New Routes

This Saturday, the bus took a new route to the hospital. Instead of turning onto Fort Road, the driver took a detour that led us past fields, boys playing cricket, and the other side of the Fort, one that I had never seen.
The beauty of living here is that there's always something new to be seen, if only you can keep your eyes open long enough. It can be difficult to gaze serenely out of a window as you fight for standing room on a bus or shield your face against the dust that embeds itself in your moisturiser, but it can be well worth the effort.

A while ago on a line bus on the No 2 route, I saw a family making rope out of coir. It hung heavy and thick, dropping from the slowly cranked spinning wheel in rough-skinned coils. You pass by fringed donkeys, the fire station, chaiwallas pouring out the day's first cups of tea, young girls riding scooters to college and men in lungis who have mastered the disconcerting art of the hoist-and-tuck.

Today there is a group of goats methodically chewing their way through a wallfull of posters, while others recline nearby with that spotted dignity that goats achieve so well. A short distance away there sits the incomplete figure of a woman made of brick. Around one and a half storeys tall, she has neither head nor arms but sits with disproportionately thin legs spread slightly apart and a cinched-in waist. If she had eyes they would look ahead of her into an empty lot strewn with weeds and garbage, and at the goats that keep her company without meaning to. Dilapidated as she is, she camouflages into the background of tyre- and tractor repair shops, the houses with their grilled-in verandahs, into the nakedness of the unpainted sides of small all-purpose stores. Maybe she was meant to be painted and worshipped as a goddess; perhaps that pot-bellied stomach and the height of her imply some obscenely elaborate chimney; I see no explanatory signboards excusing her existence, so I clothe her in conjecture and pass by.