Brutality, the Teacher

I've been more than vocal about my intentions here in India; while voyeurism is an inescapable dimension of travel, and spectacle a perceptual failing that I haven't yet subdued, I'm nonetheless trying to learn from India, at least as much as I learn about it. I'm not confident it's the case that the most important lessons are the ones taught by the harms we undergo, but it seems to me that the most salient teacher, at least, is suffering. So let me warn you in advance; this particular entry has a more sombre tone than those which have preceded it, and it contains some graphic descriptions that not everyone will find valuable. I've debated whether or not to write this privately or publicly or a few days, and have decided that painting a picture of India through rose-colored glasses is unfair to both those who are witnessing India vicariously through my writing, and to India itself. Those of us who enjoy immense privilege ought to know how the rest of the world is living, and the rest of the world ought to have a chance to have its stories told, even if only to an audience of a half dozen or so. In  the Wes, our media has weened us on drama and the spectacle of tragedy; we have become adrenaline junkies, and we tend toward privately enjoying our vicarious access to disaster and woe. What I'm going to write about isn't 'big', it's just very sad; there's no adventure in this story, but there's a fair but of hurt. So, there's the disclaimer.

In the movie A Mighty Heart, Angelia Jolie's character is a woman who travels to Africa to aid the sick and starving. Upon arrival, she finds herself shocked with the magnitude of the harm around her, and seeing a child nearly dead from starvation, begins to berate a doctor who chooses not to give the child aid because the child isn't likely to survive. She thinks him a monster, unable to understand how he could turn his back on a child near death if there is even a chance it could live, and he in turn mocks her for her ignorance and condescension. It takes her a long time to overcome her privileged ideas about welfare to understand that in the part of Africa she's traveled to, not everyone can be saved. The resources just aren't there, and being frivolous with them kills more than it saves. Her ideas about right and wrong become shattered by a reality she hadn't really been able to conceive of until she was faced with it. The film reflects a lesson I have tried to learn in advance. Anthropology has taught me to think deeply about matching ethics to circumstances, to admit reality. In much more egocentric fashion, I am also loathe to be laughed at or to be found naive, and so try to consider how appropriate my perspective is to my environment to avoid embarrassment. Both of these elements of myself play out in the story below.

I knew that India would bring me face to face with things I had never seen, and to some extent had prepared myself for this. I've had to look children of four or five in the eye and tell them no, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to give you any money, because I know that the money would not go to themselves, but to an owner who exploits them. I've seen a woman whose eye-balls had been torn from their sockets and not put back in properly, so that they jutted red and ragged from her face, secured by thick coils of scar tissue that made stalks of the nerves that must once have carried the currents of vision. We are not wealthy; on this journey, our air cannot be philanthropic. Ninotchka and I do our best not to waste food, and when we have left-overs we don't care for, to give them away to such people. We extend kindness to some who might receive precious little of it. When we settle in the North, we will volunteer our time; but this is the extent of our power, for the time being. Facing this has challenged me; but at the same time, I've been able to cope with it, primarily by relying on the reflex of jaded apathy Western society has bred in me, barricading myself behind it long enough to escape their begging, and then releasing it, letting in the familiar, cloying shame that is only assuaged by the mass complicity of all the urban populations of Earth.

Though, to give this city its due, Mumbai is no stranger to adversity, and in far better form than Western cities, Mumbai copes, after a fashion, with its vicissitudes. There are eighteen-million people in this city (my previous figure of twenty-two was an incorrect statistic), and the truth is, most of them take care of each other in ways many of us at home wouldn't recognize. It's possible, though not incredibly nourishing, to eat here for perhaps fifty cents CAD a day, and the population here seems to have an implicit agreement not to take on too much in their roles, so that meagre jobs can be born of almost any deed. Which doesn't mean that the work might not be brutal; rather, by dividing labor into simple tasks, whether back-breaking or monotonous, more opportunities for work obtain. In this way, more people than could otherwise be find themselves enmeshed in the fabric of the city's economy. In general, starvation is less of an issue than is quality of life, and survival far less uncertain than is flourishing. Born to a nation of free health care, minimum wage and the McJob, it's all struck me rather viscerally, but I've done my very best to try and live by the old adage, "when in Rome, do as the Romans do". I've tried to see India through Indian eyes, to avoid what anthropology has taught me think of as ethnocentrism. Yet, a few days ago I found myself in a situation that I could not reconcile with any ethos of cultural relativity, and which has therefore cut me rather deeply. This is a very long entry, but I'd like to feel that I did the experience, and not just the tale, justice.

To foreshadow, a moment of waxing introspective: the plight of animals is often harder for me than are those of people, a condition that I've confessed to and discovered I share with many others. Perhaps compassion simply surges stronger for the innocent, but I suspect there is more at play. I think that in the West we have learned to hide behind the fact of human agency, so that we can say to someone in destitution: this is your fault, you could leave this situation if you tried hard enough, I am not responsible for this. In short, we have diminished the extent to which we allow ourselves to emotionally contact the suffering of others, in self-defense rather than dispassion. But when it is animal pain we face—especially in a culture where the animals we eat are never seen alive, and the animals we keep are generally pets—we lose the safety and comfort of our rationalized disconnection. A wounded animal cannot seek medical attention; a starving puppy can't 'get a job'; the homeless creatures that line the roads here can't make the choice to stop breeding in order stay the swelling tide of new mouths to feed. A wounded animal can't cheat us or trick us or otherwise use our sympathy against us, and so the pain of an animal is the most honest thing in the world. It can pass, like light through a windowpane, by all of our defenses and egotisms to detonate in a vulnerable part of ourselves we tend not to offer up for exposure.

Ninotchka and I had gone to the train station to get tickets for the next leg of our visiting tour. At the station, there are a half dozen booths lining a wall from which to buy your tickets, and so far as I have seen, the lines descending from them never close to less than twenty or thirty bodies deep, even in mid-afternoon, when much of Mumbai naps away the worst of the heat. Waiting in line, I could see a dog beneath the booth we were approaching, lying pressed and motionless against the wall. I have had about a hundred momentary embraces with panic since arriving here, because the innumerable dogs that roam the city spend much of the day sleeping, and they do this anarchically, lounging literally anywhere. Whether in the middle of the road, across sidewalks, or beneath trucks (where the shade is plentiful), there are dozing canines everywhere, and until you see their chest rising and falling, you can never be completely sure that they're alive. I could see from some way off that the dog we were approaching was wounded; lying sprawled on its side, the underside of its chin facing toward me, the line of its brow was only a thin red and black horizon, obscuring the extent of the injury that must have existed atop its head. Its breath was shallow, its eyes were shut. Pressed up against the wall as it was, there was no vantage of it's other side except from straight above, a gaze I could't realize until we reached the booth. A heavy, sickening dread formed in my stomach; I knew, had known, for some time that there could not be so many animals fending for themselves in such a busy, jarring place without the occasional tragedy. I had been surprised, in fact, that in such traffic I hadn't yet witnessed any deaths from vehicles. So in my mind repeated my awful anticipation like a manic prophecy: this is it, this is it, this is it, I went. I was preparing psychologically for what I was going to witness, or at least trying to at any rate. I have seen the raw, bleeding legs who have chewed away their own flesh to fight the fleas, and I have seen the limping losers of back-street squabbles over food and the privelege of domination. I was anticipating something similar, if a more intense example for its being a head wound. It was nothing of the sort.

