so nice will it be

“In India it’s enough to have music. Serpents dance, parrots dance, monkeys dance, even the bulls dance.” Each morning finger clouds wipe sleep from a solitary heavenly eye we salute with bodies bowed. Eighty girls of every age move through yoga postures, and I grow conscious of a soft twinkle of anklets, like the bells of an arriving sleigh. A steady beat of bangles follows the flow. And from that point on the day is full of sound and light.
On the way to mass we cram onto a bus, and silk, cotton, sequins, and ribbons caress and scratch and squirm against sticky skin. The church is crowned with tinsel and trimmed with false flowers. It smells of sweet jasmine from garlands woven into dark pleats of hair. The congregation pulses with music: drums and tambourines, claps and chants, and finally, as a poor woman enters to great the sisters, a rooster cries “eh, eh, eh” in perfect beat, emerging from her green plastic tiffin basket for the finale. a tisket a tasket. Even the sermon is sung, and the congregation swallows the joy of faith, and it fills our bodies with nourishment. Here “food is music inside the body and music is food inside the heart.”
The girls take a fieldtrip to the city for a picnic, and as we repair a punctured tire, the bus is slowly passed by a line of camels. The train is migrating from Rajasthan in to the warm south, and I wonder why I’m plan to head the opposite direction. They trod along the road, undisturbed by the honks of ricks and lorries, munching on plants, molting, and I dodge traffic to skip beside them shouting, not sure who is the bigger spectacle. We pass fields of sunflowers facing their higher source, buffalo drawn carts of fresh clippings, clans of monkeys climbing telephone poles, babies on their backs and in their arms, and flocks of egrets shifting color in the wind. My scarf trails out the window in a never ending wave, and the children scream with delight and sing and dance and teach me Hindi hits and how to call a parrot in Telugu, and I feel alive and all right.
India is a mixture of sugar and spice—its food, its music, its people, its life. A balance that makes your lips tingle madly then quenches thirst with mouth watering sweets. I bite into a special treat Sister brings me, something fried, something to celebrate with, and find a chili hidden inside that makes my tongue burn and my eyes water. The combination is deceptive and subversive. Behind a man’s polite smile lies abuse and desire. Behind each child’s innocent greeting is a hunger for something more. Even the flowers are implicated, so beautiful but sticky and poisonous to the touch. You have to be careful not to succumb to the spell.