Monday, December 6th
Today’s Soundtrack: Herbert – So Now
[audio:http://shambolic.com/blog/files/2010/12/02-So-Now.mp3|titles=02 So Now]Morning
A better sleep than the last, now that I have learned the trick of tucking in my only bed sheet at the bottom to protect my feet from the mosquito’s searching proboscis. And my dreams, though they linger before my eyes when I close them, refuse to congeal into anything which I can relate.
What of today then? I have a shopping list of errands which will no doubt arrange themselves nicely: welding, washing, shopping, internetting (my spell check rightly pulls me up on that last). And of course, I should do some work this morning, that I might feel that all is not a leisurely dalliance.
The amount of birdsong in this places verges on outrageous. There are so many, it feels as though every point in the stereo image is occupied by a little tweeter.
To breakfast then.…
Afternoon
A strange day spent on bike repair, washing and riding around in the countryside outside Kamalapur. I’ve realized that this is quickly reverting to the perpetual maintenance mode that we had with the bike last time round, and in fact, I think that would be a worthy title to any account of Enfield-based travel around India: Perpetual Maintenance. That is inevitably how you spend a good portion of your time. Of today’s two repairs, welding the seat frame and fixing the foot pegs more firmly, only the former held up for more than ten minuts. The latter situation is as bad as it was, and the side stand has decided to add another fifteen degrees of lean when parked, meaning a collapse is soon likely.
Additionally, I’ve only just noticed two broken spokes on the non-drive side of the rear wheel, so today has actually ended off worse than it began from a maintenance perspective.
The afternoon also took on a slightly melancholy air. Driving around outside of Kamalapura, waiting for the power to come back on so they could wash my bike (it never did), I passed settlements, huts, forlorn communities living in dust bowls. Rows of concrete houses creating lanes and neighbourhoods where there were no towns. It was somber and quietly incredible. I keep find myself wondering if there is a universal truth that applies to these people, and to me, and to everything in between. No commonly accepted view of god seems to fit. It’s all too culturally specific. The idea of Providence also seems difficult to apply in these circumstances: what plan does He have for these poor people living in penury, pounding their clothes on river rocks and crowding around a single television?
I know the sense of their obscurity travels with me — it is subjective — the same as their sense of my strangeness is their own product. But is there anything to bridge these worlds? This seems to be a question to which I always return, and which no religion will ever be able to adequately answer, since it will only put forward the view that legitimises itself.
It is a question for the spirit; and mine is keeping strangely silent. Perhaps, in a way, that points the way to an answer.
