VIRTUALITY

Ashoka

There was a Traveller, and one day she found herself in India in a whirling bus, looking out on five thousand years of civilization.  There was Ashoka's pillar, the stone bulletin board of the great emperor whose name means "Sorrowless."  The fruit-sellers pushed hand-carts, as they had ever since there had been farmers and wheels.  The cows wandered everywhere in traffic, beloved by those who put food out for them, sometimes in the very street.  There was the Red Fort, built by Muslim emperors, the Mughals, its dusty spaces open to our wonder, while behind certain walls the Indian Army's force remained ready to defend or to keep order.  Best hope nothing stirred up this sea of people.  Out of the bus, then, to run the gauntlet of the vendors, their thin brown faces smiling handsomely under the dust, pushing the cards in her very face, not rudely, not really, as they cried from the pain in their eyes, "Mem Sahib, Mem Sahib, no one in my huge family has ever even seen an airplane ticket, and you are so rich to have come all this way, from England maybe, or America, with your big gold ring, to ride on this fine autobus. In air conditioning you ride, even though it's January, though I see that your weak eyes burn from the smoke of the dung fires we use to keep warm, maybe the AC is for that. So now you must buy some of these cards so I can go home to my family with a few rupees today; it took everything I had to buy them from the dealer, and if I don't make it back today we won't have enough to eat.  Please, it's your obligation to the less fortunate, that's how we all get along. 'Forgive me,' you say, Mem Sahib, and in Hindi—'Muaf kero'! Someone has taught you the polite words I must respect, for we still have good Indian values in this country, we are not rude, but I see they have also taught you to fear us, so many of us—they told you that if you buy from one, the rest will insist on the same treatment.  Chelo, okay then, I'll let you go with a smile as polite as your words.  It cannot be otherwise," all the while saying "Pos' card! Pos' card!" with their voices.

Inside the gates at last, more dust, but cool shadows.  Stiff-legged, she tried to keep up with the group, regretting she hadn't exercised more, remembering how cramped her feet would get if she did, preoccupied when the guide started to tell of long-ago armies.  The history would be in a book, she could read it later.  Keep up, keep up.

Leaving the fort, the bus crawled and lurched through a fish market while the Traveller pushed electronic buttons to record the wondrously varied faces of the sellers and buyers, the lifting of crates, the flourishing of the silvery wares, all weaving the dance of enterprise rehearsed on this spot for perhaps generations, as the faces on the currency changed, as trees grew and fell, as dry years and wet reeled by, and always people needed to eat.

More forts, ancient  cities, tombs, palaces, palaces decorated fabulously with mirrored glass in the emporer's special galleries and bedrooms, glass set like mosaic to make one candle into hundreds, a few candles into thousands, the rooms cooled by water flowing through the walls and by mats of grass hung behind His Majesty's seat and kept wet to be cooled by the breeze from the river.  And then the most fabulous palace of all, not a dwelling but a tomb, the Taj Mahal, luminous white marble inlaid, when she got close enough to see, with lapis lazuli and other stones set in the most beautiful arabesque flower patterns, the finest beauty of the place in its tiniest parts.  But no, stand back, the presence of the building itself—"building" such an ordinary word—almost organic in its presence, a thing to respond to as beauty itself, a goddess almost, or the beautiful Mumtaz Mahal still with us instead of lying beneath the stones, now joined by her husband, Shah Jehan--Shah Jehan, who could see his adored wife's fabulous tomb through a slit in the wall of the prison cell where his son Aurangzeb kept him during his last years.  The Traveller looked through the slit, the Taj scarcely visible through the dung-smog, and wondered what it was like for him to die in that small stone room, frustrated forever that his own matching black marble tomb on the opposite riverbank would not be built, not with the austere Aurangzeb in power.

