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?

vi. sidewalks

this morning i sloshed through the muddled streets of boston, where filth and oil and rainwater rolled down like an everflowing stream. my toes escaped unscathed, thanks to salt-ridden boots, and beneath my black umbrella i dodged the gazes of the curious and the disenfranchised. stepping precisely around cigarette butts, wayward candy wrappers and dunkin' donuts "happy holiddays" cups, i jetéd over the swirls of muck accumulating at each curb. my feet hurried forward without a clear path, touching no one.

i think of the trails i have traversed, from the path through the hedgerow that led to tesco's, me in vegan steel-toed boots with a backpack anticipating soy yogurt, dry pasta and a boldly labelled bottle marked "vodka." a lost wes anderson prop. we tromped together over the dying november grass, down a mile of sidewalk that passed the graffiti wrought by dave's eager hand. later the boots would carry me through the streets of newcastle and london, calling for bush and blair to consider the children who were not their own; who might in fact belong to no one.

there was no sidewalk in benares. the streets, full of cow manure, trampled marigolds and human excrement, quickly turned to dust from lack of rain. never barefoot, i envisioned wanton bacteria covertly invading my sandals. i could easily die here. at night, after sitar concerts or philosophy lectures, i left the meeting house to walk home, unwisely, alone, a tall pale ghost with a distinctly feminine shadow. there were no women in the preternaturally dark streets. beady eyes of street vendors hovered over flames, warming their pots of tea. as my sandals stumbled over the dusty path, i saw myself attacked, violated, robbed, or worse, fed into the ganges like men into the laughing jaws of kali. still, i prayed to her, mother of destruction and creation, dark wild goddess, protect me from my own ignorance.