Delhi > Jaipur

The train’s vantage exposed the ‘other’ side of Delhi’s throbbing street life, not that things were otherwise civilized. Trash was everywhere - scattered, piled high in heaps, burning, or drifting, enveloping the banks of waterways – thick and overwhelming. A dozen goats, adorned with tinsel neckwear and pink-painted horns, sifted through waste as their owner stood in supervision, expressionless and unaffected by his circumstance. A feral pond attracted shore birds, pigs with piglets, and water buffalo, grazing up to their bowels in an anoxic sludge of human waste. The aroma of raw sewage lofted upwards and consumed the train, molesting my senses and lingering as it diffused with the gradual influx of fresher air. Strangely, it was becoming familiar, as if there were no hope for relief.

Then Delhi suddenly receded, and a pastoral India emerged as we drew southwest. Towering clumps of wild grass fluttered in the turbulence of the passing train, alongside small plots of mechanically tilled land. The day’s end was near. A woman strode on foot across a nearby field, effortlessly balancing a large basket of harvest on her head, and her striking pumpkin sari accentuated the afternoon sun which bathed the landscape with warm, golden light. Acacia trees appeared, draped with weaver nests drooping from their limbs, and for a moment I recollected the rolling savannah of Africa, which was distant to me in time and place.

The filth and beauty of India was sinking in…