Day Twenty Four

Goa was a good break from my travels, but it would have been better right after Habitat. I could have cocooned myself on the beach for a few days and emerged ready to conquer the rest of my travels. Having it at the end of my trip was just a relaxing postponement of my return. Not that I minded. I hit the spa for one last massage before taking the long and winding road back to the airport. They sent me off with a box lunch of prawn curry and lentils. They sent me off right.

We drive by house after house nestled in the dense tropical foliage. Tourists trek too and from the little restaurants scattered around. Children play in the parks. Goa is lovely, but it’s not easy. The yearly monsoons drown the city without reprieve. Houses must be repainted every year. Those that are not bare the stain of mildew, black bags under the eyes of the house’s windows. Some are so bad the stain becomes a patina adding a depth of grime to the texture of the facade. But most are painted. Some with a new paint meant to resist the flooding. My driver is skeptical it will work. He says nature is more persistent than we are. We pass the ruins of the Muslim palace. It’s a few walls, and a few columns. Eventually, everything built gets unbuilt.

My flight to Mumbai has been delayed an hour. I consider my time left in the country and talk my way onto another airline’s flight. But this means I have to pickup my bags and recheck them in Mumbai. It’s probably a wash. By the time I get out of the airport, I’ve got five hours left to see one of the biggest cities in the world. And I’m stopped. Stopped dead in traffic. I think I spent about four of those five hours in traffic. In between, I saw glamorous Bombay versions of the strip malls that line every street in Delhi. I saw the same handicraft markets, and the same five-star hotels with their long driveways and imposing security. I saw the people kept at bay on the street, begging for money.

I did not see the slums. I did not see the world’s largest public laundry. I did not see the Parsi burial pit, nor the giant crows that live there. Bombay is a big city, but it’s clogged arteries make it tough to get around. I think I could have walked faster than I traveled today. Eventually I gave up and went to a five-star for dinner. Chinese. Maybe I hit my lentil limit.

The best thing I saw, stuck in traffic, a fish market on the side of the road. Like the one in Goa they had fresh fish being sacrificed to the flies. For the first time I see too many fish living in too small a bowl, filled with sea water; a small net stretched across the top to keep them from leaping off each others’ backs and onto the pavement. They still try. They try really hard. The water boils with their effort.

So in India, when I sit on the floor in the airport and I look out at the long, long lines in security and sense all that raw water rolling in one unbelievable huge bulge over to America, and all those planes going, all those people fleeing from the immensity of it, and in India I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that god is Vishnu? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old…

Sincere apologies to JK, but when you write something like “folds the final shore in,” how am I supposed to not think about it at the end of a long, long travel across a strange land where I don’t find what I’m looking for.

Goodnight India. Good luck with everything.