It has been so busy and full of work but i have been in such high spirits while doing it! every day i look around bhopal on a walk in the clear fall sun or on the back of a bike with 2 people and just think how lucky i am, how fortuitously the linkages of people and events in my life have come together to get me to this point, to this place the magnificent and hilarious Bhopal, India. a place where time and fact and language are all flexible in the most unthinkable ways- where life flows by, sicknesses like malaria and dengue come and go, projects fade in and out in waves of work and interest, the consistency of the dal (soupy with oil flotillas on top means the canteen lady is trying to make a larger profit, thick and lumpy with visible tomato and chili chunks means khushi eclipsed thoughts of profit and love went into it) fluctuates and fruits come and go in the unexpected swoops of seasons...
for a month every cart bore mosambi (thick skinned green oranges) and within a few days a full transformation occured-- now mosambis are rare at best and guavas (or GWAWAS if you wanna emulate the local accent precisely) sit in piles on every other cart where burqa-ed mothers pick carefully through, hunting for the ripe white ones that are soft almost paste inside (but often victims of hordes of camouflaged worms we've heard). The guavas are abundant on the trees around Bhopal so any kid can pick one off a tree limb with a little hoisting, slight bending of a leafy branch and one big lunge. all indian children seem united by their love for the hard green guavas that look just like avocados until you gnaw through the first tough layer into the tangy white core studded with tan seeds.Little girls with pigtail braids folded into bunny ear loops and pressed plaid uniforms bite them while walking home from catholic school. a girl who begs on the street with sunstreaked, tangled hair and a tattered dress and bare dusty feet balances a baby on one hip and munches a little green guava in the other hand, a treasured treat in the middle of a long fall day. south of the clinic, near the mosque that blasts the call to prayer 5 times a day through our open windows, boys and girls in the industrial area of town stand in clusters outside of the buildings packed from floor to ceiling with garbage (empty bottles, greasy cardboard scraps, ripped black plastic bags) pressed into cubes and stare into space and chew hard green guavas. alizarin and i eat them before lunch with vikas and diana, passing them around like a joint, each person getting a big juicy bite and handing it over to the next in the circle with a full mouthed giggle.
we live in this place where people bake cakes in their pressure cookers. and where people insist on keeping secrets that everyone knows about while everyone else pretends not to know. and where coffee is just sweet sweet milk with the slightest brown tinge. and where there are rules for when you can drink water with food (e.g. no water with greasy food like puri and no water after eating cucumber, guava) because otherwise your stomach will get upset. and where neem or tulsi (holy basil) or coconut oil can apparently cure anything from dry hair to mosquito bites to infections to malaria to coughs. and where people insist that eating with your hands makes the food taste much better. and where goats where ripped turtlenecks and where the idea of wearing one anklet not two in absurd. this place is pure chaos that somehow fits and pushes onward. its like the traffic. to the untrained eye the traffic appears to be a hellish race with every vehicle pursuing its own route with no regard to laws or patterns, undoubtedly about combust, but really the the roads contain a massively complex community that functions like a petrol-powered bee hive, tons of rushing with constant communication and coordination making a group of individuals into one intricate organism. bhopal is unraveling in front of us and we can trace the paths that we follow through the city like mice in a maze- memorizing the classic route from berasia road, past chowk market (where you can find chappals next to electrical appliances next to safron flavored ice cream scooped into a bright orange cone), around the corner where a series of dark, smoke-blackened shops begins (complete with old men crouching on their haunches enjoying the beedis tucked in their oil stained fingers and boys with coal smudged faces dodging the streams of sparks that fly off spinning wheels as they cut metal pipes) to furniture row where you can find any kind of chair, cabinet, bed or couch you could possibly need, past the soap and chemical row full of shops piled high with bubble gum pink chemicals in 3 gallon jugs to the looming stone gates that bring you to the open, lakeside spaces of new bhopal. and then back. bhopal is unfolding with all of its passion and absurdities and its moments of pure glee in the form of a bright new coat of paint over the mud and dung walls of a house, or a genuine smile from woman selling bloated yellow papayas. There are also those moments when you look around, full of love for bhopal and its people realize the pain that is still lurking even 25 years after the gas, still torturing so many via ailments or continued poisoning from the water and you feel this horrible tugging sensation inside, pulling out tears of anguish. you think- who could ever do that to these people- they must not know, not understand, must truly blind themselves. anyway this is what i'm thinking about as we zoom around bhopal and reflect on this mystery of a city that has become our home.
