'First Looking - Then Reading'
Newspapers on a daily basis report - axing, poisonings, road mishaps, suicides. After which falling chimney lamps, electrocution, head-slapping and wild rabid dogs, stolen legs and old ladies holding up banks to feed the poor and starving are a part of life.
My parachute lands in Grant Road, Pilahouse Naka, Bombay. Slums spill out onto the streets, families live under shelters made of plastic bags and wood. 50,000 people share 2 taps for water. Wild gypsies gallop through traffic bareback on horses. People hang pictures on the walls of the streets to make it seem more like home. The poverty here is in startling contrast to the wealth of other Indians on a massive scale.There are so many people. Everywhere.
Goa seems to be an India where most Indians don't live. Israelis cruise the lanes on old Enfield bikes. Charra-heads live out the season. Gorgeous beaches. Some busy some more remote. Acommodation 40p a night if you don't mind sleeping on the roof. At the southernmost tip of India, Kanyukamari really is a beautiful place.
After a long, winding, slow climb uphill on a bus with no doors or windows - I completely lost time to the stillness of the mountains. Mist rolling in. Chai runs and chillums, on the alert for incoming monkeys, waterfalls and open fires. Indian flowers, the most intricately tiny and beautifully coloured I've seen.
and over to east coast Chennai - communities of tsunami survivors live in makeshift shanties on the beaches, pulling nets from the sea, drying fish, living in rubbish.
India's an assault on every sense and emotion you could imagine you have. Off the beaten track, cows wander through your field of vision, wild boars, waterbuffalos, any animal you name it. The light is amazing, people so funny and everytime you think you're in over your head - she pulls out and ace and puts the tablas on summertime.
Living with the complete uncertainty of knowing where I'd be from one day to the next, unable to plan anything, information? what's that. Then, when you do find a bus which might be going somewhere you want to go, there's only a chance it will.. and then you might find a seat and if you do, you'll have conversations forced onto you and disfigurements of rotting flesh shoved in your face before you've even had a chance to buy every hungry person in the bus station a lentil bake for breakfast.
I've been woken several times by the sounds of men puking and hockling. Local people fall ill here too. While Indian people take great pride in personal cleanliness - the streets are used for spitting, rubbish and all manner of other daily convultions - which means they stink. The rivers in most cities are like open sewers. I'm surprised anyone here makes it past infancy.
I'm painting a grim picture but there's grace and humour, strength and beauty here too..
Travellers in this part of the world are in a category of their own as they make their way barefoot, on quests of enlightenment to their hotmail accounts. I find the Ayurvedics particularly strange with their clear sparkling eyes, discussing the cleansing of parasites from their lymph-nodes over their early morning avocados.
Temple elephants. Kailash de Raya.
Indian stretchable time.
Contradictions and surprises
A lot like Life.
