Floating in the Desert

My instinct is to write, but I can’t find my words.  My instinct is to smile, to say hello.  But I can’t do that here with the men, because it’s taken as an invitation to “tease Eve,"; semantically innocuous, it's simply a rosy way to say sexually harass, verbally or manually.  My instinct is to talk it out, respectfully, with kindness.  But I can’t do that either, because a woman negotiating with the average rickshaw driver has little leverage and no voice.  My instinct is to treat myself on a good day or anesthetize on a bad with a frosty beer.  But I won’t do that here, because as much as I want to, I’m determined to stick this out, to absorb India, and allow her to absorb me.  People ask me if I love it or hate it, like it has to be one or the other, like those two very active verbs are mutually exclusive and not two parts of the same whole.  Yes, I answer.  Both.  All.  India is everything, all at once, from a million different directions.  I read somewhere that it’s the heart of the world.  But I don’t think I agree; I think it’s the guts.

The digestive system of our little planet, where everything that passes through begins in one form and ends in another, where the good is pulled apart, separated from the bad, and you learn what you’re really made of; there's no room for pretense in the guts.  Where your healthy bits are saved and refined and built into your whole and the sticky parts that weigh you down are strained and chemically altered into waste you didn’t know you didn’t need.  People underestimate the magic of the guts, the revolutionary physiology of churning and transforming that renews our bodies and sustains our life.  I’m sure of it: I’m tumbling around the guts of the world, being sucked into the bowels of the earth.  But it’s a hell of a show.

Entire worlds expand and contract, here in the guts.  Swirling around with me are hundreds of ethnicities, and thousands of languages, and millions of gods.  Bedazzled wedding processionals clog the street seven nights a week and hundreds of bats as big as dogs artfully duck and weave under the fireworks that shower smoldering ash onto me and my computer even as I type.  I hold my breath during the traditional Rajasthali folk dances, and savor the breeze that blows off the Thar desert, almost cooling the air.  Almost.  My tongue sprouts new tastebuds under the chilis and curries and paneer, and my ears search and plunder for connection to what I’m hearing.  There’s a distant thunder, a startled resonance as my prehistoric memory awakens to the beats and blasts and strums from these instruments I’ve never seen before.  This music lights up quiet little corners of my soul.  It’s the language of the desert, and the language of our ancestors, and a hallowed reminder of our humanity, and our divinity.  And it shoots sparks.

So that’s India to me, in this moment.  Crawling home at the end of the day, fighting to unscramble what I’m learning from what I thought I knew.  Treading without the life vest of my intuition that I've always relied on but no longer applies.  Drifting rudderless on invisible currents pulling me deeper into the subcontinent of my imaginings and farther from the west that raised me.  So I press further into the fathomless depth of the desert at the height of an Indian summer.  Counterintuitive, you say?  Welcome to India.