my head. I don't think I can help the man beyond a meal but maybe that idea is just a facade to hide my own selfishness from me. I look away but hear his aching tongue follow me with words I cannot grasp. After a moment I hear him move on and my eyes return to see him shuffle off on his hands. It is only that that I see that he does not exist below the waist and that he drags himself by his hands, his deformed torso separated from the ground by a piece of newspaper that scrapes and scrunches across the sandy train floor. I shut my eyes. No tear appears and no tear falls, but my heart weeps silently in its cage.
backwaters
A tranquil boat cruise through the backwaters of Kerala provided yesterday's backdrop of calm, murky waters and lush greenery, the likes of which I have never seen. It was as though palm fought fern to clamber towards any gap not yet occupied. Everything is saturated with life.
I left a country deep in drought and arrived in a water world. Lakes stretch into long fingers of slow moving rivers that change direction with the tide, and they in turn branch into small channels only marginally wider than our boat. We mover from river to channel and are silently propelled by a bamboo pole deep into the labyrinth. Grasses and flowered undergrowth poised on the edge of the bank reach and stretch into our watercraft fashioned from cane and bound together with ropes made from the husks of coconuts.
We maneouvre around an impossible corner, briefly drowning waterlillies that pepper our path like ice in a bath. I close my eyes and inhale the forest, rich in subtle scents of green with pink flashes and a hint of human. Even out here in a maze of mnarshes and naturally cut lines of liquid people are living. People live everywhere here. I wonder if people own land all the way out here, sell land or just aquire land and build. The shelters are varied but consistently simple, form huts fashioned from discarded wood, recycled tin and tarpaulins, to concrete houses jutting awkwardly out of a landscape void of straight lines.
I cannot help but ponder the thoughts of the people that live here. They live such simple lives compared to that of my homeland, that now seems so intricate by comparison.
Are they happy? They certainly greet us with warm smiles and sharp beaming eyes but perhaps happiness means different things here, if it means anything at all. Does a simple life dictate a simple philosophy, or at least influence its development? Is there a place for philosophy here at all where survival is the game rather than our modern pursuits of expression, decadence and a fruitless search for mneaning and purpose, whatever they are. It seems almost ludicrous to ponder 'meaning' in this explosion of humnanit, where 'ifs' and 'buts' become no more than humid air, something of which there is already no shortage. This is a owrld of 'is' and 'is not'. The question of 'why' that usually keeps me awake at night, if it is not waking me from my shady dreams is completely lost here and I am glad to let go of it if it can allow me to taste another perspective on the human menu of perception.
I left a country deep in drought and arrived in a water world. Lakes stretch into long fingers of slow moving rivers that change direction with the tide, and they in turn branch into small channels only marginally wider than our boat. We mover from river to channel and are silently propelled by a bamboo pole deep into the labyrinth. Grasses and flowered undergrowth poised on the edge of the bank reach and stretch into our watercraft fashioned from cane and bound together with ropes made from the husks of coconuts.
We maneouvre around an impossible corner, briefly drowning waterlillies that pepper our path like ice in a bath. I close my eyes and inhale the forest, rich in subtle scents of green with pink flashes and a hint of human. Even out here in a maze of mnarshes and naturally cut lines of liquid people are living. People live everywhere here. I wonder if people own land all the way out here, sell land or just aquire land and build. The shelters are varied but consistently simple, form huts fashioned from discarded wood, recycled tin and tarpaulins, to concrete houses jutting awkwardly out of a landscape void of straight lines.
I cannot help but ponder the thoughts of the people that live here. They live such simple lives compared to that of my homeland, that now seems so intricate by comparison.
Are they happy? They certainly greet us with warm smiles and sharp beaming eyes but perhaps happiness means different things here, if it means anything at all. Does a simple life dictate a simple philosophy, or at least influence its development? Is there a place for philosophy here at all where survival is the game rather than our modern pursuits of expression, decadence and a fruitless search for mneaning and purpose, whatever they are. It seems almost ludicrous to ponder 'meaning' in this explosion of humnanit, where 'ifs' and 'buts' become no more than humid air, something of which there is already no shortage. This is a owrld of 'is' and 'is not'. The question of 'why' that usually keeps me awake at night, if it is not waking me from my shady dreams is completely lost here and I am glad to let go of it if it can allow me to taste another perspective on the human menu of perception.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Day Zero
As soon as I stepped off the plane the world grew before me, stretching out in all directrions like the possibilities of a chess board.
