India is all heaviness. It tastes like sweat and smells like struggle and feels raw and bony. Life here is unrestrained. It bubbles and seethes and jumps its banks and washes all over. And if you run from it, it will catch you and cover you with the weight of skin and blood and eye whites. But if you wade into the water with arms open, India changes. It tastes like a carnival and smells like colors and feels open and endless.
I'm in the backseat of an Uber and we're oozing down a thoroughfare that would be six lanes wide if lanes existed here. The traffic is alive with pealing horns and grinding gears. Cars and trucks and buses and motorcycles weave around each other, and for some reason I think of someone braiding hair. Then the traffic is coming apart like a zipper around a stark naked man standing in the middle of the highway, long gray hair and beard and bared teeth and wild eyes like a nude Moses parting a sea of glass and steel and exhaust. As we move around the naked man, I study the other drivers and passengers. Nobody pays him any attention. Apparently standing in the middle of the road without clothes is pretty normal. And I think how, wow, this is pretty weird.
There's a wall beside the sidewalk, and on the other side of the wall is a tangled forest. Banana peels litter the concrete, and monkeys sit atop the wall, munching the spoils they've won from passing motorists. And I'm running past the monkeys on the sidewalk, the only fool exercising at ten in the morning with the temperature edging over ninety and the humidity hovering in the eighties. Some of the monkeys saunter onto the sidewalk ahead of me and one strikes an aggressive pose as I approach. I slow down and stop and the monkey takes a step toward me, so I retreat, which seems to satisfy it. So I run back the other way up the road, weaving between the banana peels, having just been bullied by a monkey, and I think how, wow, this is pretty funny.
After missing a turn, my Uber driver executes a U-turn, drives back toward the intersection on the wrong side of the road, makes the turn against a red light across heedless oncoming traffic, and then gets pulled over by a cop, who calls him from the car and slaps him with a 500-rupee fine. My driver returns angry and tells me in Hindi, which I don't speak, that I need to pay him 500 rupees because he just got a ticket. I decline to do so, seeing as how I was not driving at the time of the infraction. He slams the door and returns to argue with the cop some more, so I go ahead and cancel the trip, exit the car, and decide to just walk.
I angle off the noisy main road into a vibrant, gritty neighborhood. Men are cooking things over open fires, young boys are rolling inflated bicycle tire tubes down the street, and women wearing clothes screaming with color are balancing plates piled with spices atop their heads. A young man is riding a bicycle jimmy rigged into a little pickup truck with a bed resting on twin wheels behind the rider's seat. He stops beside a small family crouched low together in the dust, and the smiling father lifts a girl, six or seven years old, I suppose, into the bed of the bicycle. The young man laughs and peddles down the street toward me, and the girl in the bed is laughing too, eyes wide, hot wind pushing her hair back away from her smooth face. Our eyes meet as she passes, and I smile, and so does she, and I think how, wow, everything is beautiful right now.