Ducking into the bookshop for a quickie ‘midst household chores, it struck me that India would be the perfect place to go mad. Either because, in the Indian determination to flow, through, past and around all obstacles, your own confusion would go completely unnoticed amidst the efficient malaise of quietly moving humanoids, or the opposite: someone would notice your armload of books and bring you a basket. Depending on how you wobble your head and smile, of course.
Just fleetingly, flicking through a characteristically miscatalogued shelf of books, I did not feel unlike Billy Hayes in Midnight Express. Though I probably behaved more like the prisoner who believed the only way to buck the system was to take charge of it as professor-head of asylum bureaucracy, I had an enormous urge to revolt and bolt for it. Instead, I filled my big, beautiful, shiny blue plastic basket with hippie literature and offered a subliminal wave of support to the dudes who believe in democracy. (Kerouac, Didion, Jong, Zorba, Plath, Lee, I shall read you with the new eyes lent me by the Bangalorean passenger who told me as I landed in the city for the first time four months ago, “In order to see, you must look…”)
And another one of thanks for having the opportunity to start at the beginning and not take survival for granted.
People are strange when you’re a stranger.