Outside the office it's like reading a book of a civilization of the past. And we aren't even talking about the office itself. You open the door and you walk out into the stifling heat. Pass the iron gates of the Om symbol and the Swastika you find a road leading ultimately to the street market that is bustling even in this dreadful heat. And in front of you already is usually something interesting, either this man, probably homeless, whose fixed gaze in the horizon sometimes make you wonder if he is still alive. What is he looking at? What is he thinking about? If he's not there, or even if he is there, there's usually a cow or a bull resting in the shade. The road is more like a boulevard where the lanes of opposing directions are separated by an elevated garden with trees. So you turn right and start walking towards the market at the end. On a certain day, I can't remember which, you will smell before you find the burning of garbage. It's not just garbage that people just dump on the street (forget about garbage bins or even a heap of garbage at the corners), but also the sewage dug out of the open sewage troth along each side of the road. So on another day you would find young men of the lowest caste in these troth digging out the black stuff that's been fermenting in the heat and clogging up the flow of the city's detritus. The burning of the refuge creates a nasty stink that doesn't seem to bother anyone except you. But the locals do turn their heads, to you, that is. You're a novelty, especially if you're carrying a camera. The children would come up to you and ask to be taken a picture of them, and don't be surprised that the second day they will find you and ask for copies of the pictures. For them talking to you in the blazing sun is no problem while you try covering your head with the pathetic shades made by your hand. Carrying on you notice more children, but they aren't so interested in talking to you. Their clothes are full of holes and often yellowed with age. They are usually walking with something in their hands; they are doing work. And you find them getting off the road at this corner of a walled area. Outside this walled area is a lane that connects this part of the road to the next road parallel to it. This little lane is a slum full of tents, garbage, dogs (usually sleeping now in the heat), more cows, and maybe some livestock like chickens. If you look more carefully you will see people working. They are too tired to let your stare bother them. And it's too hot to make any fuss over it. You sit there and you wonder about a lot of things regarding humanity. You sit there and your are shocked to the core about what human beings can endure and what sort of society would subject them to something so unbearable. And the children. So gaunt, so devoid of smiles now. It's not that hard to wipe away the joy inherent in children. Just now you were chatting with curious children admiring your camera, and now a different set of children whose only crime is having been born to slum-dwellers.
And you feel eventually uncomfortable staring at the misery that attracts your heart, so you go on. A block down you find in the middle divider again more cows. But these cows are healthy. They aren't just skeletons with a thin canvass of skin wrapping tightly around it. They aren't full of strange sores and infections, and the one bull's testicles aren't inflamed to the size of his head. These are healthy, albeit still quite emaciated, creatures that belong to someone. Here in the middle of the divider is a little pen owned by a villager lucky enough to bring his cows down to the city while he looks for more profitable city jobs like driving a rickshaw. The houses, by the way, that line this street are beautiful, newly built houses. The people that you just saw in the makeshift slum likely work for these middle class nouveaux riches. You usually see some pudgy middle-age woman peeking out of her cage to take a look at you, the stranger walking down the street, the stranger who obviously isn't from the city, not even the country. If you look at them, they will look annoyed and disappear.
Set among the nice houses are little shops, the equivalent of convenience stores here in the US, except that they are about a tenth the size. Usually some little kid works inside who might not know how to read Hindi or any language but certainly can do arithmetic faster than you. And if this little, cramped space called a store is too luxurious for you, along this road are also plenty of these stalls where a man is found sitting on the platform in the stall whose width wouldn't allow him to lie across on his back. It's little wonder that yoga is from India where people have little space when the population is so large. In these stalls usually you will find cigarettes and the infamous paan in little shiny packages. Paan is what causes the average Indian man to spit constantly and staining the country red.
Towards the end of the road is the first enclosed market. Unlike the market at the end o the road, which is a street market, this one is enclosed and has roofs over the stalls. It closes at 3PM, as opposed to the street market, which really gets crazy only after 6PM. Here you will find lots of vegetables of different varieties, and you wonder why you have such limited selection in restaurants. But the first thing you will find is probably someone trying to sell you something and/or practice their English. Despite having been subjugated by the very people whose ancestors created the English language, most Indians, being abjectly poor, don't speak much English.
After leaving the little enclosed market, perhaps with some new sort of vegetable to try out tonight, or just a piece of the watermelon, or even better, mangoes, you are done with this road. And you turn your head to see where you've been and you wonder what sort of journey the whole country must be like if this little segment in a city so dirty and ordinary that it hardly registers on any travel book, you wonder what sort of journey one can experience in the whole of India.
