The Dust and the Shadows

There are details we share and then there is the other kind. Sometimes we try to forget what we know. Sometimes we fail to forget. What makes a piece of otherwise trivial fact be one kind or the other is often fluke, fate, or mere arbitrariness in how you decide to look. What may be trivial to you or I could be everything – it could be the all-important thing – to another.

The truck ahead moved at a painfully slow pace. It carried chicken cages seven levels deep. I did a quick mental calculation. Seven times eight times ten – or over five hundred birds – each confined to its own little space. Each waiting patiently for whatever comes its way – and come its way it does and befall it – it surely would! Except that it does not know. It has learnt to be patient. Patience is virtue and it makes one feel virtuous. Patience is all the more virtuous when there is no alternative. The less the choices, the more virtuous it makes one appear.

The truck continued its excruciatingly slow movement on this stretch of Indian National Highway Number 31. The sun felt warm on my side of the rickety Ambassador. The seat was loose and the springs were long fatigued and lost any bounce they ever had and the whole thing lurched precariously to a side – like benches in the waiting room of an out-of-way station.

The volume of traffic suddenly rose. We were now on a short detour through a small town. Bikes, people, cows, cars, trucks, and every manner of life form converged at this one intersection and the space shrank to a tenth its size. The Ambassador slowed down, and then stopped. Horns competed with each other and people, stray dogs and bicycles moved out of the way at the last second. Not too long ago, such close calls would make one cringe in fear – but one gets used to it, just like one gets used to the rest of it all when it finally dawns that the protocols, while different, are well-understood by one and all. The rule of the road is simple. The small makes way for the big and the big makes way for the bigger. If one thinks about it, it’s the same rule in life, too.

Noor Ahmed switched the car radio on. There was the usual news of the Taliban creating problems in Pakistan. The Sri Lankan cricket team had been attacked. Some Pakistani leader had pointed fingers at a foreign power. Noor Ahmed shook his head. Noor Ahmed was the cabdriver – hired at the rate of six hundred rupees a day. The disadvantage with renting a vehicle is you must pay for the driver with it. The advantage with renting it is you get the driver with it. Whether or not he knows the roadside, he certainly can weave through the mad traffic better than you ever could.

“How much longer to Begusarai?�

“Three more hours, sir!�

It was time to hit the powder room except there was no powder room. It was only the side of the road and one merely turned his back to the busy traffic behind. In the distance, about a quarter of mile away, stood a solitary house and on its flat roof lounged a man reading a newspaper – except he was not reading the paper, he was looking directly at us – as if to shame us for doing what came naturally. Noor Ahmed pointed defiantly like a rogue cop holding a water canon – trying to scare the man on the roof, who remained unfazed.

It ended in a stalemate. It went nowhere. A lot that occurs here ends up going nowhere.

The beggar kid was barely eight years old or so. He was missing knees – probably amputated. He walked on his palms and lifted his torso – or what remained of it – rather efficiently. He knocked at the driver’s side door. “Get out of here!� Noor Ahmed shouted. The beggar kid looked at me – I only had a thousand rupee bill and I was not parting with it. There is a hardness which descends on you like a shell when you are in India, it is like a protective shield except it protects nobody but you – and it makes you more of your own master and less of a man. I kept gazing at the kid who could not figure out what to do next – will I deliver or not? Finally, he turned away muttering. He trudged toward the vehicle behind. From the back, I could see his shorts – filthy and torn and probably smelly up close. Through the tear, part of his left hip could be seen – it looked a large slab of dark brown chocolate and in its middle was what appeared to be a tiny yellow flower in a red vase but in reality was only the puss-filled tip of the sore he carried. I wondered how that sore compared with the one inside.

There were wild flowers on both sides of the road now. There were all kinds of color but most of the flowers were yellow and there was more greenery than I had seen in a long time and had remembered for even a longer time. The grass on the sides was tall and moist and the breeze was gentle. By straining a bit, one could hear the breeze talk – actually, the talk was more like a whisper and it whispered many stories of ages ago. The stories were all different and they were all the same and they were all timeless. They all made a lot of sense and were very confusing at the same time. One should never listen in when the breeze is talking to you.

And occasionally, there were people on the road side relieving themselves – and they invariably covered their faces while relieving themselves – as if by doing so they could withdraw into a world of their own and became invisible to the rest of mankind – but in reality, their bottoms were plainly visible and what those bottoms produced was even more so.

It was still INH 31, but the paving had long been obliterated. We were now treading dirt road. I tried to look beyond the mini dust storm from the truck ahead.

Those darned birds! Those darned birds had barely budged. Perhaps they were mesmerized by the beauty of what was so fast passing them by. Or perhaps they were simply too tired, just like the people all around them. Perhaps they were too dull. Perhaps they were too dulled. It does not take a whole lot to dull those birds – or for that matter, the people!

We came to a well-paved stretch – many well-paved stretches have come up since the change in Administration here. But only half of the road was open and the other half was secluded for drying paddy and there were sharp bamboo sticks placed around it to stop vehicles from driving over. In fact, the paving where the paddy dried was the only clean surface in sight – there was dust everywhere else. The nearby hut dwellers owned the paddy and the paving was the only way to dry it. One makes use of what one has. A lot of people here try to make do with whatever they have.

