The humming of the AC stopped again, and suddenly the silence of the room became the loudest sound in my head. The electricity had been cut off again. It's common here, in this underdeveloped part of the developing India. This time I didn't feel like being stuck in the room that is now dark until someone opened the door to let some sunlight in.
I stood up, grabbed my camera and left. The men inside, along with two women, just continued lounging in their extremely uncomfortable chairs. They were used to this, used to the constant interruptions. They couldn't even while their time away on the Internet now that the Internet is dead, temporarily.
Although the room remained cool, I didn't want to just sit there and watch the humans lose their energy while the little mice scurry around the corners, looking for dropped scraps of food. That was the most interesting to see when you had no Internet to do your work. The outside air felt like the oven when you open it to check on your cake. It was the height of the heat. But no matter, I preferred to be outside. I closed the door behind me gently, as a matter of courtesy as there was no one who would have been bothered by a slamming door. I took one more look at the enervated creatures lying or lounging almost lifelessly at the cheap desks.
There was a gate I had to open before releasing my body into the outside oven. Upon touching the cool metal of the gate I could feel the warm air penetrating through the crack between the two doors. It is not often in the developed world that you would walk into such incredible heat.
And there it was, the outside. I wrapped my head with my extra T-shirt and stepped outside. There was a divide in the middle of the road the separate the traffic of opposite directions, but often people here ignored the rules. The divide is more useful for the shades its trees provided. And in front of me was a cow sitting lazily under one of such trees and gnawing whatever regurgitated food she had ingested earlier today, which is probably nothing healthy considering that nearly all strayed cows and bulls just eat garbage found on the extremely dirty roads. Not far from her was the same man, probably homeless, that I had seen earlier this morning when I arrived. He was sitting against a tree this morning, but now he was lying there, motionless, and I wondered, for a moment, if he was dead. If he was, it wouldn't really make a lot of difference.
I walked slowly along the road, trying to be in the shades whenever possible, but it wasn't always possible. The sun was merciless, and the clouds you wonder where they had taken their long vacation. The rumors of an early monsoon still haven't materialized, and only in hindsight did we realize that actually the monsoon would come very late. I continued walking, slowly, to save my energy, and to drink as often as I could. I saw a few people walking by, and even a rickshaw with a man who were too tired from the heat to notice me. Normally he would approach me to try for some business.
Even under the T-shirt on my head I started feeling the heat. My normally non-sweaty face started to collect little beads, first on the nose, then everywhere else. The brain started to feel the heat too, as if my skull were some slow-cooking oven. I, too, stopped noticing my environment. The rays of the sun was so strong that everything seemed like a big white blur, like a photograph that was overexposed. Few details and colors remained to my eyes that felt like sweating too.
I finally came to a shady place under the awning of an old house. I doubt anyone was coming out or going in at this hour. Shops were either closed or the people inside enjoying a siesta. Most people here didn't have air conditioning. In fact, the only reason the office I was in had it on was to please the foreigner. They wouldn't turn it on if I wasn't there.
I sat down on the cool slab of stone in front of the door, and finally could inspect my surroundings. In front of me was a T-intersection. The road that intersects the one I'd been walking on and deadends with the house I am sitting in front of was not really a road. I had to look more carefully to realize that it was just a wide alley between the walls of the two surrounding buildings. But there was a lot happening there. Much of the entrance to this alley had a barricade of garbage, not intentionally to barricade the interior, but just that garbage was left there by everyone. On the barricade, which extended quite far into the interior, were someone's goats. A lot of villagers come to the city, forming the majority of the poor people here, and for those who couldn't establish somewhere more stable, they just lived in a place like this alley. And with them they brought along their livestock as well as their families. I could see that behind the barricade of garbage was a long row of tent-houses. They weren't houses, that's for sure, and they weren't really even tents if you think of tents as fun things to set up during a camping trip. They were, as I had seen often in this country, just sticks propping up whatever they could find to fend off the elements: tarp, plastic bags, slabs of cardboard, whatever you can find that was light but water proof. And they were held together by bricks they had found or stolen from the myriads of construction sites that formed part of this developing country.
I didn't see the shepherd.
I did, however, see two little boys. They, like many children here, were wearing tattered clothes. Actually, they were wearing tattered shorts. There was no money for a shirt. They were surrounding a rusty cart that was probably in such bad shape that not even the normally crafty and creative Indian person could make use of. But the children were having a blast. They were giggling and jumping up and down in excitement in this tormenting and potentially lethal heat. Their pathetically gaunt bodies were like the sticks that propped up their houses, and yet these sticks were having a blast around this cart. The slightly older one, judging from his bigger size, held up the little one and put him on the rusty cart, and after that the little one got even more excited and jumped up and down in the blazing sun. The older one then, with all his might, started pushing the cart. It resisted a little then started moving, at which point the little one started screaming in excitement. Their joy was the only sound at that moment when there even the wind was taking a siesta.
Surrounded by mountains of garbage and sorrow, these slum boys were having a blast. They would later devise other ways to have fun in this treacherous alley where water was surely, like all slums of any size, stolen from some unreliable source. I thought about that as I had my last sip of the bottled water and decided that, treating this road like a desert in some wild section of the US, I should turn around and head back where there might be electricity and the comfort of the AC again.
