Hot Time in the City
As I sit to type this, I am very hot. Just so you know, it's hot today.
I watched the sun rise over the street signs and the coconut stand on the corner as I walked to yoga. It was lollipop pink poking over the flat roof tops, backed by a ferociously blue sky. I realized that the sky is rarely blue here; the clouds mitigate the blazing heat quite well, and without them, the early light was already aggressively slicing through the dust. By the time I finished yoga, I craved the cool of my empty room's marble floor, shaded under a coconut tree and something more abundant, leafier as well. Sitting refreshed on the floor in my underpants, I drank water and it dribbled down my chin.
The Ayurvedic Massage class is passing along. Our teacher is Kumar; he has finished sharing his knowledge of Ayurveda with us, and has moved along to story-telling. This morning, we learned an Osho fable of a town plagued by drought who solicited the help of a neighboring community's rainmaker. The rainmaker made heavy demands in exchange for his assistance, and the desperate town complied. They built him a house and stocked it with food and water sufficient to accommodate him for three days, as he required. The rainmaker holed himself away. As the days passed, the town people became concerned that the rainmaker had duped them, and they had wasted their little remaining goodwill in other villages on securing food for the man. Just as they became rabid with anger at his insolence in the face of their suffering, rain started to fall. It was a greater rain than they had known in generations. They asked the rainmaker how he did it, and he told them that he spent the three days in the house making himself balanced and ordered. When he found himself in a good state, he could perceive whatever he would wish to see in the world, and he saw rain.
It was a nice story, huh? Kumar finished it up by saying, "And now, if I don't stop going on and on, you will all fall asleep." I suppose it's true that no parable, no matter how enlightening, will keep a hot student alert for more than a few minutes. I wondered whether he could just perceive us as alert, and find us so. Apparently not.
At the Mysore Palace on Tuesday night, we followed a parade of pachyderms cruising along the Palace gates toward the road! Each absolutely, incredibly, super enormous animal was ridden by a single man whose legs invariably reached no further than midway down the Asian elephants' little ears. I thought the spectacle was something more until my friend informed me that it was not monkeys riding the elephants, but actually people. That's just how small they looked. They call them "Jumbos" here, and I have heard women affectionately calling each other "Dumbo," meaning "silly thing." Leaving the Palace, we had to spend some time waiting for a curly-horned cow to get up some gumption in order to move it's largesse away from the parked scooters on the side of the road. And it wasn't just us so inconvenienced; about nine scooters were blocked, which means, at about 4 per motorbike, potentially, 36 people could have been affected by this delay in traffic. All of that just makes me happier than I can possibly express while sitting here in this heat swatting away the mosquitos drawn to the light of my monitor. So I will leave it at that.
I will post some pictures tomorrow. You will not want to miss the series of photos I have captured of some HOT Indian star with big hair and a silver tooth. Okay, it's just pictures of pictures of him, but he's so hot, you will think you are sitting here with me, dripping sweat onto your keyboard.
I watched the sun rise over the street signs and the coconut stand on the corner as I walked to yoga. It was lollipop pink poking over the flat roof tops, backed by a ferociously blue sky. I realized that the sky is rarely blue here; the clouds mitigate the blazing heat quite well, and without them, the early light was already aggressively slicing through the dust. By the time I finished yoga, I craved the cool of my empty room's marble floor, shaded under a coconut tree and something more abundant, leafier as well. Sitting refreshed on the floor in my underpants, I drank water and it dribbled down my chin.
The Ayurvedic Massage class is passing along. Our teacher is Kumar; he has finished sharing his knowledge of Ayurveda with us, and has moved along to story-telling. This morning, we learned an Osho fable of a town plagued by drought who solicited the help of a neighboring community's rainmaker. The rainmaker made heavy demands in exchange for his assistance, and the desperate town complied. They built him a house and stocked it with food and water sufficient to accommodate him for three days, as he required. The rainmaker holed himself away. As the days passed, the town people became concerned that the rainmaker had duped them, and they had wasted their little remaining goodwill in other villages on securing food for the man. Just as they became rabid with anger at his insolence in the face of their suffering, rain started to fall. It was a greater rain than they had known in generations. They asked the rainmaker how he did it, and he told them that he spent the three days in the house making himself balanced and ordered. When he found himself in a good state, he could perceive whatever he would wish to see in the world, and he saw rain.
It was a nice story, huh? Kumar finished it up by saying, "And now, if I don't stop going on and on, you will all fall asleep." I suppose it's true that no parable, no matter how enlightening, will keep a hot student alert for more than a few minutes. I wondered whether he could just perceive us as alert, and find us so. Apparently not.
At the Mysore Palace on Tuesday night, we followed a parade of pachyderms cruising along the Palace gates toward the road! Each absolutely, incredibly, super enormous animal was ridden by a single man whose legs invariably reached no further than midway down the Asian elephants' little ears. I thought the spectacle was something more until my friend informed me that it was not monkeys riding the elephants, but actually people. That's just how small they looked. They call them "Jumbos" here, and I have heard women affectionately calling each other "Dumbo," meaning "silly thing." Leaving the Palace, we had to spend some time waiting for a curly-horned cow to get up some gumption in order to move it's largesse away from the parked scooters on the side of the road. And it wasn't just us so inconvenienced; about nine scooters were blocked, which means, at about 4 per motorbike, potentially, 36 people could have been affected by this delay in traffic. All of that just makes me happier than I can possibly express while sitting here in this heat swatting away the mosquitos drawn to the light of my monitor. So I will leave it at that.
I will post some pictures tomorrow. You will not want to miss the series of photos I have captured of some HOT Indian star with big hair and a silver tooth. Okay, it's just pictures of pictures of him, but he's so hot, you will think you are sitting here with me, dripping sweat onto your keyboard.
posted by your friend at Thursday, October 06, 2005
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