.....

God, dead or otherwise, is not my greatest enemy, APATHY is. I suppose the essential angst/complaint of the twent-first century kid would be boredom, or maybe a surfeit of entertainment.
There's a new begging scam on the streets of delhi: a group of women walk around with one very pregnant woman apparently going into labour. They ask for money so that they can take her to the hospital. I usually, as we have somehow all been trained to do, look through them, or look away. One morning (afternoon?) I was coming back from a friends house in Vasant Kunj after spending the night. We had had a good breakfast followed by a couple of very good hash j's. I was in an auto, stoned out of my mind, and somewhat half-heartedly concentrating on not letting it show. The auto-wallah had some radio-station blaring loud enough to wake god and his neighbour, and for once I was too out of it to tell him to turn it off. So there we were, the auto-man and I, tearing down the streets of delhi in a mobile party for two, turning heads and generally having a good time. (dunno if he was tripping too, tho' most of them usually are). A traffic light - the one at the flyover on Africa Avenue, which is usually a long one. Suddenly I noticed a lot of people turning around to look at something to my immediate left, so out of natural curiosity I turned too. A woman was standing there and saying something to (at) me. By the looks of it, she was in full-flow, and had been for a while. Panicking a little, coz I couldn't make out a single word she was saying, I forced myself to concentrate, looking at her attentively, if a little blankly. Wrong move, of course. I had just managed to catch the words aspataal, paise, bus when she decided verbal communication was a washout, and visual messages might work better. Out of nowhere she produced this woman with a huge stomach protruding right in my face, and continued with her pitch. I was just so relieved at finally being able to make sense of what she said that I asked her which hospital they wanted to go to. Taken aback, she recovered quickly enough to give me the name of one. I turned to the auto guy- who was looking at me in the overhead mirror as if he had just realised I was either crazy or stoned out of my head, and asked him how much of a detour that would be. He shook his head. Undaunted, and sort of caught up in my own momentum, I then scooted to the furthest end of the seat, and gestured for them to get in. I will never forget the look on the woman's face, she looked like she wanted to hit me! She said there's five of us. I said well I can drop two of you, and the rest can follow later. The light was changing, and she had given up on me: she just turned around and walked away... sad, it might have been the most interesting auto-ride I ever took (including the one when there were nine of us in one auto at midnight in Jaipur). Oh, well...

Interesting tho', how the number of people copulating in this country and getting pregnant makes this such a very workable scam, all the year round. These people have ideas. Also sad, no matter how much I try, or think and talk myself out of it, they will somehow always be 'these people'. Tho' they fascinate me and I keep saying how I would love to try this sort of unhinged, marginal, free, life on the street ... its the mental boundary that is always impossible to cross. Damn the righteous, productive, insidiously bourgeois middle-class upbringing. Or do I mean that?