When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers.
A wisdom that is always present when the answer to one' s prayers comes to an end. When one realizes that everything beautiful, exciting, interesting is inevitably heading towards the end.
That's how I feel today, this morning, which like every day awakens first grey, then white, then blue. [This reminds me of a great book by Margriet de Moor "First gray, then white, then blue"]
Strange that stories are the most reliable friends of memory. Sometimes they turn up unexpectedly, mostly only in fragments, stories that someone has made up and yet are part of one's identity. As if they'd been borrowed.
Places like Macondo in the Colombian jungle, Gondor and Lothlorien in Middle-earth, Dune, Walanders Ystad. Or people like José Arcadio Buendia. George Smiley. Gandalf and Frodo. Tyrion Lannister ...
They belong to me like the places of my childhood. My family. My children. My friends …
Somehow reassuring at this strange time. No one's really alone. Really? I don't know …
The 1000 watt child
For the last leg, from Jaipur to Delhi, I take the train (who knows at what place on earth the bus might drop me; after the debacle from Manali to Delhi I have become careful).
7.55 is written on my ticket, and the train departs at 07.55 to the second. The armchair by the window is very comfortable, the view perfect, the weather as nice as it is supposed to be.
However, I had a bad night's sleep, my eyes close after about half an hour, and I am already about to glide away into beautiful dream landscapes, when I am startled by a wild howling.
An Indian family has turned up at the last station, parents, two children, the younger one, a girl, maybe 2 years old, the boy about ten. At this point I do not know yet that the child will be screaming at a deafening volume for the six hours to Delhi. But it does not disturb anyone, at least not Indians.
This time the music helps, especially the loud, noisy, and only very rarely can the 1000-watt child Metallica or Guns 'n' Roses drown out. Thank you Axel, thank you James Hetfield ...This time, the music helps, especially the loud, noisy one, and only very rarely does the XNUMX-Watt kid drown out Metallica or Guns 'n' Roses. Thanks Axel, thanks James Hetfield ...
Bye bye Rajasthan
And so Rajastan glides past the window, sometimes at walking pace, sometimes at a terrifying speed of almost 80 km / h.
The landscape slowly becomes greener, the semi-desert remains, but you can still see women working in the fields. Here in Rajastan they wear mostly coloured, mainly red or orange and very rarely green or yellow silk robes, flowing down their bodies like fine webs.
A breath of a veil covers their heads, sometimes drawn over their faces, sometimes not, and then, when you catch a glimpse out of their dark eyes, the world stands still for a moment. Indian women are not only beautiful (if they are not emaciated and exhausted by the hard life), they seem to radiate something that cannot be understood at first sight.
The closer you get to the capital, the poorer the villages seem to me.
The rubbish dumps now extend into the streets and alleys, dirty green ponds full of rubbish and covered with a layer of all kinds of foul plants are lying right in front of the houses.
These are the best prerequisites for ensuring rapid and reliable development of all possible pathogens. Children play in the immediate vicinity, picking up every imaginable disease.
These are the things that I will never understand.
Delhi starts somewhere
Probably nobody knows exactly where Delhi begins. Is it where in the middle of no-man's-land, huge blocks of flats standing or in the process of being built? Some are obviously finished, but there is no one there, not a living soul.
Shapeless ugly buildings stretch for miles and miles, built for a growing population?
But who will live here?
Those who can afford it will never move here, and those who cannot afford it will even prefer their shack in the middle of a slum.
Slums
And yet you know exactly when you are in Delhi.
It' s when the first slums appear along the railway line.
How do you describe them? They are huts built close together (or can they even be called huts? Is there an architectural expression for them?), without spaces in between, sometimes with raw bricks or what was just there, makeshiftly fastened, sometimes with a roof, sometimes without, sometimes just covered with a sheet, and everywhere, in front of, on and next to the houses, children, many, many children.
The ugly face
That is also India.
Not the India of the tourists, not the IT India, not Bangalore or the other hotspots of the country's successful IT industry.
This is the ugly face of the country.
Bangalore is hope, this is hopelessness.
Two thirds of the people in India live in poverty: 68,8 % of the Indian population has to get by on less than two US dollars a day. Over 30 % even have less than 1,25 US dollars per day at their disposal - they are considered extremely poor. This makes the Indian subcontinent one of the poorest countries in the world. Women and children, the weakest members of Indian society, suffer most from poverty in India.
And so you drive past, as angry as you are helpless.
Then questions arise that cannot be answered ...
Eventually a storm will be rising.
P.S. Matching Song: Little Axe - Storm is rising
And here the journey continues ... with the last day in Delhi
