I was reading a friend’s blog the other day. He’s spent the
last year and a half or so travelling throughout Asia. He’s currently in India and has been writing
a lot about the intensity of India. I find these posts somehow reassuring and
comforting. I went to India four years ago. It’s been a while. Yet, my time in
India is still impacting and influencing me. I still spend a lot of time trying
to sort out my experiences in India and what they mean about me and about
humanity as a whole. My time there was a bit of a whirlwind. It’s a massive
country and far too complex for anyone to put into words. I had good
experiences. I had bad experiences. I had frightening experiences. And I had
serene experiences filled with great peace.
This is one of my stories from India, a story a few people
know but many don’t. A story that will only show one small part of India, but a
part that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get out of my mind.
There’s not really a lot to say about this moment. It
happened so fast. She was there, then she was gone. My friend and I took the
same route everyday after our internship back to our apartments. We passed the
same people who made their homes on the street everyday. Babies were born on
the streets, and the old died on the streets. People made their beds, their
bathrooms, their kitchens on the street and others walked over them, and around
them, and sometimes, it seemed, through them.
I know that there are people without homes in the U.S. and
just about every other country in the world. I have seen poverty before. I have
seen kids living their lives underneath bridges and billboards. It’s different
in India though. There are just so many people on the streets. It’s
overwhelming. You don’t know how to help. You don’t want to invade their family
spaces, but you also need to walk down the street. You don’t want to feel pity
cause pity is one of the worst things you could feel for another human being,
but sometimes you know that that one child or that one mother caught a brief glance
of pity from your face. You don’t want to be overcome by great sorrow, you want
to talk about your day and laugh together as you walk, but sometimes it’s too
much.
We walked the same route everyday. One day as we were
approaching a home furnishing store we saw a giant dump truck blocking the
road. We watched a few police officers get out of the truck, walk over to a
homeless lady, prod her a bit, then scoop her up with a shovel, dump her in the
back of the truck, and drive away. Just
like that she was gone. Her tattered blankets remained on the sidewalk, under
the awning of the home furnishings store. Shoppers went in and out as if
nothing had just happened.
A lady invisible to the world had died without anyone to
mourn for the life she has left or to celebrate the life she will go next,
without anyone to give her a proper funeral, without anyone to cry her name,
without anyone to take the time to check her pulse or hold her hand. She was
there and then she was gone. Dumped in the back of a truck that was going to
pick up other people who had become one with the streets—people who lived their
entire lives, from birth to death, through monsoons and droughts, on the other
side of the glass.