As our chance to purchase a ticket arrived, the dog chose that moment to spare a fraction of it's waning strength to look about at its surrounds. Its head rose for just a moment, and when it glanced behind it, it's ruined skull turned into full view, coming blatantly into my gaze in a disturbingly shameless fashion, like an adult with a child's mind exposing their genitals. A fist-sized tract of the top of its head was just absent, and in its place a ragged hole was left, out of which protruded its brain, framed by a gory cusp of serrated bone and coagulated blood. It is the way of animals to appear not to notice their wounds; it is because they are spared of hope and temporality, and thus do not worry about recourse. They simply endure, and this creature was no different; it completed its survey, and returned the remainder of its head to the pillow of its paws.

The pace of my internal monologue is sometimes a cruel gift, and on this occasion I would have stopped my thoughts if I'd been able; my talent for logic, for puzzle-solving, is mechanical and automatic. Sometimes, I reflexively interpret what I see before I can decide if I care to. Before I had access to the emotional levers that would shut the gates of thought, involuntary and computational curiosity uttered its conclusions in my head: how could that hole have been made? A skull is a very strong thing; this dog could not have fallen from a height because no other part of it is injured. Another dog could not have done it; the canine jaw cannot apply that much pressure, and wouldn't attack like this, besides. If it had been hit by a car with this much force, there, on the very top of its head like that, surely its neck would have broken, or its body would have been pulled under, and it would have some other damage. This is too local, too particular, too precise, too... human. This was he last knee-jerk inference I made before I managed to silence my thoughts. Although the deduction took less than a fraction of a second to complete, as is the way with the poly-semantic blossoming of reflexive logic, it was already too late to retract the conclusion. Someone had kicked or beaten the animal with enough violence to smash a piece of it's skull from its head, and had subsequently left it to die. Whether it had crawled up into the shade of the booth to find some margin oft solace, or if the abuse had been committed there and the dog had been unable to move, or uninterested in moving, was unclear. But in either case, the broken thing was sitting there, placidly baking in the afternoon heat while its brain mushroomed out of its shattered head, waiting quietly to die.

Immediately, I felt the vomit rising in me as though under the impetus of some violent inversion of grvity; I turned, I stepped out of line, I made for the nearest parody of privacy, the corner made by a vending machine and a stone wall. I hung my head over the floor, my weight heaved against my outstretched arm, and waited for the nausea to coalesce. A spared a moment's thought for all the eyes around me, and was suddenly horrified to discover that I couldn't complete the expulsion; the retching abandoned me in my throat, would not complete, and it backed away, retreating queasily to my gut. I was disappointed, and shocked to discover I wanted the release; television has told me that this is a proper way to unveil my disgust, and I wanted to play out that drama. I was ashamed that I could witness that and keep my breakfast, but I was also ashamed to be the only one so affected. Still, my composure waned; the vomit would not come, but my I could not stop my tears, and I dropped my sunglasses from my forehead, to hide them. It was an ironic move, juxtaposed against the psychological need to vomit—or be seen vomiting—I'd had just a moment earlier. It was at this moment, I have since reflected, that some deeply entrenched and extremely disturbing splinter of ego entered into my consciousness, from the part of me I pretend doesn't exist, and I have been working against the grain of habit and denial to better understand it since. But I get ahead of myself.

A thousand people had to have walked by that dog—not dozens, not a hundred, but easily a thousand. And there it sat, apparently undiscovered. It wasn't bleeding profusely, no arteries had been cut. Perversely, the size of the hole was providing an escape for the pressure that must have ensued from the swelling around the wound, which explained why it was still alive, and  worse, awake. The blood was black, and drying. The damn thing was not going to die from its wound; it was, in all likelihood, going to die very slowly, as its brain dehydrated, because it wasn't losing blood and the air temperature was over thirty degrees. The exposure was at the top of its brain; suddenly what little neuroscience I remembered from my introductory classes was haunting me, and I felt bullied by a relentless train of thoughts that just kept coming. This thing was going to lose functioning in all the wrong order; the base of its brain was still protected, it was going to survive the death of its brain from the outside in. It might lose sight, and memory, all the complex systems that make us perceive dogs as "mans best friend", but its lungs, its heart, its ability to feel pain and move by reflex would be in tact until the end.

I knew all of this within the space of a moment's thought, and I knew that the only choice was to kill it, a merciful death instead of a slow and wilting one. Most of the people passing by had to know that the only course of action was to kill it, but what I knew, and what they didn't know, or at least weren't considering, was that no one needed to shoot it or choke it or otherwise engage in violence. No one needed to risk being bitten, no one needed a weapon. The pen in my pocket would do; one good push  into its brain stem, through the fatty tissue leaking out its skull, would take its misery away. I could end its suffering in a moment. My nausea rose noncommittally at the thought. There were hundreds of people around. Mob mentality is a fact of life in Mumbai; I've heard stories of people being killed by mobs simply for causing a traffic accident in which no one was harmed. This many people can live together in relative harmony because no one rocks the boat. The status quo is a vital organ in a population so dense, especially when resources are so sparse. I was afraid to do anything; I was afraid people would be angry that I was interfering with their getting to work on time. I was afraid that I would be accused of having harmed the dog. I was afraid that people would not understand what I was doing, and that I would be in danger for trying to help; I was afraid they would be angry at me for doing what they had long ago buried, of necessity, the impulse to do themselves. Sadly, these are all legitimate worries, and in all likelihood the consequences of acting on my own would have spelled trouble or even danger for me. But it doesn't matter, because I didn't even try.

Deep, deep down inside me was a tiny voice I remember now, but which I refused, in the moment, to hear or acknowledge: you can't do it, you can't kill it, it's gross, it'll bite you, maybe you'll miss,  someone should but you can't, you can't, you can't. I could have faced that voice, I believe, if I'd been alone, if it had been my only adversary. But what for some time afterward made me sick with myself, what I couldn't admit at that moment but later recognized within me, was this thought: you're being a baby, this is just a dog, no one cares and you only care because you're an over-priveleged, sheltered little white kid who wouldn't know hardship from a paper-cut; if you try and help, people are going to gossip about the crazy, melodramatic foreigner for weeks, you're just going to embarass yourself. Some part of me that I should have left in highschool was here, on the station platform, whispering me away from the real problem, the dying dog a few meters behind me. I hid my tears because I was afraid that everyone around me would be laughing, or disgusted by my weakness, or resentful that I was letting their city hurt me when none of them seemed affected. I was afraid that I was getting India wrong, that I was wrong to feel this way, that I was projecting my culture onto theirs. And still, another voice persisted: it's dying, it's suffering, this is not about culture or ego, this is about life and suffering and cruelty. They can't afford to care, there's too much of this here for them to risk caring, the pain of a whole life of this would crush anyone who didn't learn to look the other way. You're not wrong, and neither are they, but you are the only one here who has the privilege of compassion. Do something, do something, do something. There was a war in me, and I went quite immediately into shock.

