Thirty six years, seven months, and twenty days: that is how long it has taken me to arrive in this place, in this lifetime. And yet, since my arrival, it feels as if entire lifetimes have been lived.
At night, always at night, I entered this land of Bharata Varsha. Over and over again I return to these places of convergence seeking refuge in all that rises from this earth in the hope that I, too, shall riseIn the morning I awaken to all that is Delhi. Here resides a population that swells and surges like the waters of the coming monsoons, which makes finding oneself among sixteen million people both a madness tempered and a madness unleashed.
Before the temperature crests over one hundred degrees I walk through the throngs of the crowd in air so thick with heat and history that it denies any and all ability to move forward. Amid the dust and refuse that scatter the street, there is movement. Even held in the sway are buildings left unfinished, architecture incomplete, and ruins which speak of an unstoppable entropy, a physics divine. On their walls is written words in Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, English, and Arabic. Reading them from right to left and then from left to right they become a dizzying spiral of language that had once been borne from this land and has returned once more.
Now unwilling to move I stand in wait of the flood, but it is not water that washes over me, rather it is the sweet scent of sweet breads that rise with the heat. A moment after comes the pungent aromas of spice and incense which mingle with the clouded exhaust of diesel engines. On the beds of carts drawn by horses and camels and the hands of men is found papayas, watermelon, pumpkin, and lime; all cut open to reveal the life within, their rinds strewn on the ground to be grazed on by sacred cows, both swollen and sunken, and wild dogs who will never know what it means to be tamed. From somewhere near or far, the frangrance of frangipani in full bloom strengthens and softens with the comings and goings of motorbikes, rickshaws, and taxis passing from here to there.
The breaking of the levy finally occurs in the rushing and sauntering of those I am surrounded by: men in lunghis, women in burkas with charcoal lined eyes, others in sarees of saffron, crimson, aurelian, and sage, all with henna laced skin. There are listless men with black soled feet who lay on their sides wherever shade might be found as children walk through traffic carrying the weight of the world in their arms in the form of another child; what ease and heaviness there is in their burden.
In this stillness, the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth all vie to be the first to discern what is seen, what is heard, and what is tasted. But I know that to attempt to take it all in is to rely on the belief that one breath of air, one sip of water is enough to sustain all of life; an impossibility.
Still I close my eyes. This is how I commit such moments to memory.
And then, a horn blares, returning me to the reality in which I am now immersed. It is issued from a bus that is filled to capacity, the driver barely visible behind the soot stained windshield.
No longer silent, no longer still, I see that all of life is here on these streets, but it is only a patina, simply a scratch on the surface and no more. It, too, barely visible and unable to reveal all that is concealed below.
Knowing that the brevity of my stay here will not allow any further passage into this world still I cling to this breath, attaching all other breaths to this moment. I drink from this cup. It is empty and it is full.