A layer of mirror slipped from my eyes and I presented myself with things I could not fathom. I sit in a taxi with my long lost brother. I search in vain for a seatbelt while he lights a cigarette. I have a lot to learn.
This rattling, speeding, erratic coffin of squeaks and creak peers through a humid and dark night, showing me flashes of this wild world. Urban decay just trook on new meaning and it would take on more still when the sun goes through its next motion and reveal the depth of this old but new land of wonder, humanity and degradation.
The cold shower of the next morning woke me from my jetlagged sleep but the haze would continue for days as I try to comprehend life here. But digesting India is not as simple as swallowing a malaria tablet, it takes time. It deserves, nay demands, consideration.
We ate breakfast by a window. Stephen started to word me up on indian ways as I allowed myself to become transfixed by simple things on the other side of the pane. Power cables no thicker than stereo wire drip, drape and bunch lifke fibres in the nest of a mechanical raven. Cats and kittens, slender and slight peek and peer form nooks and crannies. A soupy smell of delight and hideousness eminates from everywhere as my ears return to my brother's words.
We stroll down a street towards Jew town.I'm amazed there is actually a place called 'Jew Town'(images of John Safran's Music Jamboree flood to my mind), but in a place of such widespread an intense spirituality I suppose it makes sense. Apparently everyone has a god here; muslim, hindu, catholic or jew. Atheism is not popular here. I decide to hide my beliefes from here on out, there is no point or purpose in exposing myself any further.
The street ahead stretches and bends, void of straight lines or 90 degree angles. The streets have eyes. I thought being the only westerner on a plane of 200 people was odd, but two white boys walking down a path of pure commotion sticking out like red keys on a piano put the prior to shame. The eyes of the women avoid us after a glimpse but the eyes of the men follow us, free of expression from dark recesses and shops like wardrobes trading in things simple and strange.
A layer of mirror slipped from my eyes and I presented myself with things I could not fathom. I sit in a taxi with my long lost brother. I search in vain for a seatbelt while he lights a cigarette. I have a lot to learn.
This rattling, speeding, erratic coffin of squeaks and creak peers through a humid and dark night, showing me flashes of this wild world. Urban decay just trook on new meaning and it would take on more still when the sun goes through its next motion and reveal the depth of this old but new land of wonder, humanity and degradation.
The cold shower of the next morning woke me from my jetlagged sleep but the haze would continue for days as I try to comprehend life here. But digesting India is not as simple as swallowing a malaria tablet, it takes time. It deserves, nay demands, consideration.
We ate breakfast by a window. Stephen started to word me up on indian ways as I allowed myself to become transfixed by simple things on the other side of the pane. Power cables no thicker than stereo wire drip, drape and bunch lifke fibres in the nest of a mechanical raven. Cats and kittens, slender and slight peek and peer form nooks and crannies. A soupy smell of delight and hideousness eminates from everywhere as my ears return to my brother's words.
We stroll down a street towards Jew town.I'm amazed there is actually a place called 'Jew Town'(images of John Safran's Music Jamboree flood to my mind), but in a place of such widespread an intense spirituality I suppose it makes sense. Apparently everyone has a god here; muslim, hindu, catholic or jew. Atheism is not popular here. I decide to hide my beliefes from here on out, there is no point or purpose in exposing myself any further.
The street ahead stretches and bends, void of straight lines or 90 degree angles. The streets have eyes. I thought being the only westerner on a plane of 200 people was odd, but two white boys walking down a path of pure commotion sticking out like red keys on a piano put the prior to shame. The eyes of the women avoid us after a glimpse but the eyes of the men follow us, free of expression from dark recesses and shops like wardrobes trading in things simple and strange.
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