Ninotchka did not see the creature; she only saw me, and my hurt. She heard it from me, but she heard it in the context of my grief. Her concern was for me, for her partner's pain. She rightly told me not to get involved on my own. I listened to her, and I wanted to listen to her; I wanted to be absolved of responsibility. She suggested we talk to the train station police, who were sitting at a booth nearby. I presumed it was futile; they were sitting ten, maybe fifteen meters from this withering life that already innumerable people had witnessed and ignored; if this was supposed to be their problem, it would already have been. But it was an excuse; I didn't know that, nor could I have without speaking to them. I just assumed it as a fact, distributing my responsibility into the ether of rationale and probability and speculation. I'd heard a story in my introductory psychology class, about a woman who had been  stabbed death near her home. She had screamed for help for more than thirty minutes, and thirty-eight bystanders had heard her screams and done nothing; everyone assumed that someone would deal with it, that they shouldn't get involved. But one did get involved, and she died limping back to her apartment. I was stunned, shocked, and horrified by that story; not because people could be so callous, but because that fear could lead to such inaction. I have for a very long time believed that I would never do that, that I would be the one in those situations, because someone has got to be. I have generally led my life this way, even though I have never faced a situation even fractionally so dire. In general, I have seen that mentality go wrong too often, "someone else will do it" becomes "no one will do it" so very, very often, at home or school or work. So, a voice inside me went: if not you, then no one; you know better, you know better and if you won't do anything, that dog is without an ally, without hope of mercy.

I said as much to Ninotchka, who relented and suggested we call someone, ask if it would be viable to intervene. As a way of helping me to help myself, it was a good idea; her concern was for my pain. But for me, whose aim was to help the dog, it was a ridiculous notion; no one was going to tell me to intervene, least of all someone we knew, someone who was responsible for my well-being. I knew it, deep down. Beneath my conscious awareness I was already accepting that I wasn't going to do anything, that I was going to join the crowds in walking away. I agreed to call someone—it happened to be Cheryl—but it wouldn't have mattered who I called, everyone I know in India would have advised the same thing. In retrospect, I know now: I didn't want advice, I wanted an accomplice, I wanted to be forgiven, I wanted to be extricated from the situation. The moment I agreed to make the phone call, all my grief became nothing more than a self-righteous attempt to save my wounded ego, to explain away the terrible, terrible argument real life was presenting against my delusions of heroism. The dog ceased to exist the moment I began to dial; it was alone, again, in a crowd of humans whose lives had made it too hard to care about its plight. I went back to the station a day later, and there was no sign that the dog had ever been there. Someone, whether in time to end its suffering or merely to clean up an unsightly mess, had thankfully done more than I had.

I spent the next two hours in dialogue with my conscience, negotiating. I moved through successively more foolish ideas about what to do. The first was retributive; find the person who did it, scream at them, beat them, turn them in, something. It was immediately dismissed on grounds of impossibility, with a secondary nod to how little the dog would benefit from vindication. My anger began to cool, to wilt, to sink into a helpless apathy. I hated India, Indians, humanity. I was disgusted with this place that could ignore such hurt, that would walk, in scores, by an animal dying so grotesquely and do nothing. I projected my own shame and guilt onto the landscape and its people, assailing them in my head with blame and accusation, but that too faltered soon enough. I knew better, I knew that the burden of responsibility was mine. I didn't care what anyone else had done or failed to do, and it would be arrogant to pretend that I really understood the circumstances in which they'd made those choices. It was the inability to reconcile my idea of myself as the sort of person who would get involved with the fact of my impotence that was troubling me, and turning my eyes outward to spend my painful emotions on accusation and deflection was a waste of time and energy, a lie I couldn't swallow. Then my thoughts grew truly ridiculous; I decided to go without food or water for the rest of the day, to suffer with the dying dog. An incredulous, punitive voice spat contempt at me: and adding your suffering to the world will aid this creature how? I bargained better: I will rescue a street dog. I will find one, save it, take care of it; a life saved to replace the one I allowed to end in misery. I spent twenty minutes in this fantasy, imagining the grand life my rescued puppy would live. Though I may find that I'd like to do something like this before I leave India, it wouldn't undo my choice to walk away, and it wouldn't help the brutalized dog I'd left dying in a train station. It was at this point that a horrible, sinking feeling came over me, as I realized what I was really doing—self medicating.

My thoughts were all concerned for me, all concerned with how to rectify my shattered ego. That was the moment when I realized what I alluded to above; that in choosing to ask for permission to help, I had already abandoned the dog, and I realized with further shame that my bargaining with my conscience was only taking me further and further away from reality, and deeper into the safety of fantasy. I resolved in that moment to accept responsibility for my choice. The only thing left to do was to admit it all, to accept it all, and learn from it. I began to study the logical performance that had played itself out in the theatre of my mind, in order to recognize the rational mechanisms that had led to my choices, to know them with as much intimacy as I could, perhaps to recognize and refuse them when next they surfaced. The best thing I could do then was to learn how not to do it again. I was tempted to let myself believe that it was a way to honor the dog, but that too I dismissed as merely one last ploy for redemption. The dog had never wanted to teach me anything, it had no sense of self, no ego, to satisfy with the knowledge of its memory. It hadn't wanted to matter; if it could be said to have wanted anything, it was an intact skull.

The resolution unfolds: I have forgiven myself for my inaction, because it was the only apology I could make. To cling guilt would be to plant a seed that would germinate and grow into a larger creature, a sapling whose branches would carry fingers of doubt and self-loathing into other parts of me, ensuring that when next I faced a situation where action was the only answer I would only feel inept and incapable. In short, keeping the guilt to serve as punishment would only increase the chance that I would commit again the very harm about which I was so ashamed. And it was a hard thing to do; so long as we have guilt, we cling to the possibility of redemption. Guilt is an unacknowledged theory of innocence; if the forgiveness can come from some external source, then we can be absolved of responsibility, never guilty in the first place. Forgiving myself was really a way of accepting what I had done, of being able to both admit that I had done it and also agree to keep on living. It meant that the principles I had claimed to hold were worthy ones, yet also their co-existence was now in contradiction with the facts, and the harder choice, in the moment, was abandoning the latter. But, beyond that choice, I have found the beginnings of a certain freedom.

I have not had to abandon my values; I have not had to let go of the idea that I live in a world wherein the choice to act on another's behalf is the right one. I have not had to relinquish the idea that I do not live in a universe where cowardice or apathy are acceptable. Rather, though I have demonstrated cowardice and apathy born of selfishness, I've done this in a universe which can forgive those actions without needing to sanction them. It means that I am imperfect, but the universe is not, and I've discovered (to my surprise) I prefer this scenario to its inverse, because its not hopeless. In short, I am free to try again to be the person I have aimed at being.

