A Red Bicycle

I'm walking along a crooked Indian city street, looking for an ATM machine to withdraw some local cash. A five to ten minute endeavor back home that can take more than an hour here — depending upon any number of uncertain variables that no westerner could ever conceive. Including, but not limited to, rogue billy goats eating through city electrical lines and paralyzing whole neighborhoods for hours on end. Not that the Indians would notice, nor particularly care.

Shrug. Spit. The long, quiet, immovable stare into the vastness.

At a round-about at the top end of the road, a vicious circle bull-whipping drivers around the turns and arteries of side streets in a frightening chaos of horns and metal, I notice a small yellow dog lying dead in the center of the circle. One small ear is flapping in the wind, his small body framed in a single patch of sunlight breaking through the canopy of neighborhood trees. He looks almost peaceful. Unlike cows, dogs hold no sanctity for the Indians. They are more like giant urban rats carrying fleas and other unsavory vermin. Yet the cars, motorcycles, bicycles and rickshaws all swerve, slow and dart to avoid crushing the poor, broken body. I stop and think I might go pick him up, and at least drag his body to the side of the road. I don't know why this will help. It just seems odd to leave him there.

At this sober, charitable thought, the dead dog lifts his head amidst the maze of traffic zipping past his snout and tail, bored, and fixes his eyes for a moment toward the opposite sidewalk. The absurdity of the moment sharpens my eyes, and suddenly the truth of the situation comes into focus. It has been an unusually cold few days with the monsoon. Wet and damp. With strong winds. The dog has found the one patch of sunlight available to him away from the sidewalk and its human feet. Away from the territorial reprimands of fellow canine wanderers. That the dry patch of cement sits in the center of the maddest intersection I am ever likely to see seems remarkable only to me. At which moment the dog, having apparently reconfirmed that he has indeed chosen just the right spot, flops his head back on the ground, and resumes his afternoon nap.

Shrug. Spit. Move along.

The first two ATMs I come upon are not functioning (why would they be functioning?), so I turn right and amble up along a side street I don't know. Past a gigantic pig rummaging through an ad-hoc garbage dump piling apparently unnoticed in front of a stately colonial mansion. Past cobblers under plastic tarps, clusters of teenagers leaning on motorcycles, tapping on cell phones. Coconut vendors sleeping in wild angles on their carts.

At the first junction, two young boys, no more than eight or nine years old, are getting into a scrape. Apparently over the old red bicycle one of them is sitting astride. Each has his hand wrapped around the other's throat. Posturing at first. But then the blows start. Big, clumsy round-house swings. Blows to draw blood. I look at a few passing adults, wondering if they will step in. But apparently this is not their business, and they simply hike up their loose pants and saris and step around the mess. Finally a third boy, about the same age runs across the street to intervene. Or so I think. He's yelling something in Marathi as he jumps in the fray. But his elbow suddenly raises, and like some professional wrester on TV in the 80s, he starts raining his bony weapon across the tops of their two heads.

The three of them lose their balance and go spilling into the street as one. A rickshaw swerves to the right, just before crushing the skull of one boy. A motorcycle is forced to screech to a full stop in the midst of his maniacal careening through the city, an almost unforgivable sin in these parts. And the driver, having had to put BOTH feet down on the ground, gesticulates and screams the appropriate obscenities to express his displeasure. Apparently unconcerned that the three children are trying to kill each other.

Then, almost unnoticed, into a small pocket in the chaos of this storm, a fourth boy appears. Bare feet, dirty matted hair. He bends down, picks up the old red bike, and rides casually away. I watch him go for a moment upon his valiant steed. Back erect, head straight and proud. Wow, I think. Just like Wall Street.


Thirty-Nine

I wake up on the morning of my 39th birthday to the sun breaking through a bright blue sky. The weather cleared after two weeks of rain and wind. Lying sideways on the bed, I've never quite seen the orange color of the tired drapes, drenched for the first time in a happy hue from the morning sun. They look like a box of Fruit Loops.

I'm suddenly launched to my cousin's house in the summertime when I was a kid. In what used to be rural Pennsylvania. You know the one. Where you could eat sugar cereal and Pop Tarts all day. And watch Underdog cartoons on one of their multiple tv's in the middle of the afternoon.

