Blue Dress Hot Mess

We were on the plane to India. We had driven down the M40 at 7 o’clock in the morning, 3 degrees and misty, an orange glow blushing with the promise of the next 12 days – the colour, the life, the world we had yet to see for the very first time. ABBA sung ‘I Have a Dream’ slowly. I do believe in angels. We were on the hunt, my mother and I. We pursued ourselves. The endless chase of “finding yourself”, when you’re sitting there all along. Running away to find yourself is frivolous. It’s an indulgence: a sweet taste, a raspberry croissant, a spice, cinnamon.

At 3:38pm (according to whose Time, I have no idea) we were exactly one cloud ahead of the sun. The lights of the plane were purple, orange, pink. The sky behind us was the same — ahead, it was deep, deep indigo. We hovered in the high-sky at Starlight – a Time in itself, like noon or midnight -, a destination between Nowhere and Somewhere, where the place names are painted in watercolour. We eat Scottish shortbread to keep up our strength.

Hours later, I can hear horns and birds and, somewhere, a call to prayer. We landed at midnight; what day it is now I have no idea. It is hot, very hot – a wave of engulfing humidity which hits you in an outpouring of sensory reality, so forceful you are swallowed whole, uncertain what is heat, what is noise, what is smell. If the wave were a whale, it hasn’t yet spat me out. The Delhi streets run criss-cross across the inside of this great beast, pulsing whale-veins with a putrid, dirty, dusty stench. There are dogs on the streets, and people sleeping like monkeys on the partition between the roads. There are TukTuks and cows, and little striped squirrels like chipmunks in the trees.

If India were a colour, it would be a deep, rich orange. Honeycomb and turmeric. Okra and tahini. Delhi is a drug. I am still living in the whale, still swimming on the wave. The Indians are hospitable, generous, serious; their history is spiritual rather than political. Religion causes wars, spirituality does not. It is a path you walk alone, on a journey no one can alter but yourself. You walk the path bare foot, and even if you visit a monument a thousand times, each time is different because you are different. Naïve innocence – “we want only peace” – marries intense worldliness – “we only want peace”. The marriage is arranged. The Indians know what they are saying when they speak; theirs is a fork-tongued language, Hindi and English, the serious meaning, the spiritual meaning, the hope, the reality all mixed into one. Their architecture crosses faiths, intermingling signs in a manner society would never allow.

Today is jasmine plum. Jamun. Hot.

India sits with us on the train from Delhi to Agra. She runs rapidly outside the window. Gathering her sari around her, she runs along the heaving platform, out into the fields of millet and mustard seed. She is a companion on our train, but not a passenger. ‘First Chair’ is full of tourists eating bananas for breakfast. The women from a 60s Plus Ladies Tour from New Zealand smell of vegetable curry and have gentle beads of perspiration glistening down from their hairlines, like snail trails in the sun. They giggle at themselves for naughtily suggesting that the TukTuks of Delhi should shove their horns “up their bottoms” (mouthed). Amused; naughty. On an adventure.

My mother’s face glows in the light of the Taj Mahal. Our first Wonder of the World, for which there can be no words but those of our guide: like a beautiful woman, you want to see her everyday. She is a dowageress and a maiden. A mother and a virgin. Old and young. In catching her amber eyes in my own, I am told we have been Born Again (always capitalised). I am told this news with such sincerity that I wonder whether we should be eating birthday cake. Instead, we ate train curry and coconut sweets, chewing the white, sticky, sugar morsel delicately, delectably. India catches us up outside the window, never breathless despite the heat, her sari still hugged around her, her bare feet still running, running through the fields of corn.

It is hotter than I have ever been – 39 degrees, perhaps, at noon; at noon we stood in the Taj Mahal. We were alone – in a crowd – singled out by the great building like a lover at a party. The whale sighs, beached. Time cannot exist here. Karma exists; positivity is balanced by conscience and matter. The turquoise inlaid in the back of my new white marble elephant is a luck-charm for success.

If you close your eyes you can hear the monsoon. The water from the fountains under the mango trees makes it feel like the jungle.

We are in Udaipur. We watched the sun set over the palace. We drank martinis. We stand, now, under the palm trees – underneath the mango tree. I have a bindi and two hands full of henna. I have a silver herd of elephants parading around my wrist. I have ridden a camel (who knew they existed inside whales?), a real, enormous, sand-coloured camel like the ones on the packets of cigarettes. He wore crushed red velvet over his wooden saddle, and stood for a photograph in the middle of the road, stoic and steady in a sea of honking TukTuks and screaming school children. A giant celebrity; a brute in chaos. A one-creature circus, with a girl grinning a maniac, rip-roaring grin perched tinily on his back, her mother’s arms gripping tight round her waist.

Dragonflies lie dead on the pool. They mate on the wing. The hills are wrinkly elephant skins, sleeping. The clouds write Sanskrit across the bluegrey sky. Between the heart-shaped ears of a Marwari horse, the sunrise peaks in flashes of pink, like the bellies of salmon on the surface of a river. The heat is so swollen you feel like you’re inside a bee sting. My guide wears a bindi to protect him, instead of a riding hat.

Dragonflies mate on the wing. They are not dead on the pool, yet.

India smiles indulgently at our touristic pleasure. Her monkeys perch on rickshaw roofs; her peacocks sqwalk alarm calls to the early morning air. The romance is eclipsed by reality, but it is not a felt absence so much as a lack of presence.

I sit waiting for the flight from Jodhpur to Delhi. I wonder whether the human imagination is smaller than I had given it credit for. What once I thought was boundary-less now has a border closer to home. I am breathing its vivid reality. The scenes of films, of books, of paintings – perhaps not the limitless limits of music – they happen everyday. Between Somewhere and Nowhere, there are incessant drums and dirty dogs and delirious dancing in the street. Netherland and Neverland meet.

Starlight is a timeless Time, but it is a place. Before India, we hovered there for a while. I still believe in angels. Perhaps if the imagination is real, then fairytales really do come true. Since India, wilder things are possible.

India is Orange.