Travels

The stench is almost deadly. I am not sure how I can describe it: it’s not carrion, but neither is it exactly sewage. Different than carrion, worse than sewage. Black shiny pigs wallow in the black murky water – really really black, darker than burned engine oil, but pretty much the same consistency -, showing only their eyes (and not even them when they dive for some morsel of whatever they’re looking for in there) and the line of their backs, like sharks without fins. A few metres away, two squatting women cook chapatti’s on a little stove by the open sewer. Next to them, the jasmine garland seller kneads the heavenly perfumed immaculate white flowers on a piece of string, and will add the new garland to the pile on his stall for women to buy and thread through their hair.
We call this the Shit Street. And I love it, just as I have come to love the dusty endless bus journeys to go anywhere, the filth lying everywhere, the sacred cows that act the town’s garbage disposals and are the main cause of traffic jams, the total lack of toilet paper, the inhumanly spicy but also delicious food that occasionally makes you throw it out from both ends (sometimes at the same time). I love all these unconditionally and with ever-renewed fascination, like the little quirks we find endearing and insightful in a lover, like the journey of world-discovery in a 3-year old. A journey where experiences are met not with judgments or classifications steeped in duality (this is bad, this is good, that’s horrible, that’s pleasant), but with ever-revealing questions leading to answers that transcend the barrier between inside and outside, self and others, past, present and future. An experience that feeds constantly on and of itself. Words to describe this feeling play hide and seek with me; I rely on the hope that those of you who are reading this have experienced being in love: you will understand.
‘Being in India is like being in love’, Sarah Moore said once. Now, 7 years later, I can’t remember Sarah anymore, nor do I recall what she looked like, how she spoke; I do remember she was a very nice, good-natured girl, but I hated her that day, because I should have said that. That was exactly what I was feeling, what I was thinking, but it hadn’t left my lips, it had left hers. Thought thief. Feeling thief. Epiphany thief.
Hm, what else do I love? The heat and the mosquitoes, the amazingly colourful saris women wear, the friendliness of the people and the feeling that I’m famous, a small-town movie star everybody greets, chats with, stares after. Even when having to take a piss in the gutter, right in the centre of town – just like any other local but with hundreds of curious eyes prying. I love the calmness of the little boy who smilingly picks up his books from the dust after they fell of his bike (I know I would probably have sworn for half an hour) and the innocence of the tailor across the street from the office who – upon inviting Lucy to have lunch with his family – has just spent half of his monthly income to buy chicken just for her, probably depriving his own family of the meat quota for that month. And how about the man who’s invited me to his house for a whole weekend just because for some reason I’ve managed to remember his long and complicated name – Subhramaniam – after having just met him. Most of all, I love Latif’s (in the photo above) gentle, friendly, dignified face, the unafraid, unflinching look on him who is only a tea-maker but could be a movie star. I treasure the perfect friendship connection that we have formed although there are only about 10 words that we can actually share with one another in English or Tamil. He works hard – I see him packing up and closing his little stand by the street around 11 every night; but he’s always there, ready, at 5 the next morning. His hands are calloused and the nerves in them have probably become quite insensitive from handling the hot glasses of chai all day, and his head is so strong he can break bricks on it (it’s not a trick, as Tim’s bump and near fainting after trying himself can bear witness). Latif is the embodiment of India for me: hard-working, courageous, friendly, genuine, exotic, resilient, innocent, and yet at the same time contradictory, as testified by his infrequent, unexpected and violent bouts of drinking.
The innocence – in him and in India (and in scores of places I’ve seen in so-called third world countries) is what I love most, the ability to make do with little, to be content with subsistence means: never call a poor man in such a place poor as long as he can provide for his family from one day to the next. I’ve seen it also in villages in Romania and I long for it in my life too; don’t tell me you’re not tired of wanting more each day, of never being satisfied, of being discontent with things that spell ‘richness’ for countless others!
It’s the loss of this innocence that all of us who feel trapped in the rush of modernity deplore and nostalgically long for. We complain that these places where it still exists are changing, are becoming more and more like our world and thus losing their ‘authenticity’. Complaining the loss of this authenticity in such places though is nothing but hypocrisy. And I’m the first to reveal it in myself. It’s all very nice to be nostalgic for the simple life when we have the alternative. And although we do have the alternative, all we do is wish, complain and be nostalgic. How many of us have the internal resources, the true wish to live the simple, ‘authentic’ life? I personally know one, ONE person in the whole of urban and possibly rural Romania too who doesn’t own nor want a mobile phone. We only really love and admire such a lifestyle as tourists, as comfortable observers. It is – I believe – completely unfair of people who do not anymore live with the question: How can I feed my family tomorrow? permanently etched in their brains to wish upon others the permanence of this question. After all, that question is what gives the innocence in this situation, is it not? The absence of choice, of alternatives forces us to make the best of the only situation open to us. It makes us more creative in exploiting opportunity, less judgmental, and more likely to be content with what circumstance provides us. Whereas in our self-sufficient, consumerist and comfort-oriented world we get so flooded with choices that we miss the opportunities too. Opportunities of everything: happiness, inner peace, contentment, beauty awareness etc. But we do have the choice. And, as it should be, it’s entirely up to us to make it.