Preserved thoughts

After a week in an airport graveyard, my pack decided to pick itself up and come find me. I know it wasn't such a big deal to lose it, its just that I was feeling like a snail with no shell. So I'm glad it decided to return.

I can't blog fast enough to keep up with my experiences. I've already trundled out to a far corner of the bumpy Earth and back since my last post, but I'd like to memory-capsulate India first.

Here are some thoughts I trapped with my thoughtnet. Most slipped out but these were the fattest ones, so I saved them:

...Like one who looked wiser than he really was. Like a fisherman in the city. With sea-secrets in his eyes. (From Arundhati Roy's beautiful and sad book The God of Small Things)

Then there is the hardened heart's confrontation which each bump on each bumpy road...infinite patience-testing...and the shouting, Indian men bellowing from behind their mustaches. I do not know if one can bellow out of a kind place. But they may be.

All words take on different, sometimes opposite meanings in a country of strange speakers. Realities reverse similarly.

Then there are the distant, almost non-existent women but for their ornaments, who show up just to prove their servitude, then tiptoe away as if they could ever go unnoticed with anelts jingling like that. They speak too softly for me to hear, and smile too demurely for me to comprehend.

But indeed, here there are the brightest smiles in the universe, which can blind you because you know the despair they disguise and the pain they override, crowd out.

People here are unkind and loving. Loud and gentle. Aggressive and non-violent. Fat and hungry. Exhausted and still dancing. I hate India and love it and do not understand it and notice every little clue but miss many of the big details. Except the ones that explain and paint the ways in which this is the land of the soul, the spirit, the Om Shanti!

I am the foreigner but this is the strange, specific land where a billion people all follow the same obscure traditions, the random ones which still stand because no one could find reason to reject them. Culture's natural filter. There must be rhythm to the randomness but what, and how can I learn?

Flowers and coconut oil in the hair. Spot on the third eye. Head wobbling emphatically. Burping loud and proud. Pissing anywhere. Wiping ass with hand. Eating food with other hand. Small clues.

G.O.D. Generation, Operation, Destruction. I am living in the O and trying to stick around. I invoke Os big and small. Ds can wait for me, though they push through quickly in places where quickness and agression are expected from everyone, including the cousins of death.