Sometimes I felt like I want to be truly submerged in Mumbai. It’s wafty with spices deep and rich, the colors busy and bright and everywhere, the music foreign yet soulful. A wealth of humanity I yearned to physically interweave with as much as possible.
But the people have a way of physically placing themselves in the world I can’t pretend to imitate. One: on a busy streetside, in the gully of bicycles and ginger-footed strollers avoiding puddles, a barefoot man, perched on the seat of a parked motorbike, resting on his own shin. His leg is bent so far that is sole is facing upwards, his torso relaxed, his face unphased, a little spaced. All the effort of a gentle breeze.
This is a folding of the body that would normally – for me or other white men at least – signal the summoning of immense, stiff discipline. As though to use the body for support, and and to avoid barriers between the body and the world, is the sign of some kind of superhuman nobility and physical practice. Like just sitting there in the world taking up a little space can’t just be as natural and unencumbered, unpolluted by effort and planning, as a leaf, brown and crispy, drifting down from a familiar east coast tree on a boring November afternoon and alighting on a wide, open, concrete square delineating where people feel comfortable walking. But for me, it can’t.
Within my yearning to be one with the kind of unfolding metastitization of rich and personal expression that I felt Mumbai acting out, the irony – a fancy abstract word evoking interruptive record scratches – is this: there are stalagmites and tites or other long-formed, hard features that are if not a controlling interest are still probably the largest voting block in the board of directors of how I feel. Which determine what I have the courage to do in a day. When I was They kept me relieved -- very relieved -- to be in a tower, behind a gate, on the seventh floor. And kept me feeling bold and energetic and fully spent just from having gone out beyond those gates and through and around the inspiring noises and people in the busy river of motorized tricycles they call rickshaws, get lunch, and return. And generally confined my experience to the most carefully manicured peaks of experience, the air conditioning and bused tables, and shuttling between them. I know that I probably cannot go get a train, and get off somewhere else in India, and walk out and find somewhere to sleep without feeling scared, overwhelmed, or some kind of unease with the world. To know that, to submerge in what inspires me, for all kinds of totally understandable but sheepish reasons, is not what I really “want,” whatever want means.
So I hung in the pool on the tower roof, head just above the water’s reflection of the brownish, molted, expressionist urban landscape below, listening to the lyrical, lilting, mystical wailing floating up to me from the minarets.
And now my comfort demands that I make a point, like it demands clean sheets and my own bed in a private resting spaces. But maybe just this once, I can say no. These words can just take up a little space and nothing else, like a comfortable barefoot man.