A Stroll

Waiting for the bus, I stuck a finger in my nose and removed a crusty flake of blackened snot. I examined it as best I could in the dark. The usual suspects, probably. Diesel fumes, suffocating plumes of dirt, and tire grime. It’s a reasonable price to pay to escape the white walled box that is now both my bedroom and office. Which is exactly what I had done. I’d taken a walk, ten minutes down to the main road, my nose hairs incidentally accumulating the aforementioned pleasantries along the way. Now I was waiting.

I’d chosen a trip to the grocery store as my social release for the evening. My excuse was toilet paper, which is in fact hard to find, but more pressingly I needed to be lost in a crowd, though that too is an admittedly difficult task when you stand out from the crowd like a marshmallow from a s’more. Cars and trucks kicked the dirt up off the road. The singsong horns from the Tata trucks and the belching basses from the buses stung my ears and rattled my chest.

I used to take the bus religiously in New York. I remember standing on the corner of 86th street watching the digital display of the double-bodied the M15 snake its way south through yellow cabs and deliveries, gliding gracefully towards the curb, coming to an effortless and dramatic pause. Perfect. The hydraulics would hiss and sigh and the bus would kneel down to scoop up the men and women who minutes before were looking at their watches, cursing. The front door would open, and depending on the time of year, a cool gust or a warm radiance would tumble out onto the street. I’d have my card already in my hand, feed it into the machine, grab it back, and maneuver to the back of the bus to stand or sometimes sit. With a deep inhalation, the bus would stand back up and barrel off down the avenue.

Indian buses don’t always stop. Not completely. In the chance that one does, it’s brief, and probably because of traffic ahead. I hadn’t ridden the bus alone before, and when I asked at the office, ‘which one goes to Modern Market?’ the answer was ‘all of them’.

A hulking red bus, rusted and tired, slouched towards the side of the road and slowed to a near halt. Men jumped from the back door, running as their feet hit the dirt. Women carefully exited from the front, as the bus was now caught in traffic. The thing was comically full, and I could have sworn I saw torsos sticking out the windows. Two petite men with briefcases leaned from out the back door, leaving just enough room for me to slide onto the first step, bump into another man who was trying to exit, and climb up into the body of the bus. Alas.

Two rupees, ten minutes, one soft elbow to the eye socket, and an accidental backhand slap-to-the-jaw later, I jumped out the back of the bus, dodged an oncoming rickshaw, and snuck off to the side of the road onto what one might call a ‘sidewalk.’ I brushed my hands down the front of my shirt, turned around, and there I was, standing smack in front of the market.

Some 25 minutes later, at 6:45 pm, I was finished. I was in no rush to get home. I looked across the road to a densely crowded part of the street that could have been a bus stand, or just India, and thought to take a walk and look for a fresh ground Café Coffee Day bean wholesaler I remembered spotting once from the window of the car.

I got to walking and felt a strange sense of familiarity – a bag of groceries in my hand, no car, going on an errand. Walking. Jesus, I thought, I do this everywhere else I live – why had it taken me two months, a daylong bout of self-pitying semi-depression, and a rather spontaneous decision to chase after coffee, to get me walking and exploring?

The thought came to mind that perhaps I’ve simply been intimidated. I talk a big game about my isolation, the confinement of living and working in the same building (the same room! Short commute, at least…), the lack of any appreciable resources in my part of town. But what a crock of shit! In two months, I’d walked ten minutes in either direction, declared ‘there’s nothing here,’ and settled then for rickshaw explorations into other parts of town. I felt a bit ashamed of myself, because instantly, when I started walking, I felt a sort of perky awareness, a fascination with the city of fire.

I found the coffee bean wholesaler. Heaven! I asked the man – who didn’t understand my words but surely felt my excitement – if I could smell the beans. He brought me a handful, and I ordered half a Kg, which I naively thought was, well, not as much as it turned out to be. I left instead with ¼ Kg, which is, I don’t know, maybe a pound of fresh ground coffee, and continued on my way.

I passed another coffee bean wholesaler on my left, then another on my right! Where had these been? Where had I been? I started to feel the pulse of the street. Only unwritten social rules separate the pedestrian ‘sidewalks’ from the chaotic hustle of overstuffed automobiles. As I walked, I stayed what you could call a ‘safe’ distance from traffic, depending on your definition of safe.

I looked all around me all at once. There were food wallas selling deep-fried green chilies. I saw numerous advertisements for whiskey, and clusters of chitchatting students from local colleges. Stores were selling textbooks about Hydraulics. There was a beautiful artisan shop with slick wicker porch chairs suspended from trees in the night, and a dusty, yellow-lit workshop, rustic looking, where men were carving details into wood furniture. John Kenneth Galbraith called India a ‘functioning anarchy.’

Back a bit from the road, a woman – wasted thin – held an infant in her arms as she squatted by a small fire, stirring something in a steel pot. Cars, buses, people passed by without noticing, just as I had many times before. I kept walking. I saw a sign for a gym. The words were written in cursive over the image of a white man’s cartoonishly large back muscles. ‘Flat 104,’ the sign said. Hours for men were posted on the left side. Hours for women were on the right. I glanced quickly, but not long enough to tell how much the hours overlapped. I went so far as walking up the stairs – more out of curiosity than an actual desire to join – but couldn’t find the entrance to Flat 104. I turned back, still looking up at the second-floor sign, when suddenly, for no good reason, my eyes returned to the road in front of me. There I was, two short steps short of falling four feet into an open street-side gutter of sulfuric-smelling sewage.

I continued on, with gusts of air from the wake of passing buses and rickshaws and motorcycles pressing against the back of my long-sleeved shirt. A hand tapped me on the shoulder, and a teenage boy with a tucked-in polo and a backpack approached my right side, the traffic side, and started speaking fast in Telegu. When he saw that I wasn’t catching any of it, he switched to broken English. This went on. We kept walking.

We parted, and I stopped to recharge my phone (add more pre-paid minutes). This is done by walking into any store with your carrier’s name out front (they’re all over the place, often in the most unsuspecting spots), telling an employee your number and how many minutes you want (or, rather, choosing from the confusing options they offer), forking over the necessary cash, double checking that he wrote the right number, and waiting a matter of seconds for a text to arrive on your phone saying RE-CHARGE SUCCESSFUL. I was double-checking my number when I heard the sharp crack of a bicycle being thrown to the pavement. I looked up quick to see a yellow Tata truck stopped in the intersection, some men leaning out the windows high above, and a man down below sitting gingerly on the road next to his bike. He got up and walked off. Nothing else happened.

Finally, I turned up the road towards my office. My home. Moments later I heard a man call my name. I stopped, slipped on some rocks, kept my balance, and saw a co-worker waving a hand at me. I went to say hello and he bought me a delicious egg mixture with onions, cilantro, fried noodles like you get with Chinese delivery, and spices, all served on a banana leaf and eaten with some sort of durable natural scoop. Bark from a tree. Sugarcane. I don’t really know. The whole thing cost six rupees.

When I walked into my room, the time was 7:45pm.