India. Again
India. How can you romanticise a place do relentlessly romanticised by so many others before oneself? Yet the temptation remains, and even as I write the cries of the muezzin drift in their eerie song over the city as it prepares again for rest. But I am in no mood for romance tonight, because in the midst of a billion people and their loves and lives there is no room for anything but lonely contemplation of what India is and what it will never become.
I arrive minutes before the stroke of the midnight hour, dumped unceremoniously into the night by KLM’s sterile efficiency of in-flight movies and boxed-up dinners. Eight hours of Germany’s geometric order and Uzbekistan’s barren expansiveness before the darkness creeps up; and in between them more clouds than one can see beyond, as viewed from the sky behind the aircraft’s wing. My cousin and father are there to receive me, patiently waiting for the airport to disgorge its new arrivals from its bowels, and we ride in near silence through the still-bustling streets, each quiet for his own reasons of fatigue.
I try to sleep, but in the heat and unfamiliarity sleep does not come because she is not there and because I know now that she cannot be again.
In the morning, I awake to countless instructions. This is how the water works, an obscure contraption that needs careful control of the system of pumps; here is the refrigerator, the bathroom, the cupboards, locks and bolts. My father wears again the army shirt and slacks he wore last night in anticipation of his trip to Calcutta this afternoon; he thinks they are practical, but they don’t suit him.
It had rained the last day, and it offers some respite as the heat begins to build again. The expected rickshaw wallah is not there, and must we persuade another to take us to the office which he does in a half-resentful flood of sweat. At one point the ground is so bumpy I must get out and push. But eventually my father’s business in the office is done and we return for a moment, only for him to turn straight around and head for Calcutta.
So having come all this way to where I belong and am yet so alien, I am alone again. My cousin takes me for lunch, though work delays him by a couple of hours, and we eat quickly outside in a flurry of somnolent flies. A ride around the locality orients me to the neighbourhood’s landscape of idenikit tenement houses and shining new developments, all of which seem only half complete. And then again I am alone in the dusty apartment on the edge of the city, with the Yamuna river curling alongside redolent with the stink of a million other lunches and dinners and loves and lives. This is India; I am back.
