India sans Sarcasm

Today, I offer no sarcastic witticisms. India has pummeled me good. I’ve just had the kind of bad day that India seems so particularly adept in providing. This is the land of inefficiency in all avenues of life, corruption from the lowliest of urchins to the finest of politicians and everyone in between, smog enough to evoke the most reticent LA nostalgia, filth that is so all-pervasive as to coat every surface all the time, violence aimed at the body, the psyche and the spirit, that ages-old and much revered misogyny and just masses of bodies. There are bodies on the sidewalk, bereft of any real sign of life but hand outstretched in the hopes of the smallest alm, while people step over them not once looking down. There are women are harassed, abused, assaulted and demeaned by men on their way to worship the great Mother Goddess at temple. There are children are maimed and dismembered by their parents to maximize begging profit. There are girls sold off like chattel, with little thought of what the futures hold for them. And there is poverty beyond anything I can describe to the Western imagination, in slums of millions leaning up against high-rises that house some of the world’s wealthiest individuals. There are people who have it all and will not spare a glance, let alone a rupee or a second thought, to those who have almost nothing at all.

India is the very worst of humanity.

This is the litany that rolls through my mind as I sit in traffic for hours in the back of an Ambassador cab. And then I arrive at a tailor who recognizes me five years after the last time I was there. Who calls me didi, sister, and asks after my family. There is the toddler who climbs onto my lap as I sit at a cafÈ, so assured in the safety and prospect of affection from strangers. There is the man who, seeing my abjection after another pointless argument with the Bureaucracy, doesn’t hesitate to come and ask if he can help. There is gaggle of school girls who approach me in a shop to inquire as to who my favorite Bollywood hero is and giggle gap-toothed at me. There are the bearers at the guesthouse who cluck about my eating, forcing extra dessert on me and leaving snacks outside my door. There is the daughter of my father’s childhood friend who, having never met me, talks to me on the phone like I’m an old friend. There is the ease of touching, the willingness to smile and the instant familiarity borne of strangers calling me sister, in a land where I know so few people.

India is the very best of humanity.