Hy-der-a-bad.
Spoken slowly it’s the sound of a place Sheherazade might whisper in a tale woven from air, as she tries to story herself away from death. It sounds exotic – but simply because it is - and I’ve fallen a little in love with it over the last few days.
At first it assaults your senses with colour and smell and sound, but once you begin to flow with it, begin to see the beauty, it changes and so do you - maybe it decides to allow you to. Construction, rubble and dust are everywhere, the traffic is a relentless river of honking metal acid etching it’s mark on the marble, stone, and concrete - there is poverty, squalor and crime on every corner and every pathway between the palms and washing strewn crumbling colour-washed buildings…but take a look beyond and beneath – what then? Just take a closer look – look hard, open your eyes, work your senses, free your heart and look.
Up to telephone wires where broken kites flutter in warm breeze, free from string and holder, caught by time, attempting freedom with each forlorn flutter. Gaze high at hawks as they swirl, round and around, convection tides taking them up and up towards the hot yellow sun; their purposeful eyes intent on purple shadowed ground, to swoop the instant that prey makes one single fatal error.
Look out around, at the spin and whirl of shade and hue, so many colours that surround and engulf – deep pink, light green, yellow gold, blue, purple, turquoise, orange, and orange, and orange – join with the swirl until it blurs and becomes a singular brightness. Richness such as that is rare - and for this instant yours - to keep so close and memoried.
Feel deep the eyes of the many people as they pass you by - see smiles, catch frowns, glimpse questions. Skin dark, and light, and pale, and proud – and all a beautiful brown caught up in the colour of the day, silk and cotton and gauze, then catch the kiss of the laughing girl as she glances in a fleet, your way and past, with kiss that does not belong with you – but enjoy it all the more for being there at all.
Deep smell the heat and dust and richly taste the tang of aromatic leaves, waft smokes of cooking meats, breath up at hanging fruit, and underneath the scents of rotting and decay, of drains, and dung, and maybe sometimes death. Breathe it happy as if it were your last and do it with content – it would be a good smell to depart on if leaving were an order.
Then listen to the noise of night, a never-ending city sung cacophony - car horns, drums, shout and whistle, call and cries, whispers and sighs - and early the faithful being called to prayer.
There is mystery and poetry, poetry everywhere, this city is a poem and I could be happy here. Fulfilled and fight to fall in love, imprisoned, live, and maybe even die, to paint, and write, and dream. I could be anything and anyone in Hyderabad.
As I mentioned - I’ve fallen in love a little, and I’d almost forgotten the taste.
But I’m not to stay, I only have tomorrow; it must be a good day, made remembered and vivid to my mind – recorded.
Tonight I think I saw the coming India in a new hotel with tasteful furnishings, and mirrored bars, no poetry at all, and not a trace of past in sight. A new and antiseptic India, the India that will be here when the construction is done and the dust and rubble and smell of shit have all been cleared away leaving only imitation America, Europe, Japan, and other colourless elsewhere’s – and that isn’t it.
In that place I wasn’t in Hy-der-a-bad.
I was nowhere again.
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