More highways, more villages, more rest stops, more sights to see from the bus—the women making dung-cakes, patting them to dry on house walls to the perfect size and shape to fit and burn most efficiently in the heating stoves; the man with the small stringed instrument that he bowed in front of him like a cello, serenading their departure from a rest stop after she handed him ten rupees, the little metal balls fringing his bow keeping the rhythm; the gas stations, minus the canopy and often minus the building, where vendors crowded around the bus so the blowsy young wife could bargain for souvenirs and delay us all, after one stop remembering her son a bit late, so the bus had to turn around.  The Traveller grew tired of the other passengers, who slept whenever the bus moved, and stood in front of her when she caught up to the group.  Dodging back and forth to try and see, though, at one palace she was the first to notice the two men under a tree on the terrace below, slapping one another and then shouting, a public quarrel which no one but the tourists seemed to notice, except for the five hundred green parakeets which rose as one from the tree, a cloud of luminous feathers at eye level to the tourists. 

The passengers, the tourist group, had to be respected, though.  All from various countries, they had their own ways.  The Traveller very nearly laughed, though, when the Dutch woman said that she and her husband didn't get along at all, their customs being so different since "he is from the North and I am from the South."  Of The Netherlands.  But all perception is relative, and not everyone is from a country as vast as America or India.

Strange things were still to be seen: the male attendants in the rest rooms, the brilliant colors of the women's cotton clothing in dry Rajasthan, the dramatic snap of the oriental carpets as the salesmen unrolled them to show to the dizzied spectators, the painted elephants.  Oh, the painted elephants!  So exotic they were, with their pastel decorations, and so welcome, as four tourists were helped onto the back-to-back seats on each elephant to ride uphill sideways, sparing the Traveller either the agony of a climb up the hill to the Amber Fort outside Jaipur, or the anguish of saying she couldn't do it—no, not with the stiff legs, and the tiredness always pulling at her.  Maybe it was iron, not enough iron, got to get some pills.

On the final day, in Delhi, free at last of the guides and the forced shopping (though the tablecloths and laquer eggs would make nice gifts), the Traveller, on the way to a book store, saw from her sedate taxi a sight still as clear to her as you read this as if it had been seen in the preceding moment.  She had swept through a tiny portion of vast India, the Delhi-Agra-Jaipur triangle, in six days, and had seen layers of civilization after civilization still living in contradictory vigor in the present.  She had seen splendor and poverty almost in unity, as when she took pictures of the Haveli Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, with her video camera costing more than a year's income to most Indian families, being pawed the while, ankle to waist, by the gentle hands of people asking for something, anything, for they had nothing, or so they said (but the government requests that no one give them anything, on account of the vicious exploitation of the poorest of the poor by extortionist "beggar gangs").  "Forgive me, forgive me," did not relieve their state nor her responsibility.  The power of that realization leads many visitors to India to give away everything they've taken with them, but the Traveller had read about the situation, and thought about it, and knew that the problem wouldn't go away no matter what she gave, and that the poor would still be there after she went home and continued to serve her own homeless neighbors.  She was a tough one and a smart one, the Traveller, and kept her perspective.  She kept it until she saw that last picture, the picture she was too deeply moved to capture with her camera, the picture she would bring to mind to look at whenever she began to feel unfortunate.

It was a little girl, standing on a sidewalk in a prosperous part of the city, looking out from a bridge, looking at perhaps her home shanty-town crowded alongside the railroad tracks.  The girl was two or three years old, judging by her posture, though smaller than expected.  She had dark hair, matted and twisted off-center.  Her skin was visibly dirty, and her dress was some kind of rag.  The little girl stood and looked from where she had wandered or been placed, to beg or pick through garbage or for some other unimaginable purpose.  Lost?  No, she stood too calmly, nothing in her hands, nothing on her feet.  Apart from a few other taxicabs that Sunday morning, no one else was visible on the street. 

No one but a tiny girl, facing the day alone in India.  Remember her, o fortunate ones.

Taj Mahal

Red Fort

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The events in this story took place five years before the Traveller was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease.

Copyright 2001 by the writer sometimes known as Jaye

Winds

Green Rosering Parrakeet