Reymond Page's Blog - Posts Tagged "excerpt"
Excerpt from The Great Year - India Edition
The main street on the way to the old city is very busy, dirty, and the sidewalks are crumbling or nonexistent, so the walk is not the most pleasant one, but once in the old city, the road is....busy, dirty and the sidewalks are crumbling or nonexistent. It’s not a fun walk and I am beginning to look at my watch to see if three days have passed. No such luck. Motorbikes literally cover any space which might be suitable for a person to walk safely. We turn a couple corners off the main street and the mood is more relaxed, without all the hard sell guys trying to get you into their shop. Children race past us, smiling and calling out to one another. Men share some water cooler chatter over a cup of chai. Shop owners work their inventory, adjusting their displays to make them as inviting as possible. One poor guy shows us more than a dozen tablecloths, and the colour combinations just get more garish and revolting the deeper he digs into his shelves. Please stop! He seems surprised when we don’t want to buy even one. It’s cheap he says. Yes, but depressingly ugly and cheap are not exactly what I had in mind for my dining room table. Some screws are coming loose and I’m fearing that these thoughts are going to start leaving my lips involuntarily. Yes, obviously export quality, I say. Laura gives everyone the high sign and out we go.
On the next corner a middle aged man engages us in conversation. Just a regular conversation, until he invites us upstairs to his second floor shop. It’s mostly an empty room, with a few boxes on the dusty floor. My location is suitable? he asks. He hands me a business card and solicits an opinion on those as well. The encounter reminds me that people are people everywhere we go. Some are curious, some are uncertain, others friendly, or indifferent. No two people are alike, and yet half way around the world, we are all the same.
Back out on the main street, we come face to face with the part of humanity that gets under my skin. We walk a gauntlet of shopkeepers who are in our space pretty aggressively, almost demanding that we go in their shops...the pit of my stomach is heating up again, but for different reasons. Laura gets behind me and pushes me along before I say anything that she will regret.
Jonas and Matthew point out the forty foot metal poles on the back of a three wheeled bike and I’m mildly sedated, until we’re set upon by two guys selling drums who won’t take no for an answer. I don’t care if it’s free, I don’t want a drum, I say. They follow along for some time and we can’t stop anywhere without them sticking a drum in our faces, so we have to carry on. We walk single file along a winding path as the sidewalks are crowded with people and cows and boxes and debris. At a spot where a lane crosses the street, I stop hard, and the guy crashes into me because he is following so closely. There is a crumbling cement post on my left, heaps of boxes on my right. He cannot pass me, and I don’t move. I turn and give him the look that I continue to work on....and wait. I am starting to feel like part of me is being let out of a cage. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good. When I see a vehicle turning into the lane I wait until the last second and then cross in front of it so that I leave the drummers behind. It’s enough of a break that they manage to find someone else to latch on to.
Now, keep in mind, there are literally hundreds of shops lining all of these streets we walk along. These are not shops like we have back home, with fifty foot frontage, bright blinking signs, and uninterested staff. These guys have five to ten feet at most, so we are passing a lot of shops, and most people are friendly, smile, and say hello and little more, or sometimes don’t even take notice of us. It’s not everybody, but it is a significant minority who spoil the experience.
But there is so much beauty here, so many wonderful people who are genuinely curious and kind, it is fascinating to watch life unfold. Breathe. In, out. Repeat. Continue.
I’m over it now.
Okay. Jaipur is crazy, but it is fun. And most certainly not boring.
There’s a chaos in India that I find invigorating because it’s a communal chaos: everyone is taking part. It’s not the chaos of mayhem and unpredictability, but a pre-evolutionary chaos of formless matter that has its own order despite my best efforts to qualify it all. It’s a chaos that begs us to come inside, letting go of our egos and instinctive responses, and be a part of that formlessness. As someone who at one point in his life thought he might be a civil engineer, well, that’s a lot for me and my brain to accept.
But India has me on the ropes.
As we pass a man in his car, he calls out. Hey moostash! He rubs his chin and nods approvingly at my goatee.
On the next corner a middle aged man engages us in conversation. Just a regular conversation, until he invites us upstairs to his second floor shop. It’s mostly an empty room, with a few boxes on the dusty floor. My location is suitable? he asks. He hands me a business card and solicits an opinion on those as well. The encounter reminds me that people are people everywhere we go. Some are curious, some are uncertain, others friendly, or indifferent. No two people are alike, and yet half way around the world, we are all the same.
Back out on the main street, we come face to face with the part of humanity that gets under my skin. We walk a gauntlet of shopkeepers who are in our space pretty aggressively, almost demanding that we go in their shops...the pit of my stomach is heating up again, but for different reasons. Laura gets behind me and pushes me along before I say anything that she will regret.
Jonas and Matthew point out the forty foot metal poles on the back of a three wheeled bike and I’m mildly sedated, until we’re set upon by two guys selling drums who won’t take no for an answer. I don’t care if it’s free, I don’t want a drum, I say. They follow along for some time and we can’t stop anywhere without them sticking a drum in our faces, so we have to carry on. We walk single file along a winding path as the sidewalks are crowded with people and cows and boxes and debris. At a spot where a lane crosses the street, I stop hard, and the guy crashes into me because he is following so closely. There is a crumbling cement post on my left, heaps of boxes on my right. He cannot pass me, and I don’t move. I turn and give him the look that I continue to work on....and wait. I am starting to feel like part of me is being let out of a cage. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good. When I see a vehicle turning into the lane I wait until the last second and then cross in front of it so that I leave the drummers behind. It’s enough of a break that they manage to find someone else to latch on to.
Now, keep in mind, there are literally hundreds of shops lining all of these streets we walk along. These are not shops like we have back home, with fifty foot frontage, bright blinking signs, and uninterested staff. These guys have five to ten feet at most, so we are passing a lot of shops, and most people are friendly, smile, and say hello and little more, or sometimes don’t even take notice of us. It’s not everybody, but it is a significant minority who spoil the experience.
But there is so much beauty here, so many wonderful people who are genuinely curious and kind, it is fascinating to watch life unfold. Breathe. In, out. Repeat. Continue.
I’m over it now.
Okay. Jaipur is crazy, but it is fun. And most certainly not boring.
There’s a chaos in India that I find invigorating because it’s a communal chaos: everyone is taking part. It’s not the chaos of mayhem and unpredictability, but a pre-evolutionary chaos of formless matter that has its own order despite my best efforts to qualify it all. It’s a chaos that begs us to come inside, letting go of our egos and instinctive responses, and be a part of that formlessness. As someone who at one point in his life thought he might be a civil engineer, well, that’s a lot for me and my brain to accept.
But India has me on the ropes.
As we pass a man in his car, he calls out. Hey moostash! He rubs his chin and nods approvingly at my goatee.