I've shared this story because it happened, and it mattered, and it's really what goes on here. Horrible things happen all over the world, but they happen more often in some places than in others; Canada was in many ways easy to live in (perhaps too easy), India I can bare, but Somalia I wouldn't step foot in. While I think of this as a travel blog, the choice to travel into a place that doesn't have the resources to polish away all of its deeds, nor a closet to hide them in, means that my experiences won't always fit tidily into the space of culture and cuisine and curiosity. My intention isn't to create melodrama or to sensationalize what I see, but to do my best to explain through the microscopic lens of circumstance the macroscopic vista of India. I have always joked with my professors that the sociological or anthropological view can be likened to waking from the Matrix in that just as there is no blue pill after you wake, neither can you retrace your steps to a shrunken perspective.  So I can't really help but see this experience in terms of how a geography and a social climate shape a people, and how they  reshape those features in turn. The dog was a salient experience for me, the introspection that obtained was a true and personal account of what happened to me in response to it. But, though the entire encounter is a glimpse of how life unfolds here, I haven't written it as though it were definitional of India. Rather, it is an exemple of the circumstances that do define India, just as the privilege of coping with this event on a blog, to an audience of friends and family who care about me, poised in front of my MacBook thousands of miles from home depict some of the circumstances that define Canada. In summary, I just believe that juxtaposition—the zig that occurs in full view of the zag—shakes us loose from the habits of thought that keep us sleeping, a necessity if we ever want to move out of a world where stories like this are harder to tell.

Family, Friends and Foundations

It's been several days since I've had either the time or, frankly, the inclination to 'blog'; we've been very busy, and have subsequently missed a great deal of rest. So, today's report might end up being a tad more synoptic than I'd have liked, in an ideal universe. Yet, I'll do my best not to skimp on the good bits.

John, Ninotchka's godfather (also Cheryl's husband), had his birthday on the 20th, but we celebrated the occasion on the 19th (which, incidentally, happened also to be my sister's birthday--hope you had a happy one, Jen). This was my first opportunity to catch of a glimpse of celebration in India, though I should note that, as members of the Christian demographic, the whole affair had a decidedly familiar character. A veritable feast of snacks (an interesting blend of typically Western fare, such as potato chips, as well as Indian delictables) adorned the room, shortly to be consumed by a large number of family and friends, who filled the home nearly to capacity. Alcohol and conversation to follow, with dinner, cake (the consumption of which very nearly descended into a marital food fight between John and Cheryl—entertaining I assure you), and song soon after. While it doesn't make for much of a story, it was nonetheless a charming and wonderful experience to actually participate in, you understand, and I was treated like an old friend far more than a new-comer (aside from, of course, the unrelenting tide of advice that inevitably follows from explaining that I am new to India). However, one highlight in particular is worth noting.

One of the guests, Jean, had had to make an unfortunate decision between attending the party and attending a soiree of a different sort back at her society. This last week marked the beginning of Navarātrī, a nine-day Hindu festival. In the province of Gujarat, a dance called the garba is a traditional part of celebrating this festival, and Gujarati populations that have migrated throughout India have brought the dance with them. So, at Jean's society [the name given to the close-knit communities that develop in the apartment complexes which constitute the living arrangements of most home-owning Mumbaikers] a dance was being hed, and while Jean had resigned to miss it this year, she had nonetheless conceded to making an appearance, if only for a few minuets. We were lucky enough to tag along. Sadly, I have no photos from our visit, but suffice it to say that it was quickly made apparent that standing on the sidelines wasn't really an option, and we shortly found ourselves swept up in the dance. Awkwardly at first, we were tutored in the steps and general approach of the dance in a small circle, whereupon we joined the main show. Essentially, the dance moves in a large, flowing circle to an intense, thumping beat in a rhythym that my Western ear, trained to think and move in 4/4 time, couldn't conceptually understand. Being the only white person on the scene, and a stranger as well, many more eyes were on me than I would feel comfortable under normal circumstances, a condition of insecurity that was worsened as I tried, in buffoon fashion, to deliver an impromptu performance of an unknown and utterly foreign dance. But before long my feet, at least, adapted to the unfamiliar pattern and my degree of comfort (not to mention enjoyment) rose dramatically. It was a wonderful experience and I was very grateful to have been invited, and of course to have been graciously welcomed into their celebrations with hardly an introduction.

As an interesting social aside, this dance is traditionally one of the few times teenagers are openly allowed to meet and greet across gender, and the ensuing fraternization has, in the current era and social climate, produced a very salient statistical increase in the number of unplanned pregnancies that occur over these ten days; significantly more that at any other time of the year, in fact!

The days since then have been awash in unbelievable food, occasionally too much drink and an altogether inadequate amount of sleep, as we have been visiting the very large number of family members that I did not have a month before. The number of inlaws I have gained quite outnumbers the number of blood relatives I have, you see, and getting to know them all has been an adventure. Everyone has been unquestionably charming and hospitable, and its given me a lot to think about. I was, I confess, initially slightly resentful; we're by no means done visiting yet, and by the time we're finished it will have taken almost two weeks to have gone and seen everyone. Before this campaign of introductions had begun, I had been jealous of the time we were going to have to invest, and had, I believe, imagined that it would somehow be work, as though it was some duty I regretfully had to perform. Quite aside from how obviously self-centered this logic was, it was also just wrong. I've had a great time, with laughs, anecdotes, unbelievably good (and plentiful) food all culminating in new relationships with dozens of people; newly-formed relationships with family members who are, it has been made evident, utterly ready and willing to act in that capacity--as family, not acquaintances. How such a thing could ever seem to loom on the horizon, rather than rise with anticipatory delight, is something on which I have subsequently spent much time in reflection. Detailing the process of pruning the garden of identity, and rooting out the weeds therein is an activity for a more private journal, but in brief, trust, responsibility and openness are delicate flowers that require much care to bloom. In short, India is providing the for my introspective appetite rather nicely.

I confess that this doesn't quite account for all that's happened these last few days, but that's the long and skinny of it. I'm off again for a few more days of visiting, but I've been collecting quite a few photographs (some amazing ones from last night, where I had the good fortune to witness a spontaneous resurgence of the monsoon precisely at sunset from a gorgeous sixth-story apartment building), which I will try and post before the week is out.

Adventures at Bandra Fair

The only way to navigate a city as large and dense as Mumbai is to begin breaking it down into manageable chunks. The first of these divisions is at the level of what you might call a district, not unlike political ridings in cities back home (though the comparison is strictly a geographical one; I do not currently have even the slightest inlking of how politics are performed here). These then subdivide into neighbourhoods, and finally into societies, which are the apartment compounds I've mentioned before. While something similar certainly exists in most cities, by way of necessity Mumbai relies on this segmentary organization for everything from the postal service, to navigation, to the sustainance of religious, economic and cultural communities. Until yesterday, then, I had never left the district in which I am staying, which is named Malad. Bandra, another distrinct significantly to the south of Malad, is both Ninotchka's old haunt (she has lived in Mumbai on several other occasions, spanning durations as little as two months and as long as four years) and the site of the aptly named Bandra Fair. Having spent so much time in bed or at least trapped within twenty-seconds walking distance of a washroom, we were both very excited to get out of the house for a while. Thus, we took a train to Bandra Fair.

