Delhi, day 3

Delhi, day3

“Why do you keep going back to India?”

“Because it’s the nearest I can get to being on another planet and still be on earth.” - Aaron’s friend, Alex

I’ve been searching for words to properly describe the flow of life and chaos in Delhi and finally decided that Alex had summed it up best. Everywhere you look there is someone or something impossible. Large grey cows making their slow, stately way along side a hugely congested urban street. Men and women with hand-bound twig brooms battling the endless dust and garbage. Demonstrators marching. I was in traffic in a tuk tuk and the  vehicles on either side were close enough that you could make friends with the people in them; they can hear every word you’re speaking and sometimes respond. There are men pushing van-sized loads of chairs, ladders, mattresses, and more, on bicycles filling in for the traditional beasts of burden; tuk tuks and bicycle rickshaws; oversized trucks; small, extravagantly decorated busses with the vain request “Please don’t honk” written in beautiful script on the back; regular busses jam packed with commuters; cars of all ages, makes and sizes, slightly scraped up; motorcycles; all of them veering in and out of and between lanes; edging past one another by squeezing into micro gaps in the traffic; three and sometimes four lanes of traffic jammed into the narrowest of alleys through an outdoor market which is also jammed with pedestrians; long blocks of cars double parked where signs forbid any parking at all, constricting the flow of traffic on what was meant to be a six-lane divided road. Extravagant temples, mosques, and the spacious grounds of colonial buildings here and there. Women appear, wearing incongruously bright and beautiful saris. At supper on the hotel rooftop, we discover another whole level of congestion as we watch the crowded commuter trains whiz by. A man sleeps under the sky train, his slender body loosely wrapped around the base of the pillar, any restless move made in his sleep threatening to land him on the road, into oblivion. Tyrion Lannister sleeping in the Sky Room, before my eyes. Battered, additionally, by incessant sound. 

I remember reading an article long ago about the extreme wastefulness of Mother Nature. How we do not realize how many false starts are made before one success, whether that be a live birth, a positive mutation or whatever. Being in India reminds me of that. Life bursting out everywhere, noisily, excessively, chaotically. With no other purpose than the striving itself. I found that to be the case in China when I was there and maybe the memory has faded, but retrospectively, I feel like it was a slightly more tentative chaos, reined in by the years of neighbour-snitching that powered their dictatorship. Here, life is bursting wildly at the seams. Although India’s ancient cultures have fractured each other tragically at times, they were never wholly repudiated; there was no cultural revolution. India is surging into the future encumbered and enriched by its past.