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Oct. 18th, 2009
On my first trip to Japan, as a fifteen-year-old exchange student, I practically lived in a set of clothes which I remember very well: a plain lavender t-shirt, and vivid teal shorts. A fellow adventurer sketched me in this ensemble; I still have the portrait, scribbled on lined paper with "Oh so sexy" written in curlique'd script underneath. The shorts in particular I wore for long after they became too short to fit dress code; nobody called me on it.
Is it odd that a color combination would stick so strongly in my memory? Today I wore my lovely purple tunic with the teal salwar pants for the first time, and every time I caught sight of myself I thought of that old portrait and those increasingly faded shorts. The shirt was cotton, with a very thin shiny-as-satin neckline.
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On my first day here in Delhi for Diwali break, a beggar woman came to knock on the car window, on my side. She held on her hip a child who could not have been more than a year old. The child's hand was wrapped in a bloody bandage that looked really, sickeningly gruesome. My host said not to look, and then that the babe wouldn't be nearly so well-tempered were that real.
And of course I'm not supposed to give anything to any of the urchins. Because this act will make more of them. As if they are stray cats or dogs or- or roaches.
This is not a principle I can conscientiously stick to when a small human being is begging me for food in a language I don't understand. I don't know what to do. I only know that doing what I have been doing - namely, pretending they don't exist - will keep me up at night.
Is it odd that a color combination would stick so strongly in my memory? Today I wore my lovely purple tunic with the teal salwar pants for the first time, and every time I caught sight of myself I thought of that old portrait and those increasingly faded shorts. The shirt was cotton, with a very thin shiny-as-satin neckline.
---
On my first day here in Delhi for Diwali break, a beggar woman came to knock on the car window, on my side. She held on her hip a child who could not have been more than a year old. The child's hand was wrapped in a bloody bandage that looked really, sickeningly gruesome. My host said not to look, and then that the babe wouldn't be nearly so well-tempered were that real.
And of course I'm not supposed to give anything to any of the urchins. Because this act will make more of them. As if they are stray cats or dogs or- or roaches.
This is not a principle I can conscientiously stick to when a small human being is begging me for food in a language I don't understand. I don't know what to do. I only know that doing what I have been doing - namely, pretending they don't exist - will keep me up at night.