Taking a train in Mumbai is not quite like catching, say, a subway, or a bus. Like many things in India, the trains in Mumbai are much more likely to end your life than their Western counterparts, and like most things that can kill you in Mumbai, this is primarily attributable to population density. Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram quite accurately describes the trains of Mumbai as dichotic places of fierce and aggressive competition immediately succeeded by charming, polite socializing. As always, here, it's a question of space; if you would like to have any, you had better damn well ensure you get it, and elbows first is the strategy of choice in this particular affair. There are no doors on Mumbai's trains, only doorways, and so once the cars are full, the only way to catch the train is to hang from it's doorways or grapple onto some other part of its outside frame. Luckily, this was not part of our experience, but I did spend thirty minutes in each direction awash in the aromas of hundreds of armits, and damp with perspirations not my own. It's not the sort of place you want to take a date, but it gets you from place to place for about 25¢. In this case, the place it got us to was Bandra.

Bandra is a shopping district, indeed the shopping district, and the annual fair is an opportunity for the area's sidewalks to spontaneously inflate with bursting, colorful reams of what is, for the most part, a plethora of low-quality items of mass appeal. The name of the game is negotiation; the prices aren't posted, and they certainly aren't fixed. This doesn't for a minute, however, mean they aren't rigged; on the contrary, they most certainly are. The degree to which one succeeds in not paying exhoribitant prices is a measure, I gather, of how legitimate is one's right to refer to themselves as Mumbaiker (the official tital of a Mumbai native). Let me spare you the suspense: no one, anywhere, at any time even remotely mistook either myself nor my wallet for having originated in Mumbai. I was, to put it bluntly and succinctly (the latter condition I will shorty negate), altogether had. That said, most of the time I was more or less aware of the occurence, if usually not to the extent, of my 'donations'. But I get ahead of myself.

The process goes something like this: you must approach an item you are looking for cautiously, with a calm, cool disinterest. If you are seen to want something, you're done before you've even begun. Assuming you can succesfully browse without letting on that anything has caught your eye, you may then casually ask the price. Depending on how much of a mug you are assessed to be, the ensuing number that will you be quoted will fall somewhere on a spectrum between marginally inflated to a numerical hyperbole that is, frankly, comical. Thereupon, you touch blades, and the match begins. Most people, I gather, immediately trip and fall on their swords by either accepting the price they are offered (a mistake perpetrated only by foreigners without at least some meager tutelage in the ways of Indian shopping) or else parry with a thrust far to weak to ever penetrate the real value (the more common mistake by far, and the one to which I proved unfortunately--literally--prone). Obviously, whatever offer one makes in response to the proprieter's initial extortion is clearly the lowest number one can ever again counter with. Thus, if one is so obviously a mark as am I, the degree to which the offered price will be exaggerated is often so great that it's hard to overcome the fear of being foolish off the mark that one would require to actually offer a reasonable price. For example, the last encounter of my two-day escapade into Bandra Fair went something like this:

Jon: How much for these sunglasses?
Shopkeep: Rs. 550.
Jon: [A smirk, followed by a by-then knowing smile] No Sahib, this is too much. Rs. 200, I give.
Shopkeep: [Aghast, shock and dismay blatant on his face] No, no; these are excellent glasses. Very nice on you. 550.
Jon: Thankyou, have a good day. [A casual, dismissive wave ensues, and I turn to leave]
Shopkeep: Ok, ok! You bargain, you deal. I say 350.
Jon: [Pointing to the shoddy hinges, and the painted-on metallic finish obscuring the plastic beneath] No, I give 200.
Shopkeep: [Outrage, with a gesticulatory flourish that clearly indicates that he will have no choice but to starve should I continue on in this fashion]. I can go 300.
Jon: [Suddenly insecure, doubt forming behind my brow] Uhh. 250, no more, no more.
Shopkeep: [Exasperated and defeated] Ok, ok, 275 I can do for you, 2--7--5.
Jon: [Suspects something has gone wrong, turns to leave]
Shopkeep: Ok! I take. 250, 250 I take it.
Jon: [Victorious, pays]

Whereupon I thanked the man, feeling good about having paid less than half of the original asking price, donned my new shades that had cost me about $8 CAD, and hopped into a waiting vehicle which contained my host Cheryl, her driver Babloo, and Ninotchka.

Jon: Cheryl, what do you think I should have paid for these?
Cheryl: These? These are nice, I think maybe Rs. 80.
Jon: [Facepalm]

I had suspected I ought to have shot lower, you understand, but the risk of looking absolutely foolish prevented me from doing so. Did I really believe this man was trying to charge me 700% more than the item was worth? In retrospect, the answer is quite simple: I'm white, so, yes.

The game is fun, however, and while I've played it rather poorly so far, it is one in which learning from one's mistakes pays dividends (or rather, fails to lose them). Of course, all road-side shopping is like this, here (and most shopping, incidentally, is road-side), but Bandra Fair has a thrilling blend of megalomania and mercantilism that makes it something else. At least, this is how it was experienced from the vantage of one who has always seen a price tag as a placeholder for the stone tablets they were originally printed on.

But, the shopping misadventures weren't the only highlights of our tour of the Bandra beat. Along with meeting more of Ninotchka's extended family, all of whom continue to prove charming, friendly and endlessly hospitable people, we also succeeded (at last) in acquiring our wedding rings. That is, we got ink! Al's Tatoo Parlor is, I gather, a somewhat famous location in Mumbai, or at least in Bandra, and the amply pierced, tatood and smiling men inside were happy to place upon our fingers the three concentric circles we had long been hoping to get. This was a task Ninotchka and I had failed to convince any Haligonian artists to do, because the hanf and fingers are areas of the body that exfoliate very quickly, and thus tolerate very little disturbance if one's tatoo is to remain crisp, smooth and attractive. Being unwilling to risk the damage to their reputation that might ensure from irresponsible customers, we were unable to get them done by anyone at home in time for our wedding. Yet, I confess now that I am happy of the fact that at least a small part of our matrimonial activities could be completed here in India.

I do have some photographs of these sights (especially the waterfront, which is enormous and beautiful, though in Bandra uncontaminated by sand), as well as of our new rings, but I've sadly forgotten to bring them to the internet source I'm currently devouring. I'll be sure you avail you all of them as soon I am able.

Photos, at last!

The humidity this morning was visible; it wasn't a cloud, it wasn't fog, it was just a faint, grey mist that clung to everything, everywhere. The entire supply of the city's air was simply so thick with the exhalation of the monsoon that light simply couldn't hold on to its inertia. It's very beautiful, but it also means I've got to change my shirt about three times a day.

