J. "Say the letter J", I repeat to myself, "just say it: J, J, J!"
The thought is not intelligible. It is the wrong summary for a first day in India. There ought to be more. It is the wrong thought for a first day in Mumbai - a global city that breathes and exudes music of its own. It is certainly the wrong sound to recall all the beats of one block's walk. It is the wrong phonetic image for the loud whispering within this city's walls. But, unalterably, I ought to repeat it: J!
J has become the vastest single memory of my first day in India. The sound of the letter is what I have heard repeated during the incessant murmur of crowds in every street and by the drumming of buildings that tailor the complex history of this city. It is my own beating now. J. My mind fixated on it as an image I want to recall (from this Thursday in the present calendar) for its symbolical importance and not for the actual scientific repetition of its use in the local tongue. It is a sound that is basic, raw, and proper to my core now. J.
Hear this country. J. Aspire to sound along with it. J. India's flirt, let it find you out. J. Let it smitten you with hope. J. Possibly maybe. J. There is possibly maybe. J. J. J.
My journey here is not to be conventional. It is about re-thinking alphabets, about testing basic forms of cognitive knowledge that that have shaped an all too matured psyche that will not suffice me, in its current state, for any lifetime ahead. Coming here is about returning somewhere internal and simple. It is about allowing images as trivial as the sound of letters to fill in the voids of the heart and rewrite common places and forgotten feelings. To revolution-ize the places of my spirit that have become unattached from the world. That have lost a sense of humanity and connection.
The purpose, in a nutshell: obtain a sense of wisdom in the recalling of spirit. Grasp the opportunity to learn how to gather, again, fetus style. And to learn this, not as a momentary, visit-specific or travel driven purpose, but rather as an everlasting skill, priority, and purpose of being. For some reason, this process is not common place to me.
Piano plays away. Now, at dawn, Damien Rice serenades. Heart races along. The Arabian Sea ahead. My forehead points to it and thinks: "I want to spend time with you". A designer's loft. A vast window facing it. Antiques gathered for centuries crisply and perfectly positioned along the Eastern wall of the apartment. The wall, endless. The treasures, collected by a dignitary's eye. Two women sleeping deeply in the contiguous rooms to the one I sit in complete darkness, except for the light of the moon that pours in. Have you mastered the perfect day? Has the day felt endlessly broken in tilted movements of life expressions that showed angles, never imagined, but ever captured?
A bright purple wall on my back. Facing directly at the ocean, defiantly. Two water bottles screaming as loudly as the crows by the ancient tropical trees that lay next to my window. Realizing that none of this was up to us. Neither up to me, nor up to the water bottles, nor to the crows. None of us designed any of of what I saw today. No single segment of the endless, vast history of this country, was up to us and never will be. Realizing that you stand far. That you come in as a foreign soul with a band aid and a handicap to understand everything that you could want to understand. Knowing, that you are minimal. Just as a point in history as a mind capable of grasping the eternity of this world and the forces that shaped it. What a cosmopolitan soul I am? Try again. What an uninformed simple mind better captures it. Until you are here, you do not know. At least, I did not.
No matter what, no matter when, our capacity to realize what exists anywhere remains, utterly, limited. Grand civilizations, much like this one, simply place you where you belong. At a point where the X marks the start. The genesis to learning, learning, learning, and learning the importance of nourishing a global soul that ever struggles with the capacity to really be part of a place's history. The world is here and there. Explore. Explore it. Make a point of it. Start. Remember this. Make of this thought a life priority. Vast ocean waters ahead. Vast sounds, J, open up.
The sea, the wall, the bright purple, the lack of space are memorable from this day. All beating to one sound. To J. To this very sound of this alphabet that right here, in this place of the world, feels vast, feels endless. One wonders, am I an accidental baby of this land? A baby just thrown into the world. Thrown into Mumbai.
Here I sit feeling Mumbai. Feeling India's light. Here in India I am in a hidden place.
I saw a woman today running. Her colors were bright. Her back was showing flesh as she sped away. The rest of her body was draped in cloth - yellow and red. Her speed impressive. She ran among thousands of cars in an semi-paved highway. From within the bubble from which I observed her, she seemed to be two seconds away from elevating. Elevating above from the black taxi cabs, from the people sleeping on the streets once called untouchables, from the temperature of the air covering this city of disparities and beauty. Speeding up to meet the skyline of luxury that intermixed with colonial buildings. She ran next to me against backdrop of cement, steel beams protecting low rising buildings, and skyscrapers dirty with the lush blanket of global pollution. She rose towards a ceiling that met the sky. She did that over a city by the ocean that seems to have forgotten about the sea that encloses it. A sea that no one does seems to see. This city has a different more profound ocean. It hosts 17 million people of the world. Who move. Who touch. Who feel. Who seem grasted in a mystic trance. Spirituality in a city that is told to behave as a cosmopolitan meca of flavors. A city that breathes the local. While it exudes the greatest paradoxes of the global development. The world has turned to show that globalization remains an endless paradox - intellectual masturbation.
Learning to see cracks of the spirit. Noticing how it sparkles out there. It is not up to me. Unthinkable surprises, about to happen. Day one. What a revolution.
Nature is ancient.
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