Each day we four Ann(e)s hand over our lives to Mr. Datar Singh. And each day, our chauffeur and saviour, delivers us to our destination…alive and completely knackered from the sensory overload.
Years ago I read Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. I struggled and fought with his huge long sentences that never seemingly ended, lacking punctuation (do I recall that correctly?) or pauses or places to breathe between the assault of words and sentences filled with clanging ambulance horns, ringing bells, smells of smoky fires, incense, stumbling thoughts and ideas crashing and cracking and filling me with deep despair at ever getting air between the lush running waterfall of words that cascaded over my synaptic connections, mixed with the aromas that sizzled and burned with heady fragrances from frying ghee covered aloo gobhi intertwined with the heady cardomman perfume of chai sold from street stalls lined up next to motorcycles and pedi-cabs and cows, always those cows…
One day, in the midst of trying, yet again, to read the book in a usual-book fashion, I came up with a solution. I no longer tried to contain the story in manageable chunks. Instead I simply read the words and let them wash through me with no categorization or containment. And it worked.
But it was on my first trip to India when I truly understood the essence of my epiphany; because that sensory assault was, and is, India.
Like Rushdie’s writing, India floods my senses with a bombardment of colour, noise and near -misses between pigs, motorcycles bearing a family of four or festooned and bedecked trucks rumbling straight at us, each moving in a choreographed dance that allows everything, and every being, to move in some organic ballet whose intricate moves have long ago been lost to our Westernized minds.
Each day we step into our air-conditioned Toyota and Mr. Singh gets behind that wheel and sets in motion what should be impossible. Each day he navigates over roads with missing sections, non-existent shoulders, head-on traffic and sleeping cows. He swerves around motorcycles and seven hundred and thirty-two million overloaded trucks interspersed with uniformed school children, goats and random rocks. These conditions would have the average Canadian driver in tears.
Yet each day we arrive amazed and exhausted, and still alive, at the day’s hotel.
We are thankful every day to Madhu @ 10 Year Itch for organizing our trip and lovely hotels, but most of all we are drop-to-our-knees grateful for the fact that he sent us Datar.
Hi Colleen,
Thanks a lot for the kind words about 10YearItch TOURS. Appreciate it.
I shall forward this link on to Datar. He’ll be super happy with the compliments you all have been showering on him.
We are so glad that you and your friends had a great time in India !
Regards,
Madhu
Madhu, Let us THANK you for all your attention to detail and for placing us in the care of Datar. He was just so confident and careful. We always felt safe because of him. Cheers, Colleen
Travel can be like attending a large banquet: you think you will cheat yourself if you don’t eat too much. After all, it is all so good.
Perhaps, one gets more by doing and seeing less ~ giving oneself the gifts of time for reflection, rest, ease. This is when travel becomes part of one’s spiritual practice, because if you can travel in a manner that feeds your body and soul (as opposed to draining yourself with overeating and overstimulation), you can live more sanely in your everyday life.
You say that sensory assault IS India, but the Ashram is India too. Surely you still have choices, and you seem to be choosing to immerse yourselves as fully as you can into what you perceive to be “how it is” in India. Perhaps you are testing yourselves, seeing if you can not only endure it, but thrive in it.
I raise my glass to you four Ann(e)s, Super Travellers, crazy ladies, adventurers extraordinaire.
P.S. I had the same kind of epiphany reading Rudy Wiebe’s “Temptations of Big Bear” and Michael Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter” in a Canadian lit course I once took. Just letting go of having to “understand” and letting the words wash over me was the most rewarding way to approach these books.
Which is your point as far as how you are experiencing India right now. OK, Colleen ~ NOW I get it!
You’re right about it all Carol…we are enjoying our hotel havens as a respite from the stimulus assault 🙂 And we are SO privileged to have an a/c car when everyone around us is either on foot or stuffed in an overloaded bus. India is all of this chaos, all of this quiet, all of this horror and all of this beauty. I think every possible incarnation of the world is represented in this country.
Datar must be a wonderful person. Shuffling four lovely ladies about in a country far from the comforts and safety from which they call home. I’m imagining how different it must be from the Ashram with silence and peace, prepared meals and meditation. Having never been to India or anywhere quite as profound or historic, your descriptions have given me a clear vivid picture of what you are feeling, seeing and experiencing. Thank you for the glimpse into a world I have never physically been, but now feel as though I have.
You’re so right Karen. This is such a contrast to the ashram. Contrast isn’t a big enough word, but I don’t know a bigger, more encompassing word right now 🙂 It is necessary to go back to the oasis of our rooms, just to regroup and try to contain what we’ve seen. Every inch has something amazing going on. I don’t know how all these people do it with such apparent ease and grace.