By Sarah Stankorb
My guts were being ravaged by angry Delhi parasites. I couldn’t sleep for five nights, haunted as I was by waves of begging children and the woman who trailed me, hand extended, pleading please for money to feed her baby. At night, the infernal pre-monsoon heat alleviated right about when the street dogs below our window began fighting. I imagined them with emaciated bodies, teeth-snapping in a canine skirmish over the very scraps that had infected my intestines with liquid fire.
Without any critical thought, I’d taken Lonely Planet’s suggestion to stay near a Tibetan colony, Majnu-ka-Tilla, in northern Delhi. The fetid stink of the city—its open sewers, and even the Yamuna River winding near our hotel—filtered over a busted window air conditioner. Drowsily in the morning, I noted with little surprise that an army of gnats had hatched from inside the machine’s sultry belly.
This was my India. I’d thought I’d find my soul in the midst of the exotic. Here, caste was real; poverty, more intense and brutal than my imagination could fathom. I’d had callow ideas about contributing something, giving back to orphans and the sick—Mother Teresa with a backpack.
In India, I was supposed to find faith in something. Now, in a semi-delusional, sleep-deprived stupor, I lay next to my husband, glaring sourly at the dark ceiling and wishing we were home. I’d become that most dreadful of archetypes: the bitter American abroad.
Eventually, our digestive systems acclimated and my husband dragged me, most unwillingly, from the hotel. “This was your crazy idea,” he said, hailing a rickshaw.
Delhi felt like a supersaturated liquid. The city held more life than it seemed any place could at its natural capacity. Fleetingly, I considered the many books I’d read anticipating this trip. The God of small things could only be overburdened into ineffectuality here.
We meandered into the Digamabara Jain temple, shoeless in religious observance. A sign indicated that the temple housed an avian hospital. A sulfurous fug watered our eyes, but barefoot and acutely aware of air- and foot-borne disease, we shuffled into a cage-lined room. If the streets of Delhi are a cacophony, that room replicated the sound but at a higher register, as mangled, injured and malformed birds squawked and flapped in their cages. A few with hideous birth defects momentarily made me wonder what Darwin might think of this religious sect caring for the weakest of the species.
On the floor, along the second row of cages, sat a man spoon-feeding a soggy-downed, bent-necked hatchling. He had wisely, and more hygienically retained his sandals for this part of the temple complex, but I could see his feet were calloused, cracked and grey. My gaze fell to my own pink feet, on tiptoe to avoid the worst of the room’s smeared bird droppings. The tenderness of my flesh was a small indicator, marking the ease of my life.
The man, heavy-lidded and impossibly aged, nodded in welcome, then with great care, steadied drops of milky liquid into the bird’s yawning beak. They were drops of compassion in so much as they were nourishment.
When I’d left for India, my head was filled with the loose idealizing that drives so many Westerners to overheated yoga classes and landed the Beatles in Rishikesh (and their own subsequent disillusionment) so many years ago. It’s the ethos of “conscious” consumption that makes Eat, Pray, Love so appealing to the Oprah generation—we can travel, tour and pick from the best of the world’s cultures to assemble a fulfilling hodgepodge in our spiritual shopping carts.
Instead, my feet awash in bird feces, I found that amidst the clatter of life’s miseries, it’s a steady hand that creates miracles.
I smiled at the man and his pretzeled bird. His stoic face crinkled as he broke into a half-toothless grin. I took a deep breath, as years of yoga had conditioned me to do, and promptly choked. The man chuckled and waved an arm in the international sign for Man, this place stinks. Entirely unaware that he had first taught me a spiritual lesson and then brought me back to reality, he went back to ministering to the bird.
Sarah Stankorb’s work has appeared in Salon, The Morning News, Mindful Metropolis, Skirt and Geez Magazine.
