My first exposure to India was Suneeta, an eloquent fourteen-year-old high school sophomore who became my best friend. I admired her velvety voice, voluptuous curves she couldn't hide even back then, and skin of cinnamon, strangely immune to break-outs. Her home smelled of curry and strange spices and tumeric, and she told me that she worshipped innumerable gods. There was a god of learning and fireplaces, of nourishment and rain. She even told me the essence of Hinduism: man was part animal and part divinity; when we die, the divine essence that is us joins Nirvana (God), while the animal aspect perishes with the body.
Fast forward fifteen years and I was sojourning to India with my mother, a tour group, and dozens of enthusiastic Slumdog Millionaire fans. Seated beside me on the plane was Natasha, a Russian beauty in the Old World European style of Isabella Rossellini and Nastassia Kinski. She had eyes of Egyptian jade and she was so breathtaking that many mistook her for a supermodel. Refined as she was, she was the very antithesis to my first glimpse of India.
At first glance, the land of India was squalid. My luggage arrived covered with dust merely from riding along the baggage claim. We befriended another Vietnamese couple because our red suitcases were similarly soiled and we were brushing them off with identical expressions of disgust.
Aside from the highways, many roads were comprised of dirt and cows roamed as regal creatures from sacred lore. Men urinated freely in the streets and dirty, ragged children chased each other among piles of rubbish, their laughter conveying a far happier existence than a nation plagued with depression and anxiety. Women sauntered in the flamboyant hues of magenta and cobalt, saris that were brilliantly beaded, covered the squalor like curtains before a stage.
Then I saw small, dilapidated huts within a block of majestic mansions, and cow dung littering the sidewalk. India was a shock to my system, as I realized that the affluent passed the starving everyday without taking a second glance. The caste system teaches that the untouchables belonged in their pitiful situation, that they deserved their unceasing poverty and the brahmin were conditioned to ignore them, since they had no role in the alleviation of the suffering. This was all due to karma, the untouchables had committed evil in prior lives and were relegated to this doom, while the higher castes had elevated themselves through good and moral deeds.
There was no sense of social responsibility, except for the altruistic foreign organizations and folks like the Albanian Mother Theresa to help the poorest of the poor.
I thought this was a semblance of Hell, a world where the poor lament their fate as inevitable and the wealthy did not care. Perhaps this is closer to America than I realized.
No comments:
Post a Comment