I've been getting requests for photographs, so this morning, in a fit of inspiration, I ran out and collected some. Thanks to Picasa's charmingly user friendly interface, a slideshow can be retrieved from the link below

http://picasaweb.google.com/this.impetus/MumbaiSet1#slideshow

Recovering from jet lag as I continue to be (not to mention far too many hours of lost sleep over the course of my escapades with Indian food), I'm afraid I've very little left in me to contribute by way of words, so there'll be no lengthy accounts of my Mumbai experience tonight, but if pictures are worth a thousand a words, then a small novel awaits at the link above. But, if you're hungry for a little more to read about our travels in India, Ninotchka too has taken up the blogging trail, to be found here:

http://kaleidoscope-n.blogspot.com

Food Fight

Insofar as this is, ostensibly, a 'travel blog', I've got little to report. This is because I've left our apartment only twice in the last three days; once to walk to the local medical clinic, which purported to open at 9:30am, and again to return the afore mentioned clinic, when it actually opened, at 10:30am. The explanation for this discrepancy, so far as I can tell, is "because the man behind the booth said so". From a Western perspective, where anything put into print immediately is understood to be irreversible gospel, this is a national modus operandi I am looking forward to learning to be at peace with. Currently, however, I am finding it marvellously infuriating. The Buddha is giggling on a plane I can't access.

The reason I made these trips to the local medical clinic lies in the intense discomfort I have been enduring for for three days. Allow me to both euphemize and hyperbolize at once: I have felt, in a nut shell, as though my enteric system has been trying to dispense with a can of shaving cream. Suffice it to say, my love of spicy food stops at my palette. Below this point, I have proved to be awash in antagonism. But a charming, sensitive, intelligent and curious doctor carefully, patiently discerned my condition, and with almost prophetic skill, predicted the problem, the solution and the corresponding time course to within hours, all for about $3.50 CAD. By experiences with Canadian doctors have seldom been so comforting. Thus, I am on the mend, and have in the process discovered that the peanut butter here is significantly better than at home. Samosa's, meanwhile, are currently a prohibited item.

I will post more when I'm able to cross a kilometre without diapers.

Mumbai Mornings

Mumbai does not wake up; it erupts. The first wave of sound comes from the birds, of which there are impossible hordes, especially (I'm told) now, at the end of the monsoon, when everything is wet and green and lush and bursting with a vitality that must last through the coming months of baking heat. There are swarms of crows, and from the moment the first of these begins its cries, only minutes elapse before the fabled 'early-bird' is joined by thousands of slightly less ambitious but equally vocal peers. Then there is a sound I have not yet identified, but is reminiscent of a cross between an owl and a gibbon, and I am increasingly worried that it's the pigeons. If this proves to be so, I will be doubly cautious of them, because no pigeon at home could possibly produce so mighty a coo**. Smaller, gentler birds (and once again, I apologize for having no idea what sort any of these creatures are, yet) soon begin to twitter and to tweet, and theirs is a more musical addition to the chorus, a soft soprano peeping against the tenor ululations of the pigeons and the alto rending of the air incited by the crows. Finally the less numerous but more exotic bird-calls (cuckoos, shrill trumpeting, whooping bellows and barking trills that evoke an image of Amazonian warriors, birds to be sure but nameless for now) join the request for sunrise, and soon it is difficult to differentiate them; a Mumbai morning begins in one massive, intricate avian conversation. Masala is the name given to the Indian mixing of spices, but it is, in its own way, the philosophical essence of Mumbai; the blending of things, diaspora, a feral plurality. Between five and six in the morning, the air comes to life with an auditory masala of bird call that I, at least, am neither able to nor interested in sleeping through. In short, the symphony here is free.

The next voice on the scene is not a voice at all, but the low, thundering rumble of the trucks; huge, lumbering remnants of two or three decades past, by the standards of home. The trucks here are all painted in bright colors—-usually deep reds and greens--as though industry is unwelcome here if it cannot don at least a pretense of beauty. That is another theme of Mumbai; glorious, gaudy, explosive color and pattern, sight-rending combinations of brightness and richness and contrast, as though every moment of production were also a celebration, or a mating call. The trucks amble on, but soon the baseline hummed by their huge engines, and the beat that booms as they slam their loads into pot holes is overtaken by the car horns. Once they begin, flooding the streets like loquacious automotive geese, they don't stop again until they've chased away the sun, and even then they squawk and bleat their way to sleep beneath the moonlight. But there are local echoes, too; the sweeping of floors with the long-bristled and short-handled brooms, running water from a multitude of huge, outdoor taps, wagons and crates that make the sharp crack and muted scrape of distinctly wooden things. Stalls and gates open by the thousand and so metal grinds against its rusted, flaking skin in a clanking, staccato jingle. Bells cry out to school children that classes are beginning, and the sounds of car alarms and radios constitute a juxtaposition as they interrupt the clatter, reminding me of home. The call to Muslim prayer (now strangely familiar, as a consequence of the Western media's obsession with the Muslim universe) is a distant, crooning Arabic voice that sounds from high above the city floor, played over huge P.A. systems to reach the faithful from amongst impossibly large populous of infidels below. One must be thankful that humans have no capacity to see the waves of compressed air that create sound, here, because the skies of Mumbai would be so densely occupied by ripples of endless amplitude and period that blindness could be the only effective consequence. What I mean to say is, basically, that Mumbai is an unbelievably cacophony.

But my favourite part of the city so far, and I confess I am pandering to cliché here, is the aroma. It is quite simply not like any other olfactory experience. I have on several occasions read as much by Western authors, who have taken it upon themselves to try and compress into English the endless assault on the senses that twenty-two million souls in such a small space can make. Even so, I was unprepared for the pungent, intoxicating reality of it, but they can hardly be held accountable for failing to prepare me, because the simple fact of the matter is that you've got to be here in the flesh to really understand it. Therefore, I too inherently join the failed ranks of articulating this experience. The smell is unique, and this morning in the shower it finally occurred to me what about it endears me so; it is the smell of the social. It is a smell the so-called natural world will never produce, because it is created by millions and millions of people doing what people do, and doing it together, which is of course something--anything--and endlessly thus. Human beings cannot help but do; we create, we move, we push, we change, we imagine. Marx, in what continues to be one of my favourite quotes, wrote: "What separates the worst of architects from the best of bees is that the architect raises his construction in imagination before he raises is in reality." The smell of Mumbai is incidental, but it is born of untold imaginings and labours compiled together in a geography that is bursting with the effort of containing them. The smell here is thick and humid, a composition of sweat, spice, shit, vehicle exhaust, industry, a million forms of flora, and a generality of life in every stage of birth and decay, all baking beneath the oven of Mumbai's equatorial latitude. It could clearly be said of any city that it's fragrance is contingent on the labour of its people, but I think it is too easy to mistake the scent of industry for the scent of the social; it is not just the fires that people light, here, that lifts the smell of Mumbai into the air, but the endless motions of the people themselves, and so the air smells of their histories as well. I love it, I love it, I love it; whatever else I may come to know about Mumbai--and there is enough hurt and harm in the poverty and fight for space here, to know heartbreak with a relentless intimacy--I have truly and helplessly fallen in love with aroma of this city. It is a small thing, perhaps, but the intertwining of scent and memory is a mysteriously salient means of connecting to our personal histories, and so I am grateful to have so beautiful a link to this adventure by which to travel here again from the platform of the future.

