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.