Awake

It's simply complicated

I'm sitting at a desk that I've pulled into the middle of my hotel room. I'm surrounded by a pile of punjabis on one of the twin beds, various papers, maps, receipts, empty water bottles, and granola bar wrappers, battery chargers, cameras, blank tapes, filled tapes, memory sticks and a few favorite CDs. Outside my 5th floor window, I see a still and motionless landscape -- the tops of buildings and apartments and clothes draped from the window sills. But my ears hear a different story. I hear non-DEQ approved combustion engines, the crescendo and decrescendo of engines as they aggressively weave and manuever down the street. I hear three distinct sounds of horns. The double-beep ("Look out"). The single beep ("OK"). And the rapid succession of beeps that I take to mean, "Move now or die!" I hear dogs barking, a man wailing, and in a couple of hours, I'll hear the Muslim call to worship over the loud speaker.

The juxtaposition of stillness and chaos, of melody and cacophony, of peace and imminent danger precisely and abstractly describes my experience here in Ahmedabad. This is the town where Ghandi lived -- a man of peace and revolution. And this is the state of Gujarat -- a place of change and turmoil. And it is here that I find myself in the dead of winter wearing a rose-colored tailored punjabi with embroidered flowers ready to embark upon the chaos of the streets to find a McDonalds with the young people in our group.

It is indeed a strange existence.