Notes From Mumbai

A love letter to Kashmir

When I was young, I hitch hiked everywhere. I travelled a lot; I worked only to save money to go places, and I did. Sometimes it was good and sometimes it was terrible and often it was simply hard. Internal flights were rare in those days and only for the moneyed. In South America bus journeys of 72 hours, constant harassment. Feeling weak and pathetic upon return, a doctor sent me to the Hospital of Tropical Diseases. I had a memento other than the tiny little pots that I had tried to buy in a market in Bolivia.

I had a parasite.

It had made me ill but it could be got rid of because I was back home.

There was when I look back, an unease about the selling of the small clay pots that I did not properly understand at the time. I thought they were cute. But these little pots were made to be buried with children who died so they could eat in the next lifetime. Many, many children there, died under the age of five and in a way, I was too young myself to understand what that meant. Since then, I have been in many more places where death runs parallel to the living and it’s not its opposite as we tend to think. The dead have to be tended to constantly. Surely it’s obvious that they need to eat.

After the parasite was zapped and I began to feel normal, I came to know looking at the miniature cooking pots, that travelling is always in its own way parasitic after all. I was another gringo in such of what exactly? A souvenir?