A passage from india.

"An endless string of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle." - Sports Illustrated

I was half asleep on the way there. Lyrics from "Fake Empire" by The National tumbled lazily in my head as my bleary eyes looked out the taxi window. I was in my third country in as many days, and had slept less than ten hours during that span. This on top of the general road weariness that I've been feeling since Istanbul.

I paid the small entrance fee for my fourth Delhi sight of the day and robotically took photos of the exterior gates of the Humayun's Tomb. No audio guide; time was short if I was going to squeeze all of Delhi in to a day, so I figured I'd just wikipedia it later. I passed through yet another identical looking gate, this one the West Gate, the modern-day final entrance way. I walked through it distractedly, my gaze still turned up at a rusting light fixture hanging above me. I finally looked straight ahead.

"Holy shit."

Loud. Loud enough for the nearest dozen or so people to turn around and give me judgmental looks. I mumbled a distracted, unaffectionate "sorry" without shifting my locked eyes. It wasn't just its beauty that shocked me, it was its unexpectedness. Its context. Aside from the previous few sights I'd visited, for hours I'd been surrounded by absolutely nothing but decay, in both buildings and bodies. For an afternoon I'd almost forgotten that wonderment was possible.

I've seen a good deal of destitution, especially on this trip. I mentioned the eyeless elderly woman crawling backwards in Lithuania, just one of many penniless beggars in Eastern Europe. Small Egyptian neighborhoods, especially outside of Cairo, were the worst kept I had ever seen. Then came India. In Delhi I thought it was just the scale that shocked me. Poor people packed as far as the smog allows your eyes to see. That every single time my car stopped children pounded on windows for money, or little girls dressed with absurd pigtails and inked-on black freckles did backflips in hopes of charity, their appearance distantly chasing an ideal so forgotten, so anachronistic it seemed like parody. A mother helped her daughter shit on the street in front of a UNESCO Heritage Site because they conceivably have nowhere else to take her. But Jaipur's desperation sunk so much lower. The first five minutes I was there I walked past a dead cow on the sidewalk, its eyes already mostly cannibalized by insects. (Mostly. That was the worst part.) Dozens of people urinating in the middle of the street (I mean middle), countless people with glaucoma so heavy it looked like cotton growing from their sockets, severely crossed-eyes, anorexic limbs twisted backwards: the tolls of malnutrition. Homeless men whose feet and ankles were the purest shade of black from dirt and soot from never owning a pair of sandals that a block away cost less than a dollar. Dozens of people molding flat cakes of manure with their bare hands so they can burn it for warmth. This isn't poverty. This is an economic holocaust.

Seeing all this squalor doesn't break your heart. It slowly drowns it in syrup. All the success and comfort that we strive for as Westerners works backwards, potently resonating as guilt when you have to turn away little girls tapping your legs and arms for a few cents. Men who walk beside you begging nonstop for the length of a full kilometer, in the unfathomable hope that after refusing fifty times, you'll somehow change your mind.Then look up from this to see phenomenal architecture. The Hawa Mahal, Qutb Minar. Jaw-dropping works of exotic beauty, close enough to complexes of squatter's lean-to's that they cast shadows. Or would be able to if the pollution didn't block out most of the sun.

If this sounds like my experience in Egypt, it shouldn't. At all. At no point in India did I ever feel in bodily danger. These people did not want to see me injured, maimed, dead. Their never-ending insistence, the flocks of dozens of potential cabbies my white face attracts when it steps out from the train station- it is all borne of need. These people need to survive and have very few realistic options. And despite all this tragedy, despite the weight of my sodden conscience over our economic divide, the occasional episode comes along to sweep my mind away, albeit temporarily.

I entered the Gandhi Smriti, the house in which Gandhi spent his final days and that contains the courtyard in which he was assassinated, rolled my eyes and sighed. Schoolchildren. Hundreds of them. Visit a museum at the same time as them and you'll be stuck there for hours, or at least so annoyed that you skip half the sights just to avoid them. Wandering the hallways meant I had to compact myself and tiptoe past a whole line of them. Just about all the boys turned their heads as I did this and around forty of them broke off from the end of this line to start following me around. When I hit a dead end, they cornered me.

The bravest one approached me timidly.

"Picture?"

"You.... want a picture..... with me?"

Bobbleheads can't nod that fast. And he handed his cell phone/camera to a friend, and several other boys slyly jumped in too. Not just this picture, but the seven or eight more that I was asked to take before I finally had to tear myself away. Back at Humayan's Tomb, the sight that blew me away to the point of public profanity, I encountered another battalion of schoolchildren, this one from an all-girls high school. I left the main chamber where the symbolic coffin lies to go into a side room that, it turns out, held nothing. I heard a clamor behind me and saw that fifty or so of these girls had evidently picked me over the dead famous emperor. The echoes of their giggling and catcalls filled the monument with a deafening roar that brought their less-than-amused old chaperon running, waving her walking stick in anger. Since this is a long post to write, I just took a break to grab dinner at a local open kitchen. The nine year old boy that brought me the menu stared at me for the next ten minutes, and shyly scurried away gushing when I simply asked his name. All this to say, even if it's for a few seconds, even if it's across the world, and for reasons I don't totally understand... it's pretty fun to be a rock star.

And it's not just these moments of flattery. Though I talked to them only briefly in my two day stay (been busy with sightseeing, errands, photo albums, blog posts), I could feel such incredible warmth from Arvind and Shoma, the 40-something couple that ran my small homestay in Jaipur. A genuine desire to know me and hear about what I had to say, what I had to talk about, as well as the others staying within these four rooms. I didn't just sign the typical guestbook with the necessary info. Shoma asked me tonight to write in a personal notebook, where travelers leave their well-wishes, the url's for their blogs so she can follow them long after they've stopped walking down the alleyway from Purohit Ji Ka Bagh, thru the gate and up the steps to the Explorer's Nest. The two of them have never been out of India, but in this way, yeah. They have.

Of everywhere that I told people I was traveling to on this trip, India was the place that the most people were jealous of, that they were dying to go. That confused me, I didn't understand the common thread, why that stood out over 29 other countries, especially when it wasn't even in my top five. My best guess is that it's the lure of the beautiful unknown. For all the current world tension the divide has created, the roots of Islam and Christianity aren't that different from an outsider's perspective. Hinduism on the other hand is magnificently rich, infinitely fascinating, and a total world apart from the ideology that most of the West is used to. The people that come back from India raving about the land, having experienced something profound, my guess is they've left their known world completely behind, they've wandered around this country giving it the depth and attention that it deserves, but doesn't often receive. Not the six days I can spare, not the two weeks you can get off work, but at least two or three months. You cannot attain any desired epiphanies by visitation, but by immersion. Life can only truly change via doorways, not windows.I am in India long enough only to be an observer, not a participant. The cows wandering the streets still attract my attention and even though they're just about everywhere, I get a jolt with each swastika I see, even if they only still wish its ancient, original meaning of good luck and protection. The doorway I'm walking through is not India, but rather the column up top to your right. My overall journey is the opportunity for change, something long enough that it has the capacity to shape my life. My season of wet cement. Some of the first words I wrote on this blog were that I preferred microcosms, not mosaics. I didn't realize that one can breed the other. Moscow, Manchester, Omaha Beach, Valencia, the Isle of Skye, Berlin, Amman... so many others, and now Delhi, Jaipur, Agra. For now crystal shards still settling, shifting in the fluid mortar. Still unsure of the final pattern. Not ready for display yet.

Soon.


Delhi:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2110582&id=35804394&l=c2834e4f17

Jaipur and Agra:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2111247&id=35804394&l=8899150aaf