My sleepy eyes pulled up their lids like cranky old Roman curtains on a cloudy, cool morning in Bangalore, or more fondly called by my own nuance, Bengaluru. It's another time of the year to drown in a lazy indulgence of absolutely relaxing and doing nothing, for no other reason than you can!
Basking in that glow, my mind kept running back to the past events of the last two months, like a love-struck gazelle prancing and jumping in a delirious celebration of armour, coffee beans and probably many others. What came as just another simple morning awoken to a land that I had to think a bit on bearings, on sounds spoken in a tongue that I could not recognise, bumps and huffs from a pet dog in our current friend's home by the name of Zac - prompting me a good wake-up with his gigantic gentle paws and lovely drooling smothering hot fat licking tongue of the physical kind.
I thought about getting smashed and literally carried away up above my feet from the ground, by a crowd that cradled me by its sheer size and numbers, along witnessing the parade of the palace like a queen on her own carriage. I remembered the pressing of hot human flesh from aunties that probably should had gone a bit easy on the jalebi pig-out, my ears still rang of the loud boisterous shout-back of Indian mothers who took no shit from bullies made in male uniforms as they hurled back abuse made more pronounced from impatience. My skin still tingled from the heat, the dryness yet my pores felt cleansed from the hike up that morning hill in Pushkar as sacred as the notion built upon to worship and appease the goddess.
Every now and then, no sooner than I had began to think that I find myself riding an auto and watch the world hopped by. Cows' udders filled with milk waited with a nonchalant pace as the milkman pulled down each teat with the fervor of spring, women balancing gently like swaying coconut palms as they put their urns of fresh water and milk on their heads, palms holding lovingly to their children. Bakeries filled out the streets with the pungent produce of the ovens, intermingled with the rancid smells of last night's late pissers, whom like thieves in the dark - desecrating walls with what their little bladders could not hold, and the paths along villages lined with fresh vegetables and flowers for the housewives and pilgrims coming to congregate for the day's cooking and pooja. Temple bells clanked out the hymns of the faithfuls, one could so easily find peace within such chaos.
Indeed, in India, with so much to offer and so little space, everyone is anyone's business. You learn to live within and without the community, you learn to stand up and you learn to let go. Be it the rich or the rags, anyone can somehow still find a little bit of magic amidst the pollution of politics and obstacles (for the latter, a Ganesha holds a lot of allure for the believers). For a single traveller looking for something in herself, this is, I will say again, the best and biggest classroom of life you can find.
India can be intimidating to the first impression. She's a complicated but attractive lady that takes the shapes of so many avatars. She's a wild mustang that runs strong amongst the Kashmiri hills, then she could be a tired, age-worn courtesan in Delhi that you keep going back for the stories of the ancient glorious past and a goblet of wine (and mind you, India produced some of the best wines I have tasted), to a seductive, saucy temptress leaving her footprints on the Great Thar Desert, while I drift into my private thoughts of the many village women that billowed away amongst the mirage from the heat, and as my train zipped past the fields of sunflowers, golden mustard pastures, laughing green sugarcane plantations that seemed to wave at me like children, I remembered vaguely of a tired looking lone turbaned Rajasthani man daydreaming away on a corner at the platform, while his mouth chewed absentmindedly on a paan.
And again, I thought so often back to the woman I saw opposite the train station on our stop at Vadodara. How her seemed husband slapped her face in what looked like a private domestic fight taking place in public. She looked fed-up, she fought back to warn him not to disrespect her again. He was a coward. He tried to drag her to the shadows of a flight of stairs, to further coerce her behind prying eyes. I wanted to run up the cross-over bridge to launch a thousand punches on him, I wanted to offer whatever I had to empower the woman. Whatever was her fault, I don't believe in subduing a person to win an argument. Why must it always be a one-sided discourse? Surely we have enough room for a disagreement, I may not be parallel with your thinking but that doesn't mean I don't like you - surely? But as horribly as the scene played out, nobody on their side of the platform came to help. The guards with cane sticks were busy parading their badges on the other far end, there were too many distractions and just as a power-cut would suspend your movie in-between, an incoming train cut off whatever visual I could have of the woman. And I had to get on to board.
I had seen many forms of the female here. Some were bright, some hopeful. Some determined and strong, some downright pending for an eternal deliverance from rebirth into this hard world. Some would hold the great history of India, some would be the great future of India. Some touched me with the charity of a greeting and nothing more, some begged for more beyond of what I could give.
Unfortunately I could not seem to reach beyond what public interchange allowed of me with the other half of India. That said, many in the North had been aggressively less polite to me because of my gender, many a time using the might of volume and rude hand gestures to scare me off... only to learn that a pure Chinese Hakka takes no crap from anyone, man or woman. Some were quietly respectful like the villagers I had met in Kashmir, others were, to say the least, quite happy to eye you incessantly. Many young boys were, in my joking mood, brave enough to reach out and touch my hand. I suppose little boys will always be curious but they will be the more adventurous ones to ask about my name. Moving South, I am more comfortable with the c'est la vie go-about attitude from the dwellers here. There was less stalking, less barking at my face. But all said and done, India generally speaking protects the honour of a lady very much. If a man so as much as graze you intendedly in a rude way, the crowd doesn't take to such act kindly. I would say that in today's world, this sort of communal looking after each other is a rarity but alive here in this country, although much in a fragile balance between the traditional and what not.
And there was also the incident in the city of Aurangabad. Young newly minted kids acting in an egoistic manner. Stealing drinks behind the club's bar and pretending that they "meant to pay" for it later. Creating a lot of noise, intimidating the bar tender when the bill was presented with a penalty. Using their daddy's money to ask "do you know who I am?" - isn't that too last century?
And then there was the ripping out of chairs and throwing of bottles onto the field because the fifth series of the ODI between India and Sri Lanka was cancelled. Forget about the safety of the kids perhaps? But then again, a little part of me had gone a bit cricket crazy.
There will never be another India and my only wish now is to make the best out of the next two months, and maybe a sly maybe, that in the future, we will catch the pinnacle of this wave that the Asian Tiger had woke up to.