**[note: This was written two days ago; jetlag has found me waking at 3:00am, and in those early morning hours I've now confirmed that they are, indeed, pigeons. But, Mumbai was playing a joke on me. Housing here tends to occur in compounds; large blocks of apartment buildings that tend toward a shared central courtyard. It makes for many towering vertical alley ways of concrete and glass, which become magnificent natural amplifiers. As such, I realized this morning that the pigeons are not quite so perilous as I thought, but rather have been cooing into a makeshift amphitheatre outside my window, and thus leaving me unjustly intimidated!]

Reverberations

Disclaimer: It is almost a certainty that I will initially be posting almost manically, and, as I grow accustomed to India (presuming such a thing ever occurs), I will probably become less and less diligent with documenting my experience. For now, the urge to spill my impressions onto the 'page' is irresistible, and therapeutic besides.

The people I am staying with—Ninotchka's godparents—are kind, generous and uncannily insightful; in the space of a day I already feel very much at home, in terms of my ability to feel comfortable both physically and psychologically. Being Nova Scotian, I am used to being able to pride myself on belonging to a culture of hospitality; yet, what we do in Nova Scotia out of, I think, a sense of moral responsibility, is elevated here to an art. Which is not to deny the underlying ethos—of course, it is the foundation upon which the rest is built—but the considerations and attention to my needs that have been shown to me are incredible. It is exhausting trying to demonstrate my gratitude.

That said, I am also perfectly aware that I am in the company of some very special people; I would not anticipate that any home of equal means would be so hospitable. Which is actually what I aim to report, presently.

It is no secret that I have come to India in part as a sort of pilgramege, or at least in pursuit of a spiritual education. I have been concerned, privately, that this would prove to be an expensive and embarassing romanticization. I would have felt this concern melt into an enormous relief, today, if I had not been preoccupied with shock and awe. John and Cheryl are owners of the home I am staying in; Alfred (hereafter, Alfie) is Cheryl's brother. Additionally, he is proving to be a very, very wise man indeed.

Speaking somewhere on the order of six languages (I didn't get a preicse count), Alfie was a networking technician until, after eight years, he was surprised to find that his greatest moment of fear occurred when he was alone with a large and then-injured computer network. I am extrapolating, because we didn't discuss this particular bit at length, but I gather that the realization that his greatest fear was unaccompanied by danger sounded an alarm in him, so, he quit. Our discussions about what he has learned have proven, to say the least, to be profound in the extreme. In fact, on several occasions today I was somewhat overcome to sit in front of someone who, casually, calmly, and unprovoked, described to me in words I would never have thought to use ideas that I have been ambling over in my mind for a year or two but had never or at least seldom tried to articulate. It was enormously gratifying, and it was accompanied by a sense of conformation. Most reductively, it was a conversation about consciousness, what it is, what can be done with it, and how irrelevant (or at least, illusory) everything else is before (or, rather, within) it. I can't do the conversation justice, here, but I can say for certain that it has taken me only a couple of hours to find someone with a wisdom greater than my own who is willing to impart what he can of it to me. Embarassingly, the phrase that comes to mind is 'booyah'.

Hindi is hard. Plain and simple, the enunciative progress I am going to have to make in the next while is daunting, but I'm lucky enough to be sharing a home with a family of polylinguists, and especially John and Cheryl's children. Bruce, who is eighteen, has just begun his first year at university and will shortly be taking a refresher course in Hindi, for which he will be acquiring textbooks. Brenelle [that spelling is a guess, currently] is roughly thirteen [also a guess] and has provided me with some old essay readers of simple Hindi texts with which to begin. In short, I am enormously lucky.

All of this, however, exists inside the home; I have hardly had chance to venture outside, yet. I did, however, take it upon myself to go and get bread this morning, which proved to be not at all adventurous. It was educational, though, and a nice way to ease into negotiating the streets of Mumbai. The first thing one needs to understand about Mumbai's roadways, so far as I can tell, is how not to die when you're in the vicinity of them. There cease to be lanes the moment you deviate from the main arteries (and to put into perspective the ratio of main roadways to everything else, one simply needs to imagine an oak tree and compare the path of its trunk to the paths all of its branches). Auto-rickshaws, which are essentially very small three-wheeled taxis of a shape and size more or less akin to the children's rides one finds in malls, pepper the road in a constantly diving, shifting mass. If you have ever played a stage in a Mario Brothers game wherein the primary challenge is simply not to be killed by a constant onslaught of smiling bullets ("Bullet Bill", to be precise), than you have some concept of what the population of auto-ricksaws looks like. In Canada we have a law which states that it is illegal to pass someone on the right. In Mumbai, there is traffic anarchy. I do not mean traffic chaos (though there is certainly a great deal of this as well). Rather, I mean that if there are rules, there are clearly only suggestions. As such, the car horn is used as it was intended, as a form of communcation (and not only as an expletive); in fact, it almost seems as though Mumbai's drivers survive eachother by echo-location. As a Canadian, it makes me jumpy when I am walking on the street's edge (oh, and so far as I have seen, the vast majority of streets are unemcumbered by a sidewalk). I am constantly afraid that am an doing something obviously and terribly wrong, that this apparent to everyone but me, and thus that the inumerable honks that go careering by me–generally only inches away from me—are indications that I am enraging Indians by the score. I am eagerly awaiting the dissolution of such ethnocentricisms, though I am already contemplating with dread the sense of silent death approaching I am afraid I'll have upon my return to Canada.

There are dogs that look marginally like dingos everywhere, licking eachother and travelling as often in small packs as alone. Rats, mice, and squirrels are as common as pigeons, and the pigeons here are barbaric, fearless tyrants compared to the timid, roaming creatures at home. Alright, that last was an exaggeration, but they've learned to survive Mumbai's streets, and in the attempt, it seems bravado has been selected for.

The food, quite simply, hurts so good, though I am beginning to accept that I am unlikely to have many meals wherein I am not laughed at, because I have inherited from my father the capacity to actually have a net loss in sodium when I eat spicy food. That is, I sweat buckets and there's nothing I can do about it. At least this much is for certain: I will return home with the cleanest pores in Canada.

