Stew

The other day there was an extremely heavy monsoon. I was alone at the office and had to make my way over to the house. It's only about a five minute walk but it was raining extremely hard. I grabbed the umbrella, rolled my pant legs and stepped onto the flooded streets.

My initial plan was to hop between the raised parts of the uneven asphalt, and the sloped driveways but this soon proved inadequate. I was soaked and the streets I needed to go down were utterly flooded.

As I've mentioned before the streets of India are not like Canadian streets. They are covered in cow and dog dung and strewn with litter. There are no garbage cans on the sides of streets, rather there are garbage piles which the cows graze on.

Now all this filth which I had skirted in the past was floating in the brown stew of the flooded streets. Well there was no point on dwelling on something like that, so I stepped into the murky water, which was only about half way up my shins at the highest part. Little cigerette boxes floated around my ankles, and who knew what was floating around my toes.

I came onto one street where two little boys were playing in the brown water, bathing their legs in it. Two soaked girls came splashing past me saying, "Hi Didi!" (Didi means sister.) There was a festive air amongst these kids and I grinned back at them. Two boys had found an old peice of sterofoam and were using it as a raft to float along the roads, flailing and falling about it. Sometimes you just have to forget what's in the water and swim.

(And no, I didn't swim. I meant that metaphorically.)