India
Truth comes in at the eyes and ears; I sniff it out or feel it out or it lingers on the tongue. After orchestration, it rolls off my word processor like bad a Xerox copy. But sometimes, if I’m lucky, it has a photocopy’s immediacy. I am 47 generations away from the original, and now the story has the surreal nuance of a wanted poster hanging in the dusty far corner of the post office. It’s all noir, or hyper-saturated color, poster bleak, with none of the slick polish of “America’s Most Wanted”. No talking head introduces the next segment. It just happens, an approximation of reality.
None of this has anything to do with India, though my thinking led me there — and not the India of Gandhi or the India of the Ganges or even the India of dirt country roads with a barefoot man leading livestock toward home — but the India of a woman with hennaed feet and tinkling ankle bracelets and serpentine hips dancing across rice paper and leaving no mark.
And I am suddenly sad, realizing I have wasted most of my life pursuing women whose hips wouldn’t sway so if the finger of God Almighty came down from the sky and etched the commandment in tablets of stone.
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