from sadhus by patrick levy.
The kindness, the vitality and the enthusiasm of Indians delighted me. It is a dirty, disorganised and chaotic country, over-populated with noisy and invasive people, but most of them are smiling and curteous. They expectorate with conviction, shout when talking, call out to each other from one end of roads and buildings to the other and private life overflows into public spaces, but their friendship is immediate and their sincerity spontaneous.
In the narrow lanes shared with pedestrians, careless of their nuisance, motorcyclists insist on the horn largely beyond decency and necessity. Whirrs of generators, bells and amplified rituals from temples, the backfiring of auto-rickshaws, political propaganda blasting out of cars, the latest songs booming from CD shops' loudspeakers, cawing crows: all this composes a continuum of cacophony, punctuated in rhythm by resounding percussions of all kinds of work; and then suddenly lit up by a muezzin who proclaims the hour f glory or the childish flat voice of a sadhu singing Ram-Sita Sita-Ram ad infinitum.
Holy Varanasi has discovered neon, plastic, posters and concrete. The visual realm is a mess. Electric cables weave a worrying net between the heavens and the earth. Nothing ever seems to be finished. Harmony and beauty, or simply order, do not seem to be worth even a shadow of concern. The general indifference makes a huge dustbin of the collective space. People drop anything they don't want here, there and everywhere, without remorse or complex and without making even the slightest superfluous movement. India Ma is a garbage dump. But these people can see beauty where others do not even have an inkling of finding it.
The air is unimaginably filled with levitating dust and the dioxin fumes of burning plastic bags and garbage. The acidic smell of spontaneous urinals pervades the alleyways. Sensory faculties are stimulated to their painful extreme. The food is like self-induced arson that no amount of water can extinguish. Meals are torture. each mouthful is a blazing inferno in which up to thirty-six types of chillies compete with flames roaring for fiery supremacy, imposing an exploration of the nuances of fire and burning upon the taste buds followed by the digestive tracts. At concerts, instruments and voices are amplified to the Larsen limit. "If God gave heaven to the Indians, twenty-four hours later it would be no different from hell," and Indian man once told me.