Disembarkation

I'm too exhausted to come up with much; I arrived about two hours ago, whereupon Ninotchka's god-father, John, and his driver, Babloo, picked me up. The number of thoughts I am having are enormously outpacing my ability to document them, and rather than try, I'm just trying to make a point of 'blogging', as it were. So—I'm here, I'm safe, I'm tired, and the duress of it all has left me in shock (the infamous culture shock, in fact). My immediate impressions of Mumbai:

Warm, wet, aromatic, filthy, huge, organic, intimidating, cooperative. It is obvious from the first drive through the city that living here couldn't possibly have a rule book. I am interested to see how effectively policy can be deployed, here. Commerce, too, seems to be remarkably make-shift, as though someone had taken the early eighties, thrown them in a blender, and then begun to build shops out of the mix. But, this is the impression of a Canadian who's driven through the tiniest fraction of Mumbai at 4:30am after having had roughly two hours sleep in as many days. Now, I am going to lavish myself with a duty-free Twix bar and some alone time with my iPod on a balcony roofed by mango trees. Having introduced myself to India, it's now time to begin the enormous task of letting it reciprocate.

Introductions—At Length

There are those commitments in life that occur in real time; a kiss, a pulled trigger, a punchline delivered. These in turn stand in juxtaposition with their counterparts which unfold gradually, yet irreversibly; the end of the first trimester, a signature, or, in my case, take-off.

I'm flying over the wrinkled coast of Nova Scotia, over land so spattered with lakes and ponds it looks as though the province is, with geological patience, submerging. If the plane is my chauffeur, the sky is my warden; as the former ferries me to my destination, the latter ensures that I cannot escape. So, committed, my stomach is lurching about. Like a child playing in a puddle, caffeine and a Tim Horton's breakfast (my blue-collar bon voyage) are frolicking in my anxiety. And whence for the allegorical galoshes? Ten-thirty in the morning is a tad too early for a drink. I'm running out of finger-nails fast.

A disclaimer to those who've never read my writing: make no mistake about it, melodrama is my first language—English is merely the vehicle.

This intercontinental adventuring business is all so very new, to me. One of the greatest pleasures in life is the profundity that accompanies the novel, and as soon as I realized this—in my teens, I believe—I began to practice a sort of meta-awareness to appreciate such experiences as vividly as I could. Saturation of experience is the path along which decreasing marginal utility ultimately sends novelty, blunted, to its grave. Thus, rather than lament the fact of novelties inevitable transience, I do my very best to savour it while it lasts. Whether its the heady tonic of infatuation (wherein waning novelty, if unanticipated and misunderstood, can so easily be mistaken for a failing romance) or the thrill of a new toy [read: e-paraphenalia], the accompanying sense of adventure—of something new—is a gift that derives from our being such obliviously finite creatures, and it is too often squandered by mourning its passing. You can't ever keep it; nothing is new forever. All we can do is watch intently as the thrill of the novel passes, honing our attention in order to best glean each transient detail, else, when it inevitably has vanished, the imprint of its memory will be shallow and discredited with an undue sense of loss. You cannot lose what was never yours to keep in the first place, you see, but you have everything to gain from delighting in the gift of your history.

So here I sit, watching the carpet of my home descend over the horizon, knowing intellectually that it will be many months, if not years, before I see it again, yet helpless to reify the fact. India is an inevitability, merely forty-two hour distant, and still it is only a pastiche of abstracta, a psychological scrapbook of factoids and images, stereotypes and romanticizations—fantasy and spectacle, in short. I have been trying for weeks to properly realize that reflection as more than an intellectual truth (as usual, it's being impossible hasn't dissuaded me at all). Logically speaking, I can't possibly know the first thing about what I'm getting into. And for all the world it still feels as though I'm someone Rudyard Kipling penned but failed to publish; I feel like I already know how this story unfolds. I am simultaneously terrified and hungry for the magnitude of my conceptual discrepancy. As an aside, then, let the record show: it isn't fair that one should be able to recognize in themselves the arrogance associated with youth and still be helpless to divest oneself of it.

An alcoholic drinks away his problems, and finds more at the bottom of each bottle; I run from one dichotomy to the next, propelled by the exultation of finding synthesis in the former into the anxiety of negotiating another. If circumstance were a pinball machine, how a shiny and smooth a marble I would make.

I will shortly arrive in Washington, where I shall have thirteen hours to relieve myself of before I'm flung across the Atlantic. Airports have always played the muse to my imagination, so I'll pick up again when either inspiration or boredom prompt me to.

~hours elapse~

In just over two hours, I will board Quatar Airways #52, and thereby commence my first trans-Atlantic crossing. I've spent the day in Washington D.C., and found my self having a number of strange reflections about my experiences here. The first, and in some ways (depending on the lens through which one chooses to examine these sorts of things) the most salient, occurred as I entered the downtown core via a city bus, and saw in person for the first time a slough of images I am, actually, quite familiar with. The Pentagon, Arlington Cemetary, the White House, the Library of Congress—to name a few—rolled into my field of view with an eerie recognition. And I do mean eerie, which quickly explained itself under some fast reflection, a clarification I will presently share . Since the largest part of anyone who's likely to read this won't have played the game Fallout 3, allow me to catch you up on the details: set in a post-apocalyptic future, the player roams Washingto D.C. and it's surrounds, collecting those resources that can be salvaged from the debris of a spent civilization and all the while indealing with the consequences of tinense radioactivity on the local biology. Suffice it to say, then, that it was simply a bizarre experience when, whilst travelling beneath an overpass on my way into the city (and the reader should appreciate the Washington in Fallout is street-for-street a copy of the real thing) I had a reflexive expectation to see a pair of super mutants armed with chain guns bearing down on me. I'm not even slightly kidding; it was a knee-jerk reaction, and it left me very seriously rethinking all the arguments I've ever heard about the ethical implications of video game violence. Moreover, it left me reflecting on the surreality of knowing a place I've never been too well enough to recongize huge swathes of it on sight simply because I've watched enough movies centered around America's capital to warrant it.

I could (and did) pontificate on that topic for some time, but I'll spare the reader the ensuing essay. Besides, I did not, in the end, actualy visit any of the afore-mentioned American heritage locations, minus one. I made my way almost immediately to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. In the most reductive description I can manage of the experience, let me simply say that one never gets too old to get very, very excited in the presence dinosaurs. Additionally, I visited the zoo, and the same came be said for gorillas, elephants, tigers, anacondas and komodo dragons. Why I am so deliciously fascinated with things that are so effortlessly able to achieve my death I don't fully understand, but on numerous occasions today I found myself bursting with the urge to tackle someone.

So now I am sitting in a pub—Harry's Tap Room—marginally enjoying a plate of fish and chips that have been served with chile sauce, and sipping on a Bud Light (a beer which, at least on this side of the border, sports the slogan "superior drinkability", the implications of which for the English language I won't currently explore). This, coupled with the fact that voices on buses, intercoms, airports and digital billboards have been all day reminding me to "report suspicious behaviors and happenings to the appropriate authorities" because, afterall, "safetly is everyone's responsibility" have left me with an urge to escape the Orwellian prophecy that is the United States with all haste. To that end, India here I come, now slightly less anxious, in large part thanks to mounting exhaustion and the moral support proffered by Budweiser.

Be well Nova Scotia, I shall miss you.