Even at two weeks' remove, some of the visions still feel miraculously fresh. Below are three. Sorry they're late.
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1. Nirmal's Math
During our first conversation, while I was seated on a tiny stool in his shop, Nirmal said, "For me, I have a saying: 'Come as visitor, go as friend.'" This, it turned out, was no empty threat. I can say so confidently because the very next day he risked life and limb taking me to the train station on his scooter. We were weaving in and out of a wedding procession, around palanquins and around people dressed in incredible sequined saris and around a wooden cart loaded with huge blaring speakers and around an elephant. Actually, we were heading towards my hotel--and away from the train station--as we lurched out from behind the elephant, but that's only because we had to get my big, unwieldy suitcase and try to wedge it onto the scooter with us.
He parked his scooter and we rushed across a footbridge to Hanuman Gat, the neighborhood where my hotel was. We were hustling around couples and groups out for eveningtime strolls. Many were stopped, leaning on the rail of the bridge, looking south onto the lake and the fairytale palace that seemed to float in its center. The palace was all white and lit with white lights. It looked like a huge, organized assembly of candles out there on the dark lake.
Nirmal said, "You know, we get a lot of Indian tourists here in Udaipur."
"It looks that way. What percentage of all tourists to Udaipur are Indian, do you think?"
"Oh, at least sixty to seventy percent."
"Wow," I said. "So most of the tourists in the city are actually Indian?"
"No. It's about equal."
"Oh, so half-half? I thought you said at least sixty percent were Indian."
"Yes. Half-half. Sixty percent Indian, sixty percent foreign. It is like that."
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2. Two scenes glimpsed out the side of an auto-rickshaw in Calcutta. Each lasted less than 30 seconds.
First, a little boy not more than 5 years old. He was filthy, wearing filthy pants and a filthy shirt, and his cheeks and forehead were marked with little circles of soot or ash, as if he had been stamped by a filthy stamp. He was doing awkward and jerky somersaults on the sidewalk and in the side of the street. Not fully in control of his limbs, he moved like a rag doll. A woman, presumably his mother, sat to one side playing a tin drum with a wooden mallet. She was smiling. After his fourth somersault he sat with his legs splayed out and the woman handed him a metal ring about 16" in diameter. He pulled himself through it, sitting doubled over with legs outstretched, cinching it around himself perfunctorily, working it over the sad little hump of his shoulders. The ring, free of him, clattered to the ground and the woman banged twice on the tin drum to mark the end of the show. The boy walked around to the cars and rickshaws stopped at the intersection, braying feebly at the drivers. He made his loop and walked back towards the sidewalk. In his filthy, sweaty, sooty little right hand he clutched the shiny rupees my auto driver gave him.
Second, at night, close to the Shobhabazaar metro stop in an auto-rickshaw bound for Ultadanga. The road is impossibly crowded. Dingy orange-yellow light from incandescent bulbs and coffee-can oil lamps spills over vendors, pedestrians. It smells like burning ghee; it smells like cigarettes. On my teeth I can feel the grit from diesel exhaust, from burning gas and plastic. The driver spits a vile missile of dark red juice out onto the street. His left cheek is stuffed with pan (a mix of betelnut, tobacco, sugar, fruit syrup, candied dried fruit, anise seed, dried coconut, other nameless pastes and powders, all rolled in a green leaf into a cone-shaped pouch the size of a golf ball). Looking up to the sidewalk, there they are BOOM! two perfectly white cats in a wire cage perched on a high stool. People stream by the cage carrying briefcases, carrying plastic bags with sticky, dirty hands, bearing in their cheeks huge wads of pan. Yet here are the cats, perfectly white, impossibly white, actually, given the dingy orange-yellow light of the street, but undeniably there and undeniably as white as they seem. They were cute, too, their fur attractively matted and tousled. One playfully batted the other with its paw, gentle as a lamb.
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3. Some types of houses seen on Feb 17th, around 5:00pm, from the window of a Sleeper Class car on the overnight train from Chennai to Hyderabad.
- Houses made all of dried palm fronds woven together
- Houses made all of odds and ends of corrugated aluminum
- Houses made with walls of corrugated aluminum & peaked roofs of dried up interwoven palm fronds
- Houses with walls of dried up interwoven palm fronds & one-way slanting roofs of cardboard and plastic sheeting and corrugated aluminum
- Houses in the mud
- Houses that are just cloth sheets held up by 4 or 6 wooden poles
- Houses of cloth and poles fallen over like a horse
- Houses caved in like rotten tomatoes
- Houses all deflated like an old pumpkin
- Some brick houses
