I remember the feeling, so familiar, of being at an unfamiliar place at night. Everything had the same color but everything looked different from one second to the next. I remember also the smell, which also changed too from one place to another. By the time we reached the hotel my brain was already flooded with too much information to sleep with.
There was a cow, however. Or a bull. It didn't matter. It was suddenly like in a safari.
That was fifteen minutes before. Now I was sitting, dazed, in an air-conditioned room, away from the heat that I had to be in for the past thirty minutes. The heat. It was after the dusk, and it was still stiflingly miserable outside. I was inside a motorized rickshaw, and "auto", as they called it there. The madman that was our driver whizzed through the night time traffic that no New Yorker on the busy Cross Bronx Expressway would dare to do, however much they were in a hurry. The speed of the auto generated, obviously, a lot of wind for me, but it was hot wind. And with the myriads of smell and stink in the wind, I felt like I was swimming in the madness of a thick soup.
We were going too fast for me to hear any particular sound, so the sound became a soup too, like the smell and the images. The motion was a soup, as we oscillated erratically between sudden speedups and near crashing stops. Still, none of this was particularly new. I've been to many countries with these kinds of soupy experience. Even at night, sometimes it was raining; here, there was no rain, and there would not be any rain for a long time.
But then, there was a cow, or a bull. What was it? I didn't bother to check. I've seen cows before, in different countries, but never in a city. I screamed loud enough for the auto driver to hear and stop, almost throwing me out of the rickshaw. He thought something was wrong, and his Hindi was too fast for me to understand. But I didn't really want to understand and he didn't need an explanation when he saw me come out of his auto, pointing at the cow we had passed. He laughed, and signaled that I should get back in so he could reverse. He was amused. He was a young man whose name I can't recall now. He was probably from some nearby village driven here by equal measures of economic desperation and greed. He didn't own the auto, of course, but he made more money than lots of other people from the village. He was tired, undoubtedly from the day's work, but he was amused and saw this interaction between the foreigner and the cow as a nice, light diversion for his day's work before retiring to some cheap moonshine that would accompany, obviously, his story of a foreigner and a cow.
The cow. Let's suppose it was a cow. Most creatures were cows, few bulls, for some reason. She stood there, next to a huge pile of garbage mixed with dug up sewage. It was in front of a building with two restaurants. I was told that they were Muslim restaurants. I was told that we were in the Muslim district. The locals instantly got interested at the incident of a stopped auto with a foreigner, one of the few, if any, in the city now, probably the only one in this Muslim neighborhood. The spectacle was too irresistible. Within minutes there was crowd of people chatting and watching the cow whisperer.
Not really. I couldn't get close to the creature. The stench of the garbage and the dug out sewage in this stifling day with no wind was too overpowering for me. I have never stood in front of not only a cow in a city but such repulsive display of human jettison. I was warned that there were cows everywhere, that there was dug out sewage (eventually to be burned) scattered everywhere just like garbage was. This wasn't a city, I had been told before arriving, but just a huge village where thousand-year old infrastructures were still in place for a modern country with laptops and wireless Internet connections everywhere. I had to see it to believe it; I couldn't accept it.
Here I was, standing in front of a cow, which was not in anyway bothered by my staring or the ring of crowd of human creatures whose center she shared with the starer. She masticated the edible parts of the garbage quickly but effortlessly. Her left horn was chipped. There was a dark trail of something dry running down her right eye, which was red. Her skin was full of bruises. It was sinful to harm a cow, let alone kill it, but people did this frequently, especially when a cow attempted to steal vegetables. Eating garbage could only get you so far in your natural desire to be healthy.
I stood about two meters away, listening to the cow, listening to the chatter around me. But I was also noticing the different smells. It wasn't only the stink of the sewage waiting to be burned or the garbage waiting to be picked through by the beast in front of me. It was food. I smelled grease, hot grease somewhere; I smelled sweets; I smelled meat, and being in a Muslim area there was beef, no doubt; I smelled life, people living, people laughing, people thinking, people worrying. The smell of humanity, good and bad, comprised a complicated array of emotions and behaviors. I took a look at the people around me and the cow. Most of them shied away with an embarrassed smile when my eyes met theirs. They were, if I can remember correctly, all men. No women were there, or if they were, they were probably wearing all black, covering from head to toe (but not the face), and in the darkness that would be easy to miss. Some faces stood defiant, unwilling to shy away from the ridiculous foreigner who wanted to flaunt his stupidity by watching a cow. Maybe he started to resemble the cow, standing so still, hardly even moving his head. I was for them as much of an attraction as the cow was for me.
I turned and the people's gazes, I could feel, followed me back to the auto. The auto driver, being quite proud to be the conveyor of this night time entertainment for these fellow citizens of his that he probably did embrace too much as a Hindu, waved the people off and screamed some quick Hindi at them before squeezing himself into this little seat. The sound of the motor burst out again as the chattering of the dispersing circle of people started to thin out. I thought a little more of the cow that moment. And I thought a little more again in the air conditioned room when I was looking out the window, staring at the old, dilapidated palaces from the old Muslim empire that set its capital here. I thought about the invariance of time I saw in that cow. It was marked by the brutal events of time in which she had been alive so far, but her eyes, her nonchalance, her total lack of curiosity in me, a novelty to everyone else, made me think about a clock that had stopped. And a sudden chill of sadness overwhelmed me, and that chill would stay with me in the remainder of my stay in this city still trapped in some time hole, moving neither forward nor could it regress any further.
