Beauty and the Beasts

Part One of My India Travel Diary

According to the salesmen of Northern India, I am the most beautiful, auspicious lady in the known universe. As such, I am more than deserving of a $11,000 diamond tennis bracelet, which coincidentally is the best piece in the store, the most unique—so unique, in fact, that they don’t want to sell it but if I insist they would consider it, special for me. The fact that I like the bracelet is evidence of my good taste and my exceptional beauty. Namaste.

I’m eating this all with a spoon here in India, because why not lean in to the graceful choreography of salesmanship, or at least the part that proclaims one’s beauty? Salesmen from Delhi to Jaipur to Jodphur are evidently stunned by my looks—not so stunned that they are speechless but stunned enough that they need a minute to recover before they name a price.

I am having a ball; India is amazing. Three friends and I organized the trip to visit the ambassador before he is shown the door on January 20th, and to see the highlights of Rajasthan, of which there are many. My sub-agenda had two components: Clothes and animals. I’ve been well-served on both accounts. Animals abound here, in eye-popping quantity and variety. The minute you arrive you see a thousand and one dogs, who appear to belong to no one, who loiter on every median strip and road shoulder, seemingly unperturbed by the mad clatter of traffic around them. It hurt my heart a little to see them, but most seemed relaxed and confident, as if they were just out for a little afternoon stroll on a Delhi superhighway, as one does.

And of course there are cows. Like the dogs, they seem unbothered, cruising down the teeming streets with the stolid gravity of a river barge, stopping whenever the hell they feel like it, bringing traffic to a screeching halt, which delighted me. Speaking of traffic, we were in non-cow-created gridlock the other day that was the most astonishing thing I’ve ever experienced, a knot that had no beginning and no end and seemed to exist in a fourth spatial dimension, like a Fields Medal-winning equation that established a new language of physics. The best way I can describe it is to have you picture a supersized magnet dropped into an intersection, drawing every car, motorcycle, bicycle—every speck of metal—into a solid clot. We were stationary for so long that I began to fantasize that we would remain in the intersection forever, suspended mid-journey like the townspeople of Pompeii. When it finally resolved, which seemed to occur organically but quite mysteriously, it was as if it never happened.

My scoldy travel nurse had warned me to steer clear of monkeys, but I was excited to see them, and in one poignant vignette, to see one digging through some trash alongside a cow, who also thought there might be something tasty tucked away in the pile.

More to come…. Off to explore a fort. Much more to report on animals and then my big takeaway on clothes! XSusan