I need to go live in New York City for a month so I can determine what is unique to India and what is just part of being in a big city. I've been thinking about what I see at the side of the roads here. In Provo I could actually drive for several minutes and possibly not see a human being outside, except other drivers. Here the streets are teaming with life. I've seen women sitting near stacks of terra cotta pots, barbers shaving customers, dogs sleeping or scrounging, cows resting or trotting along in traffic, people cooking over fires and sleeping, everywhere colorful fruit stands and peddlers pushing carts of coconuts or papayas or vegetables, men coming out of what appear to be public showers, dressed and rubbing their hair with towels; tea and ice cream and popcorn and roasted nut vendors, people ladling milky brown tea and fixing flat tires, people selling flowers or flower petals, people going into the temples to ring a bell and pray, bikers hauling trailers with huge loads of piled up boxes or flattened boxes for recycling. People walking and shouting, rickshaw and auto drivers looking for fares. I was traumatized by one terrible street fight we saw from a cab.
Two roadside visions are sticking in my head today. Yesterday I was riding along near the American embassy and saw a sari-clad woman kneeling in the gutter pulling weeds. (Even the female street sweepers and city clean-up crews look beautifully dressed to me.) Near the woman a 6ish-year old boy was holding a plump looking baby and another tot was nearby. I drove by in a flash, but I imagined that this woman was working and tending to her children all at once by the side of the road. I thought what a challenge it would be to do what that woman was doing every day, then of how some young mothers I know in the US have such different challenges of loneliness or boredom or depression.
The second vision still fills me with astonishment. Again from a cab, we saw scores of long tour buses parked at the side of the highway. They were piled on top with bags and blankets. Men walked on top of the buses rummaging. Our cab driver told us they were Buddhists on pilgrimage, but I couldn't find anything about it online the next day. Suddenly we noticed that the "pilgrims" were sleeping on blankets by the buses, on the ground right along the side of the road. They slept with their heads nearest the road, some between the buses and the road. It felt like traffic was whizzing passed just a few feet from their heads. How could they possibly sleep in such a vulnerable position? Why on earth would they assume that cars would only drive on the proper road and not go barreling onto the shoulder to get around jams? It still agitates me.
Two roadside visions are sticking in my head today. Yesterday I was riding along near the American embassy and saw a sari-clad woman kneeling in the gutter pulling weeds. (Even the female street sweepers and city clean-up crews look beautifully dressed to me.) Near the woman a 6ish-year old boy was holding a plump looking baby and another tot was nearby. I drove by in a flash, but I imagined that this woman was working and tending to her children all at once by the side of the road. I thought what a challenge it would be to do what that woman was doing every day, then of how some young mothers I know in the US have such different challenges of loneliness or boredom or depression.
The second vision still fills me with astonishment. Again from a cab, we saw scores of long tour buses parked at the side of the highway. They were piled on top with bags and blankets. Men walked on top of the buses rummaging. Our cab driver told us they were Buddhists on pilgrimage, but I couldn't find anything about it online the next day. Suddenly we noticed that the "pilgrims" were sleeping on blankets by the buses, on the ground right along the side of the road. They slept with their heads nearest the road, some between the buses and the road. It felt like traffic was whizzing passed just a few feet from their heads. How could they possibly sleep in such a vulnerable position? Why on earth would they assume that cars would only drive on the proper road and not go barreling onto the shoulder to get around jams? It still agitates me.
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