VARIATIONS ON A PRIMATE

“All that showy technology in the paws of a band of primates who in terms of their emotions are barely advanced beyond the level of baboons. They're chimpanzees with bulldozers, monkeys with bombs. It's a dangerous situation, but that's okay: danger is the perfume of change, and change is the future's vocation”.
(Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito)

I begin writing in this notebook on Christmas Eve, here in the heart of Paharganj, New Delhi's crazy main bazaar. I had never been here in winter and the days are cool and sunny; a poor sad sun that hardly finds its way through the thick smog, the fumes, the dust, the aerial shit that flies around in Indian cities, and slowly but steadily fills our lungs, our blood, our brains. The nights are cold and silent, empty, sad, like under a self-imposed curfew; the power-cuts accompanied by the far-away buzz of diesel-engine generators. It is a very retro vision of a bleak future where neon signs have lost their juice and would be advertising long forgotten businesses anyway, where noise prevents all conversation, and where world-weary travelers have become the sharks, the touts, and the local merchants their innocent victims. A moto-rickshaw driven by a middle-aged turbaned sikh runs over a dog who simply walks away without a squeal, a minor, almost non-existent event in the core of absolute chaos of which I am the only witness. The banana sellers, the beggars, the myriad souls attached to their mortal coils, fighting their way through time and space as well as they can, crossing streets as they cross existences with one another in a million simultaneous little ways, making infinite patterns of being in the dense web of life and death. Each and everyone dispensable, exchangeable, forgettable, and yet somehow unique inside their little brains, their puny little hearts that beat thump thump sometimes faster as when a moto-rickshaw runs over you, sometimes slower as you are lost in silent contemplation of nothing, daydreaming, all motion suddenly stopped, all time forgotten, for a brief instant that lasts forever. This is no place for Christmas, there are far too many other festivals as it is, and fat rosy-cheeked old men with white beards dressed in red velvety outfits would be too exotic, too flashy a symbol of abundant excess for the overall squalor, the never ending layers of greyness and decomposition, of rot, of crumbling and decay, of overlapping strata of misery and petty greed. The dirty skies blend with the dirty ground which fades into an even dirtier, more mysterious underground; a city of rats and cockroaches, maggots and feces: a cosmic sewer made of three elements: the earth, the air, the water. A world where only fire purifies. This is apocalypse now. Not one great conflagration but a million little apocalypses bursting or decaying amongst total indifference. Each and every single form of life an unsung martyr. The monkeys, who are wiser men than us, are now all gone from Paharganj.

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