Journeys of a Pregnant Virgin

I originally wrote this entry in longhand on December 4th. (My impressions of Delhi were quite different when we returned at the end of our trip, a month later.)

Midway Blog.

Here I am - in India. Halfway through my five weeks of travel, and what a time we have had. As always, there has been the challenge of trying to take in the outer world and still not lose my sense of the inner, and while I know I've been dreaming, I have not remembered much, so that I feel a little out of touch with the inner realm at this time.

I hardly even know where to begin. From the moment our plane descended into Delhi in the eerie darkness of early morning with heavy fog and smog utterly enveloping us, I knew we were in another world. As we found our driver with "Miss Marlene" on his sign and emerged out of the airport, it was as if we'd entered a scene in Dante's Inferno. Even at 5 am, we drove into the thickest smog I have ever experienced. A dry and desolate landscape stretched out on both sides of the road and against the dusty trees, ghostlike skeletal figures moved in the grey dawn, spectral somehow, as if marking our entry into another realm. A few thin women in coloured saris, but mostly men in shabby western shirts and Indian tunics in greyed tones, as if they'd permanently absorbed the smog in the environment and were gradually turning black.

But it was the smell that assaulted me most powerfully. The acrid, almost stinging smell of endless small roadside fires, which was to haunt our four days in Delhi. There was no escaping it, not even in our guesthouse where, if anything, it seemed especially strong, filling my nostrils and throat as I was awakened at 2 am each morning by male voices chanting in the temple next door. A heavy and relentless smell, reeking of burning dung, diesel, and overcrowded humanity spilling everywhere into the streets. Of course I had heard from friends and read in India guide books of the overwhelming assault of the senses greeting the traveller to India, but nothing could have prepared me for that powerful stench of smoke which seemed timeless, as if holding both the flame and ashes of India's thousands of years of civilization and the greedy fuel consumption of an industrial India hurtling into the twenty first century - while on every corner, a small Hindu altar summoned the faithful.

Transported into another world, it felt like, a wholly other time and place, one with a rich and mythic tradition that we westerners can only envy and behold, but never really step into. A timeless dimension, and to say it is full of paradox is a weak cliche in the face of such enormous polarities. Everything in India is over the top - extravagant and extreme in relation to our carefully modulated and measured western mentality and perception: wealth and poverty (the richest men in the world are two Indian brothers); blinding opulence and staggering degradation; extremes of beauty and ugliness, those beautiful dark faces with their glowing eyes and the hardship and suffering engraved in their deep facial furrows, the spontaneous and openhearted warmth and a guile born no doubt in response to years of foreign exploitation and tourist greed.

India contains them all, these mind-bending, heart-wrenching, soul-twisting paradoxes. In the midst of everpresent heaps of dung and garbage, the wild, bold beauty of the women's saris in their unapologetic hues of electric pink and fuchsia, green, blue and turquoise, red and yellow, and the most beautiful orange I have ever seen. There are no pastels in Delhi, but every shade of brilliant colour under the hot desert sun.

And then the touts - interesting etymology - the peddlars and merchants everywhere in the dusty dirty streets, often in impossibly white and ironed clothes - shouting in our faces, "Come to my shop, Madam! Only twenty rupees, Madam, very cheap!" A massive confusion of sensory images of all kinds. (I recall that one seasoned traveller advised me, "If you must fly into Delhi, get out as fast as you can!")

Varanasi, labelled by a friend as "Very Nasty," holiest city of the Ganges, proved a disappointment. Rather than watch the world created anew at sunrise from a boat as the guidebooks suggest and as many tourist groups did, we walked across the Ghats at dawn, forever besieged by groups of children, tattered scraps of humanity sent out in the dark of morning to begin the day's begging. We felt like voyeurs at a religious ritual we simply could not understand, at once besieged by tourist-wise beggars standing in our path, tugging on our clothes, haunting any possibility of a moment's view of the Ganges.

What to write about. Food. Clothes. Customs. Sights. Weather. Conversations and unexpected encounters. Emotions. Impressions. A fresh sense of the good fortune, privilege, and abundance that we take for granted in Canada. How can I imagine a desert village only an hour or two by bumpy road out of Delhi where a woman stares blankly at a coloured pencil we offer her daughter as if not sure what it is for. Finally the little girl accepts it but without any glimmer of recognition of what it might be. Continually thrown back and forth between old and new, tribal and urban life in India.

(This was as far as I got in the "midway blog" so I will end here. Over the next days, I hope to write a reflective entry from my retrospective inner gaze as I gradually settle back into my life at home in the early days of a new year.)