Moksha

With dawn comes the din and myriad smells of warm chapatti, fried kofta, fresh paneer, fouled latrines and scorched pavement over the sizzling hot griddles and electrically amplified voice of the muezzin while below the balcony of my hotel room an old Jain woman sundries disks of cow dung over the bleached rooftop of a guesthouse where a dozen rhesus monkeys loll about in the nascent heat.

With dawn comes the regular procession of the chanting Dalits ushering shrouded and flower-adorned dead men through the dirt alleyways leading to the funeral pyres of the ghats where piles of sandalwood priced by the log burn red hot in the cool morning breeze.

With dawn come scalding chai and the temptation to cradle away what the night has left behind with what the day has already brought into something of enduring power and lasting beauty.

And yet, better to let it all go and follow the flower girls through the maze of the old city and on to the bazaar stalls past the mumbling sadhus eyeing foreign women under the disapproving gaze of Brahma.

Fifty years from now you and I will be dead to the beating of this world I write the mother of my infant son half a world away.

Pushkar, India, April 2007