I peel the single sheet off my naked skin and stand up. My bare feet slap across the cold marble tiles to a small, single-burner stove. I have just recently discovered the necessary ratio of tea to spice to sugar to make a serviceable chai, and I set the milk and water to a boil. Last night's dishes find their way into warm, soapy water, a wet sponge clears crumbs and tea bits from a stone counter into a small plastic bin. With tea in hand, I pull open the curtains and windows, and in pours the morning wind and squawks of car horns and parrots. I sit on a low stool, placing my mug next to a book, and gaze out over the city of Pune. Miles of low buildings and trees rising through a polluted haze.

I open the book at random, and my eyes fall onto a page detailing the root of the word 'happy'. It comes from the verb 'to happen'. The ability to let things happen. A place, apparently, where we don't need to be anywhere else, with anyone else, doing anything else. Happy. Content.

Some personal bent looks up, wondering if this is somehow too wimpy and passive. I turn back out the window at the dirty city. At a world that is not what I want it to be. At a sea of people who are not how I want them to be. A pace that is not my own choosing. But that is my problem. Let the world be what it wants. Let people be whoever they want to be. Let the pace be whatever it is. Let the whole world happen. Who am I to change a single thing?

The word jumps up off the page again, and a low smile cracks across my face. Thirty nine years old, and I realize I don't really care anymore. The world can be whatever it wants. It can happen however it wants. And I, in turn, am free to fall into this strange little eddy. Next to a small book, these orange drapes, and a sweet cup of milky tea. Content. Happy next to this window, and the mad world careening, happening all at once beyond its simple, square frame.


Local Knowledge

My friend and I are walking home from dinner. Some spicy fare of something or other. The food, I mean. Vegetables cooked beyond recognition, hiding in masala-red pools of oil and ghee. We're bantering on about something insignificant. Car horns and potholes probably. When suddenly there is a mighty crash at the circular intersection behind us. An appalling sound of metal on metal. The kind of noise that makes one side of you want to turn around and gawk, the other side cringe, bury your head and hide.

My morbid side wins. My morbid side always wins. I turn. Some 100 meters up the road, 2 motorcycles are lying helplessly on their sides, their wheels still spinning slowly in the air. The two drivers are on their backs, a pair of slowly writhing heaps thrown on the dirty, unforgiving concrete. One rises like a fallen boxer to his feet, his shocked hands slowly checking his head for gashes and wounds unfelt through the adrenalin and fear. The other is clutching his chest as a cluster of other motorcycles, cars and rickshaws stop and gather around the scene.

Standing there frozen, trying to convince myself that a weekend CPR class qualifies me to be of some service, I hear my friend say to me: "Come on, let's go. There's nothing you can do to help." The crowd at the intersection has swollen to at least 20 people. It's their country. Their language. Their customs. And I realize it's true, there's nothing I can do. Except add some novel distraction of white skin, checkered shorts and a t-shirt.

Just as we turn to go, though, we see a small white and blue ambulance van bouncing up the road in the direction of the accident. It is less than two minutes since the crash, and there is no way someone has called and gotten a response in this short amount of time. Which means this is a wildly coincidental turn of fate. I have been in India enough times to realize that coincidences like this are more or less common-place, and as we swivel and track the trajectory of the van, I marvel at the almost poetic synchronicity of the moment.

"How weird is that?" my friend says.

"Very, very weird."

Then, when the ambulance is about half-way between our position and the crash scene, a second thought comes to my mind. I have also been in India enough times to realize that nothing — nothing — is ever as it seems. And as if reading my mind, my friend (also a frequent visitor to these parts) suddenly says: "Oh my god, I bet he doesn't even stop."

"Not a chance," I reply.

The ambulance rides up against the rear bulge of the crowd. Its nose pushes first to the right, then to the left, looking for a way through. Then it honks. The crowd — wholly unmoved by the sudden, inexplicable arrival of an ambulance on the scene - briefly collapses in on itself like a poked amoeba. The van angles into a gap, darts through the space, and continues on its merry way.

Standing perplexed in the street, the two of us seem to be the only ones perturbed, or even AWARE, of the irony in the moment. True, an available ambulance miraculously happens upon an ugly crash scene in the dark of the night on a random back street of a dusty, chaotic city in the Indian heartland. But that doesn't mean he is going to actually STOP! Let alone do anything.

Shrug. Spit. Move along.