India - Part 3

Red or black, everything matches, shirt, pants and scarf.
The color is specific to the god(s) - male or female.
The out come is the same.

Forty days of fasting will achieve favor in the after life, you must do this fast three years in a row.

I wondered if I would dare mark myself it this way – wearing my convictions, literally. 

Do we, in this culture, mark ourselves this way?

I mean...believe in anything this much.
I guess a handful do on Ash Wednesday.

I don't know about you, but I am not leaving the house dressed like that.

Maybe by not wearing our convictions we are quick to say things like:
"you can see it in our actions" or 
"we are marked and different by who we believe in".
This. This is way more than a bumper stick kind of belief.
Women shave their hair off, bringing it to the temple for an offering.
I had to ask for clarification, really, they shave their hair off?
India is know for women with long beautiful hair and all I could think was, 
"Ain't happening here, I am not shaving my head".
I am thinking, wondering, if we had to wear our convictions in public would they mean so much more.

- - -

Horns. 
Car horns, bus horns, train horns, truck horns.

It's loud and distracting. 
What do they mean?

No one moves quicker, no one is startled or jumps at the sound.

No one seems to be too moved by the sounds.

Unless of course you are the guest.

At first, you are offended by the sound.

Should I you be?

Maybe, but the rules are different here.

No hand gestures seem to follow the sound.

The sound of the horn only seems to say, I am here, don't move suddenly in ANY direction.

- - -

You can’t wear shorts.
Period.
 Yet, men wear a tiny little towel of sorts wrapped around their waist with a dress shirt. 
A dress shirt that has seen better days.  
The men who wear them seem to have grown smaller over the years. 
They are almost invisible it seems.
Becoming smaller than children, not in size, only in mind.

Fragile. 

Their dress shirts may have fit tighter and had more color.

  They carry a walking staff once used to tend sheep. 
A fringed towel is wrapped loosely on their head. 
They have salt and pepper beards, piercing eyes that seems not to be all that trusting any more.
The women seem more at peace with it, the getting smaller part.
Their faces are different.
They don't seem so out of place.
I wonder if in their younger days these men dressed in red or black.
Did it matter any longer?
Would they have fasted those one hundred and twenty days.
Would they want them back.  

- - -

Always a pot of Chai brewing, always time for a cup. 
A milk film forms on top of each cup and sticks to your top lip. 
Each cup smells of spice, so hot you burn your mouth the first fifty times trying to keep up with the drinkers. 
Chai is to bring peaceful thoughts to your day, causing you to pause, to think.
I love Chai.

- - -

Hindu chanting at night makes me think of torture in POW camps.  
Day and night it is almost never quite.
For such a quite people they make so much noise.  
Most of it seems to be a ritual. 
However, there is one chant that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Some kind of horn, a deep long drawing sound.
There is, nothing peaceful about it.

- - -

Riding on the streets in the auto rickshaw it hits you.
In the air there hangs a smell that sticks in your nose and throat, holding them for ransom.
It lingers, not allowing fresh air to enter bringing freedom to your lungs.
You believe this is what death smells like....and it does.

- - -

Many forms of Gandhi still walk the streets. 
Some are real, some, some are not.  
Thin tiny men dressed in white, bald headed, a walking stick in hand. 
Round glasses too big for his face. 
More than once I have done a double take. 
Yet, I have seen no Sisters of Charity, only the good mother in statue form.
I am sure she would hate seeing herself in gold.

- - -

There is a bathroom in my room, for this I am grateful.  
The gift of hot water, priceless. 
The shower has no basin, water is free to fall in the whole room. 
Water makes it's way out of the confined room ensuring a mini floor washing daily.  
There is again the smell.
There are no closed drains, so with each burst of water the air is filled with  “the smell”. 
Not the street smell, this one will allow for air to come in your nose and mouth.  
Because this is an open space, it is open to ants, hundreds of them. 
Without knowing they had made my towel their new home I grabbed my towel after my priceless warm shower, it had been a long hard day. 
As I dried my body, I was rolling ants across my back. 

The pain was instant.
Hot and burning.
I didn't know about the home I had disrupted.
I was truly sorry.
I would pay for this mistake for a few days.
I was now red in color, not in clothing choice or religious convictions.
I needed a horn to do the yelling for me.
I needed Chai. 
Someone get me Chai - peaceful Chai.