Today I whispered my English poetry notes to myself as I walked down Bhandarkar road. The heat was so intense that I wet my scarf before I left the house and draped it over my head. I had been pacing the length of my room, which in this heat can be quite taxing, but it is the only way to memorize the form of a pastoral elegy and not day-dream about the coming trip to Rajasthan or the peanut brittle Raja gave me for my birthday. I also have a few bones to pick with this course, so conservatively confined to English with a capital E, beginning with Wyatt and ending with Robert Frost. The only allusion to India, that I can find in 'Leena Mam's (who people dread, teasing me by calling her my 'namesake') selections, are the jewels on Belinda's dressing table in The Rape of the Lock. To make matters worse, she has chosen to teach an entire unit on metrics, which seems absurd and unfair to my Indian classmates. We couldn't help but laugh when she asked everyone to emphasize the stresses in the poem. Stresses scattered everywhere in the most lovely and musical way. Her voice rose in desperation over the cacophonous chorus, but to no avail. Everywhere in India rules bend and meld, which, despite the failure of metrics, leaves us in a pretty poetic predicament.
The fruit stands here are all piled high with soft orange mangoes that have to be eaten over the sink. Near the end of my road the stand is especially heavily laden and today I picked the ripest, most delicious looking one I could find, 'for today eating.' The fruit-sellers at this stand always make me feel so happy. As soon as I arrive, the youngest finds a fig and splits it in two, 'half for me, half for you' he says and smiles. I always buy four bananas because I like to say 'char' and get glimpse of what it might be like to know the language. Today the middle brother asked if I needed hot chili peppers and I shook my head. "Too hot, no?" he laughed. I held my palms up to my face to cool it and nodded. I will buy them when the rains start.
Weather aside, I don't know if I will ever again be able make my pre-exam days this enjoyable. When I get back to Kingston, I will have to be inventive. Last week, I spent for days at Palolem Beach in Goa, reading The Myth of Sisyphus to the sound of the crashing waves. The location made Camus' painful consciousness much more bearable. I realize that the book isn't a great vacation choice, but it had to be read for a course here and I can't complain when I am able to break it up with an evening kayak around a small island and a swim down the half-moon shore.
All of my study breaks have been pretty incredible (in the unbelievable sense of the word as well). The other day, Mikael and I went to a park across the river from our side of town that wraps around a temple. It was crowded with families of picnickers, young couples, and people selling snacks. It was nice to lie in the grass and look up at the sky. Outside, the gate there was a small fair, a few rides, some ponies, and lots of cotton candy. On a whim we decided to see the Rambo Circus and drove to a huge nearly empty tent, where for a few rupees we could watch a two hour show. Trapeze artists, trained dogs, bendy girls, a man who could drink barrels of coloured water and spew it back up again in separate streams, a clown dwarf, a 'wheel-of-death,' and a sad elephant holding a much-too-heavy lady. All the elements of a circus, just as strange and surreal as ever...no more-so, definitely more-so.
| Mikael wrote much more about the wonders of the 'biggest circus in India'... http://www.brudfors.se/2013/04/rambo-circus.html |
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