so pleased to meet you

I'm still catching the blog up on life here, so here's something from what seems like forever ago. It's just a little somethin' I wrote right after arriving...

It was raining when we arrived in Kolkata. I rolled down the taxi window anyway, if only to keep from being suffocated by the incense burning to Ganesh, stuck in the dashboard like smouldering birthday candles. It's almost my birthday, too, I tell him. Just in case he wants to throw me a surprise party. Our driver in a wet and dirty tanktop, the once-had-been white now transparent from some combination of sweat and rain. The horns are a sort of sonar it seems, like bats flitting around trying not to collide. Shush, I tell them. Let me meet the city. Introductions are sacred. Like puja, like prayer. In them you read the silent longings, the spiritual pleas. Like an old text, an ancient scroll. In this manner we greeted each other, Kolkata and I. I read boldly its crippling poverty, its burning spirituality, and its beauty which is rooted in a history older than my body plus my soul, times a thousand. In return its scalpel eyes saw my crippling selfishness, my spiritual poverty, my burning desire for love. I kneel to touch the feet of this place, and it returns the blessing with a hand on my head. As I walk away from this first impression, I am actually moving in. Moving to this place where wounds like tendons lay exposed, still pulsing with inextinguishable breath. Out of my silence then came the only word I knew to say. One that's been lying dormant and dust covered for awhile now. Mercy, I whispered like a lullabye to the men sleeping exhausted on their rickshaws. Mercy! I shouted at the marble hotels, white... oh-so-white. Everywhere the word fell it returned from, louder and shining. Mercy, the wind whispered in song as I slept. Mercy! it shouted and rained down respite life.