There is something very precious about waking up to a morning in which no word forms on your lips. Silence tastes like honey.
From wedding to school to presentation to meal we dashed like a drunken bird caught in a powerful tail wind. We danced in circles and drove in circles and talked in circles around metal plates of rice and curry. We bumped and jostled along roads that were really bike trails and past other doing the same thing in other directions. Our motion turned to madness turned to motion and riddles were uproariously funny and even the jeep's automated voice system joined in the fun.
There is something very quiet about the dew on a spiders funnel like web in a rice field and something very gentle about steam easing off a cup of tea.
Small town bazaars were just another excuse to move and so we did prancing around mats of minuscule potatoes, edging past baskets of puffed rice, and swerving to avoid piles of dried fish. We skirted creepy followers, admired a banyan tree whose elegant roots stretched ever downwards from great and astounding heights from all sides, and steadied our footing as bicycles careened past and women carrying earthenware pots on their heads squeezed by. In that bazaar I realized that motion had a color, which was an orange-y brown with flecks of every other color swirling around.
There is something very tender about an evening rain which dampens and cools as it dots the earth like kisses from unseen lips. Peace feels like rain.
The school was like a beehive and the students stood in lines, crowded into classrooms, filled empty plates which filled empty stomachs, washed clothes and hair, scribbled on note books, nibbled on biscuits, and sang songs deceptively cheerful. The groups of students became nebulous mobs oozing and sliding between buildings and across the yard. Teachers wandered around as if they were unsure how they had arrived at such a place and pushy Indian men slicked their hair to one side and urged us to join staff parties. So caught up were we in the activity that we gobbled snacks and attended assemblies as though it were our very lifeblood.
There is something very somber about the unexpected gifts of guavas, glass bracelets, and brass cups from tortured women with beautiful bleeding hearts.
Goats tugged at tamarind trees and women carried timber. We balanced on rims of dried up rice fields and dodged stomping water buffaloes. A woman's sandal broke and she tossed it aside and kept walking. Rotis puffed and were stacked in steaming heaps. Flowers were threaded onto strings and laid over foreigner's heads. A tailor grinned a vibrant orange and spit and ignored a request. Trucks blasted obnoxious horns and flipped off of bridges. Rats clawed, dogs barked, mosquitoes hummed, and tears were cried.
There is something very timeless about a sunset and something very profound about a night sky so expansive and twinkly you would snap your neck to see it all.
India is a tangled mass of gnarled and twisting motion. It is so convincing as such, so intoxicating, so overwhelming, you would never know it was a facade hanging on the framework of abundant stillness, a framework held in place by the ridiculing jester of time, until you dare to look past the mayhem all around you and back into the long stares of their eyes.
Stillness: deep, life-giving, merciful... India refined that in me.
