xi. slumbai

i am a failure as a blogger. even though i will continue to think this, i will not write of it again.

this afternoon i saw a matinee of 'slumdog millionaire.' a far cry from danny boyle's 'trainspotting,' although equally superb. it reminded me of the worst aspects of india, the barefoot children with gold nose-rings and filthy smears across their faces, needy yet cunning eyes, and cupped palms with dirty fingernails that poke at your hips or tug on your tunic, keeping you surrounded as you attempt to push past them down the ghats or across the street. for as brief a time as i spent there, it is this india, the india of brothels full of children, of feces and excrement, crowding sweat, pickpocketing, drug-addled, dreadlocked europeans, and smoke, diesel, and garbage rotting in the sun, that will not leave me. a little girl called me her butterly auntie, and another painted my nails at her father's tea stall. all of the children were so eager to be touched.

earlier this year i read mehta's "maximum city," about mumbai, and the film contained one such burning man as is mentioned therein, lit on fire during the hindu/muslim riots of the early nineties. today i saw him erupt and stumble down the street, unaided, unsalvageable.

and somewhere among all of this, there is room for the corporeal reality--not our phantasms--of the gods, brilliant in their colors, vindictive in their righting of wrongs, cyclical in their quest for creation and destruction, creative in their amalgamations of inhuman bodies. they are, and are not, of us. ganesh has guarded my many passings to and fro, to and fro, yet what liminality, what interference of the divine, will allow me to truly cross over?