The Road. Things you learn walking across India

The Road

The Road is my teacher. All the lessons I needed to learn on my walk across India unraveled along the way. Not in a temple or an ashram. On the road.

They unraveled one after the other like the 108 beads of a Mala, the Hindu rosary, during a prayer. Only a few of these epiphanies found me alone, hidden in the uncomfortable safety of a cheap room, late at night, under my mosquito net.

But mostly the lessons manifested themselves in the shape of humans or animals on a stretch of road, in broad daylight. Dozens of men and women, kind and rude, whose names I hardly remember but of whom I remember vividly the way they made me feel.

There were not only lessons from people. The Road instructed a few animals to unleash on me truths I was ready for.

Two dying cows, for instance, showed me I was ready to stop eating meat. As they exhaled their last breaths, their eyes were full of pain, wisdom, and depth. They were neither the plastic-wrapped bloodless cuts we buy in supermarkets nor the stupid animals we claim them to be. They were living, sentient beings, and I felt like I was a murderer until now.

A snake crossed my path on a torrid September day. It stopped at less than 2 meters from me, raised its head and looked at me. Without any fear. It looked into my eyes as I stood, unafraid but vigilant, for a time that felt uncomfortably long. It was probably 30 seconds. A snake (was it just a snake?) staring into your soul for half a minute. Looking for Shadow or Fear or parts of my Soul that didn’t belong to the Light. But all it could do was crawl away once I snapped out of my trance. In my mouth the aftertaste of having looked into the eyes of evil and passing some kind of test.

I took 15000 pictures in the three months of walking in India, yet most of the people I remember most vividly were never captured by my camera. I only retain evanescent images, their faces slowly fading like corrupted bytes on a hard drive.

I remember a 3-year-old child picking up garbage on the street and bringing it to his dad so that he could stack it in a huge plastic sack and sell it for a few rupees. I don’t even remember now in which one of the seven States I crossed, but I remember the child, the father and how they looked at me walking past them. I was a walking privilege and didn’t dare to look at them too much or take a photo. I learned early on to tiptoe around real suffering. I remember thinking: my child, your father is passing on to you all he has to offer. He’s passing you his curse and trade: collecting garbage. You’re in the family business now, it won’t be easy to break free from the chain of the generations. Then I simply kept walking and forgot all about it until it came back to haunt me today.

I remember walking on a semi-empty highway somewhere in Rajasthan, 1 or 2 pm, the usual 35 degrees, and seeing a million-year-old woman sitting on the side of the road. Alone. You see a woman 500 meters away from you with her hand stretched towards the sky, her head bent and hidden by veils, and there is no one in the radius of 1 kilometer and it feels for a moment like she is begging the Gods to leave a few rupees in her hands. Or maybe she is a Goddess herself and she wants to see if your pilgrim heart truly believes in abundance or it’s all pretense. So you walk and when, after minutes, you finally reach her, you drop 100 rupees in her bony hand and she doesn’t even look at you or the money. She doesn’t say a thing. She just keeps her fist now clenched around the banknote stretched and in the microsecond you blink, the banknote has disappeared and the hand is still stretched. And in my mind, that wrinkly, bony hand will always stay stretched. Till the end of time.

My teacher was the Road: made of incandescent asphalt, purulent foot blisters, trucks leaving trails of dust, ox carts, horsecarts, carts pushed by men, sugarcane fields, roadside landfills, cheap restaurants, polluting factories, chai-wallahs who rarely accepted to be paid for their tea, a million speeding motorbikes overloaded with children, goods, animals, pipes, suitcases.

My teacher was nothingness and it came as a relief. At times, I felt a wave of madness induced by the heat, the fatigue, the presence of Gods at every corner, the solitude, the poor diet and lack of proper sleep, the endorphins, the constant contemplation of mortality, poverty, and the usual f*cking killer monkeys.

Those waves of detachment from the old core, or madness as some would have called it later, lasted for weeks on end. And even I, as a neutral observer, could perceive myself drifting off, losing the grip on my sanity or what I believed to be it. I could see the shift while looking at my reflection in a window: the long dusty beard, the sweaty clothes, the eyes wide open, as if I had drunk a million coffees. And the Smile that came back after a long time.

Ironic that, while I was uncovering my most authentic Soul, I was afraid of losing myself the most. I looked like a mad man and I was afraid of losing my mind forever. Turns out I had simply forgotten how it felt to be happy.