Those stupid birds! Aren't they supposed to raise a cacophony or something?! Instead, they just sit there and they just shit there – some a few levels above others and when they crap – why, the one underneath must receive it – and all of it! Isn't that what we all do, too? The one on the lowest rung gets most of the crap and must carry the load overhead. There is never escaping the crap which comes from the top.

"Line hotel, sir!" Noor Ahmed announced. Drivers need breaks and they need to be fed and they need to relieve themselves. The line hotels generally charge about forty to fifty rupees per head for a very filling meal. The driver , the line hotel owner, and the guy at the gas station – they all know each other by face and they all know of you that they don't know you because you are not one of those faces. You are the traveler, the entity from outside. You are food ready for the inevitable follow-on act – it is nothing personal just like there is nothing personal between the driver of the truck ahead and those well-confined birds.

Things are seldom clear-cut. We are more likely to be muddle-headed than otherwise. Nothing is ever straightforward. Like this highway which is supposed to go straight from this small town to another town, even smaller. Except that it does not go straight. There are breaks all over the place. There are large pot holes and your vehicle must do a dance around them – the same dance routine the vehicle coming toward you does. There are the overloaded trucks, the overloaded auto rickshaws; the overloaded passenger vehicles, the slow bullock carts, the slow pedal rickshaws, and of course the slow pedestrians. They all do their complicated dance routine which could make your head swirl and amazingly – they mostly manage to do the dance without stepping on any toes of their various partners. Even the most muddle-headed of moves may have a mad method or two associated with it. If you don't like the dance routine, you don't get on the dance floor – or, like me, you just close your eyes tightly shut and leave everything in the hands of the one who is driving you at the moment.

Noor Ahmed switched off the radio. It felt stifling hot for this time of the year. I wondered if hot weather makes the birds poop more. Darn birds! Why don’t they at least raise a ruckus?!

Why don’t they ever raise a ruckus?!

On this portion of INH 31, you find a lot of temples – about one every quarter mile. Some say that is so because a government directive prohibits anyone from removing religious structures from the roadside – so whoever tends the temple has virtual possession of the land it takes up. Usually, small vendor stalls spring up all around and the stall owners live there, too – with the temple serving as the base. So you see a lot of small temples but you don’t see many mosques. Perhaps the Muslims are more serious about their religion – or perhaps they do not dare to. Things have changed from the days of the Laloo when they openly hung bovine carcasses by the roadside. People then hanging those carcasses were not trying to offend anybody, it was only business and it was a means of livelihood for them. I wondered what all those folks did for a living now – perhaps they still did the same things and they had merely moved their operation out of sight.

Out of sight – out of mind!

The Kosi river runs very lean at this time of the year. The highway rises steeply about fifty feet. The bridge has no guard rails. At the approach point, the pavement is only about twelve feet wide. The bridge has no guard rails and the approach to the bridge has no sidewalk. A few months ago, Mr. Ramchand's bus had toppled down the embankment right near that point, as it had crawled up the slope like we were doing this very minute. Except that it had been the middle of the night. Some say the driver had swerved to avoid a boulder deliberately placed in his path. Others say he was simply drunk – most overnight bus drivers like to steel their nerves with a few drinks before starting from that small town thirty kilometers back. One would probably never find out. The driver had perished – like twenty or so of the passengers. Most had died of blood loss. There was no help available. There were only sounds in the darkness. There is nothing like sounds in the darkness because such sounds are unreal sounds and they remain with you – unless you are too far to hear them. In the end, only silence remains. There were no lights except the fading headlight and there were no outsiders except the outsiders who immediately descended on the scene and started looting the meager belongings. Mr. Ramchand had survived by breaking through a glass window and running very fast toward a far-away light he could see. Not every one had been that lucky – certainly not the young women whose fate Mr. Ramchand did not dwell on. There are details and there are details that we leave out – out of kindness.

The Hanumanji temple loomed larger. High tension transmission wires ran overhead and seemed to run precariously close to the temple steeple. From my vantage point, the clothes line which carried the temple’s banner appeared to almost touch those wires. But they never touched – they merely made skew lines with each other. Skew lines come quite close but never really touch in space – or in time.

The dust rises like fog and gently embraces you from all sides. It makes no difference how much or how little you count. The dust is the great equalizer on the INH 31. I breathed it deeply in – it was India and it was home and it was what I was made of and I felt like a child to the core as the dust went all inside me. It was the dust of late spring. Many springs ago, when nobody was watching, I had once tried breathing in talcum powder and it had felt the same way except the aroma was sweeter and there were no questions of who belonged where and I had liked the talcum powder but hated the dust then. Now it still felt similar but not all the same – like you taste sugar and it does not taste sweet the same way if you have a sore inside your mouth even if the sugar be the same. One can only absorb so much sugar without damaging oneself and it is the same way with the dust, so I raised the window glass and found Noor Ahmed looking at me like I was crazy.

The shadows remained stuck to all they touched. The shadows became longer in time and looked fuzzier. The setting sun lay ahead and the shadows all pointed back. But there was nothing to go back to.