It feels impossible to describe – to be true to – our first hours’ experience of India today, driving south from the Nepal-India border across heavily populated Uttar Pradesh to the city of Varanasi.
Far easier, it is, to write about the bright white tips of the Annapurna Range to the north, those shy mountains, so far veiled in clouds, giving us a first and final glimpse of their beauty.
Or to say that we drove across vast fertile alluvial plains that run along the Ganges and its tributaries, their rice paddies about to be harvested, lush market and household vegetable gardens edging the road.
Or to describe the frenzy of jostling buses, transports, motorbikes, cyclists, three-wheeled moto taxis, pairs of oxen pulling farm wagons and carts, so many people walking on the roadside, small gatherings of people conversing at the road edge, cows, bulls and goats ambling along an imaginary centerline.
All this, or something remotely approximate, is possible to put into words.
But there were other dimensions, other qualities in what we have experienced that felt astonishing, so new and so immediate. A kind of physical, especially visual, rawness. Life raw, exposed, public, teeming and seemingly frantic. (“Especially visual” because so far we have been passing observers, cocooned for much of the day in our van.)
Along our way …
A lean white-haired man wearing a worn, dust-coloured lunghi pulled up around his waist, squats at the pavement’s edge, genitals hanging black beneath his hips, shitting and pissing a breath away from the torrent of speeding lorries, cars and motorbikes.
Another man tends a fat-filled vat of sizzling pakoras and samosas in a tied together shelter of poles at the edge of a shallow ditch filled with muddy wet garbage around which whiskered men sit chatting, their voices sucked out of hearing by a cacophony of honking drivers of every kind of two, three, four and eight wheeled vehicles slithering, like a school of mackerel, around a bull lifting its tail, the impatient drivers pushing ever- so- slowly on into an ever-thickening mass as bull piss pools between their tires.
Each town’s streets, really a churning rapids of street-walkway-parking lot-market, seem inhabited by a restless frenzied energy that tosses people back and forth in frantic, noisy swirls and eddies as the cows, as if blind and deaf, continue their sleepy meandering ....
There are quieter courtyards and alleyways here and there beyond this din, but here anywhere close to the street the inside is outside, or there is no inside at all.
The goods of shallow shops and workshops – rolls of electrical wire, great hanging stems of bananas, lines of shirts, bras and caps – spill onto the streets and into …carts of roasted peanuts; a patch of ground strewn with bicycle parts, men straightening a wheel frame; pyramids of apples and aubergines; six men squatting over a parchese game; a woman in paddy green sari with gold trim haggling over garlics; groups of passing uniformed school children pointing towards our van, chattering, giggling, looking preposterously clean and bright, like the women in saris, against the mucky streets and rain-stained, rust-corroded, worn brown-greyness of so many of the shop fronts.
Especially surprising – against this world of what so often seems like the utterly threadbare and frenzied – is the attention to personal cleanliness and beauty, and to moments of created order.
Like those gloriously harmonious designs and combination of colour I see on women’s saris, their figures like bright red, orange, green, gold, blue flames rising from the dust and rust.
Or the mounds of oranges, apples, cucumbers and aubergines, rows and pyramids and half-moons of purple, orange, pink, red, green, so carefully arranged each morning by marketers.
Or the dignified bearing of so many people we pass or talk briefly with, the men’s neatly timed beards, the women’s graceful subtle hand gestures, the erect long backs and delicate footsteps around the muck and water-filled potholes.
Astonishing – these signs of grace and beauty.
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