playing dirty

Our bodies are made to keep toxins out.  But still I can feel the dirt seeping into my pores, coating my nose and my lungs.  I can feel this heavy, ominous fog closing down on me, swirling into my head and making it ache.  I spend all day veiling my nose and mouth to keep the dust out, squinting into the gray air to try and glimpse the sun, and suddenly at night when I can't even see the tracks outside the train window, I feel intensely claustrophobic.

I am coated in the dust of many cities, mud in cloud form, heavy fog mixed with smog and dust from a dry winter.  Delhi is as busy as ever.  The city is scattered with huge signs saying "Delhi 2010" -- India is hosting the 2010 summer Commonwealth Games, which as far as I can tell is basically the regional Asian Olympics.  The people have amassed at this call to make a global impression: every hotel in Pahar Ganj is doing construction, improving their facilities.  The city suddenly surges forth to build an infrastructure from the ground up, building gutters, a metro system whose construction causes epic traffic congestion, and suddenly enforcing traffic, hospitality and cleanliness regulations.  To see an infamously dirty and disorganized city push so singlemindedly, all at once, to install the kind of infrastructure needed to host Asia, is simultaneously awesome and appalling.

Meanwhile, we sit in hordes of autorickshaws at an intersection and I am stunned by a young boy crossing the street in front of us, one hand raised in a feeble gesture: stop.  Please wait.  I once read that Indian traffic is regulated not by the government but by the simple law that bigger vehicles have the right of way over smaller ones.  Pedestrians in India understand that they are at the bottom of the traffic food chain, above only dogs.  This small gesture, backed by an uncommon faith in drivers and fellow human beings, moves me by its sheer impossibility.

I spent the first day in Delhi walking in and out of bookstores.  "The History of WHAT?" the booksellers say as I mumble the last word.  "Anarchism?"  Hardly daring to let it leave my lips.  A strange mix of reactions passes across their faces as they dismiss me before even saying, "No, we don't have that."  Heathen book, they neglect to add.  In an up-and-coming capitalist titan born from the clash between Moguls and the British Raj, "anarchism" is a dirty word.

Here the dirt comes in layers.  On the very inside, buried so deep it's supposed to be invisible, lies the remnants of the caste system, which still somehow dictates the way people treat each other and even the way we look at each other.  There is corruption of officials, confusion between different value systems: the ancient codes of community, the codes of hierarchy, the foreign hierarchies imposed over that, and Gandhi and the others' fight for freedom from it all, fight for the reign of humanity.  "Indian people don't use the dustbin," says a man in the train station, laughing as we walk our trash across the platform -- explaining the landfills lining the street.  There is the dirt from the air, and spread over it all a layer of Ponds fairness creme.  The obsession with paleness, whiteness, false perfection...  I can feel all these layers covered up in myself and it makes me feel both pervasively, inescapably dirty and free to act clean, since I am washed and pure on the outside.

We drive past a park scattered with groups of homeless, derelict bicycles and blanket-covered mounds that are hopefully merely sleeping bodies, and a business meeting of men in suits and ties, sitting on the grass, laughing.  I have hope that all these changes on the outside are a sign of impending change from within.  But even if they are not, somehow, it is beautiful.  I fill my lungs with a mix of dust and starving oxygen, take a deep breath, exhale warmth to ward off the fog, and squint out the window to watch at least the power lines pass in front of a yellow-grey midnight sky.