Читать книгу Painted Oxen - Thomas Lloyd Qualls - Страница 15

Sometimes I have trouble telling my dreams from reality. The farther I travel from some experience, the more unsure I am that it actually happened. Just like a dream, the closer I am to it, the more sure I am that it’s real.

Where is the line? How can I trust that my image of the world is not a trick of the brain? That the external world is certain and the internal is imaginary? What if it’s the other way around? What if the things I rely upon are actually made of air? Why is it that five people in a room witnessing the same event will have sometimes dramatically different accounts of what happened? Could there ever be such a thing as an objective truth?

I read a news story before I left the States about a man who regained his sight after having lived without it for decades. What he discovered was that his brain had forgotten how to see. He had perfect vision, but his eyes didn’t work. Things he could do effortlessly when blind became frustrating and laborious. Familiar objects became foreign, as if he awoke one day with a profound form of amnesia. Simply picking up a cup of coffee from the table took an extraordinary effort.

In a blind world, things like shape and texture are everything. So visual images meant almost nothing to him when he regained sight. In short, he was forced to create a whole new relationship between himself and every other object in his world. Maybe the rest of us could use this kind of radical perspective shift. Maybe it would help us see ourselves and the world more clearly. More and more I get the feeling that I really don’t know anything, that I’ve been sleep walking since I was a kid.

I had an experience when I was in Europe a while back, it’s known as a kundalini awakening. I was in an ancient underground chapel, meditating, when these flashes of light shot up from the base of my spine towards my head. My whole body was filled with a surge of electricity. I know, it sounds crazy, but unlike some things, I’m pretty sure this happened. Anyway, around the same time, I started having these dreams.

In one series of dreams, I am a lion. And I’m going about doing lion things. And when I wake up, I’m sometimes shocked to find myself in human form. For an instant, I think I’m dreaming. I think I’m a lion dreaming that I’m a man. Eventually, I get up and make coffee and brush my teeth and somewhere along the way I settle on a reality where I’m not a lion.

I guess my point is, if I can have dreams that I believe are real, especially while I’m in them, how’s that any different than what is happening right now? How’s it any different from what I believe is reality?

When I was a child, I secretly believed that the world I knew while I was asleep was the real world and that my waking life was really just a dream. I’ve set down that idea for long spaces at a time, but it always has a way of catching my attention again, of reminding me it’s still on the shelf, with the other forgotten distractions. I think it hangs around because I know there’s something to it. We dismiss and forget many of our childhood notions at our peril. The world is as big as our ideas of it.

Despite the vividness of some of my dreams, it’s usually hard for me to remember them with any consistency. Even the ones I remember have gaps in them. Sometimes large ones. Sometimes they are mostly gaps. Given what little information I am able to collect about the dream world, how can I really know anything about it?

Whatever some people might say, it seems to me that a world in which I can fly, bend space and time, and meet with people who have been dead for years, deserves more consideration than it gets. If I weigh the waking world on one side of the scale and the dream world on the other, which one is more substantial? Doesn’t a world of endless possibilities seem more likely to contain the whole of our lives than the fraction of the world that we call real?

****

I wake up on the floor. So I must have slept. And I probably incorporated the screaming Hindi television shows into my dreams. But I don’t remember them.

My friend from Down Under pulls himself upright and rests against his backpack. It is surprisingly peaceful in here. No television opera, no bustling crowds. Just the sleepy morning stretch of the slender light of dawn. Through the glass walls we see the city start to wake up. Hungry taxi wallahs are already lining up outside. Their scurrying about reminds me of watching an ant colony under glass. I watch our packs while the Aussie goes outside to find us a ride.

I’m a pretty confident traveler, but he insists that I beware of thieves. Not the type you’d imagine, thugs lurking in alleyways or pickpockets. Apparently, there’s a whole sub-economy here based on scamming tourists. For instance, there are more than a few taxi drivers who are paid to take you only to certain hotels, no matter where you tell them you want to go. So make sure you know where you’re going, set the price for the ride before you get in, and don’t pay a rupee more than agreed when you get out. It helps to know that there are generally three prices for everything: the Indian price, the Westerner price, and the naive tourist price.

The Aussie comes back in and says he found a ride for 150 rupees. That’s about three dollars and fifty cents U.S., he says, we can split it. So we grab our bags and he leads us through the tangle of cars and rickshaws crowding the pavement outside the airport doors. He scans the faces of the drivers until he finds the right one. We put our backpacks in the trunk and jump into the backseat. Next to the driver sits another man, whose purpose is unclear.

Even though the Aussie was specific about where we need to go, a short distance into the drive he realizes we’re going in a different direction. He sits up and says no, this doesn’t look right. He explains that we’re not going to a hotel, we need to go to the train station. (We’re not actually going to the train station of course. This is the trick the Aussie devised in self-preservation, because the place we want to go is near the train station. But if the driver and his friend in the front seat know we need a room, we won’t get to where we’re going.) The conversation escalates and the Aussie yells at them to stop the car and let us out. We get out, open the trunk and take out our backpacks. He throws 100 rupees on the ground in front of the driver. The driver is indignant and says he’ll call the police. The Aussie tells him to go ahead, he’ll be happy to report him. The driver calms down noticeably and says the police won’t be necessary, that this is an acceptable fee for the distance they drove us.

We walk a couple of kilometers, ask a few people for directions to the Paharganj, and make sure we get the same story from more than one person. The Aussie says that rather than look ignorant, most locals will just point in a direction, even if they don’t really know how to get to where you want to go. I’m starting to wonder what kind of shape I’d be in if I hadn’t met him.

There really are cows wandering the streets in India. Lying down in the middle of traffic. And pigs eating all manner of trash, including what the cows leave behind. Because nothing goes to waste here, locals also take advantage of the cow patties, scooping them up and forming them into flat, round disks which they then stick to the outside walls of their houses. When the patties dry, they are peeled from the walls and burned as cooking fuel in the open fire pits inside their huts. This is India’s recycling program.

Eventually we find the Paharganj, and along with it, a string of guest houses for backpackers. Crowded with cafés, chai stalls and spice wallas, the Paharganj is also the area’s main bazaar—where the locals sell all types of handmade goods, saris, and shawls, as well as a trove of souvenir items. Bridging the past with present, it sits right between Old Delhi and New Delhi. If you’re a Buddhist, you might think of it as the middle road, to a Catholic, maybe it’s purgatory. For me, it’s the perfect place to explore the in-between world of the land of dreams.

We’re here before anything is open and roll-down steel doors line the whole street. It looks like a long strip of storage units. Adding to the scenery, there are crumbling brick facades and outdoor urinals. An old man sleeps on a rope bed in an abandoned structure without a roof. And in the middle of the street a large pile of garbage has collected for so long it has become a traffic median. Several pigs feast on the spoils. And there is no way to describe the smells. The Aussie is walking a couple of paces in front of me, but he turns and grins as he looks at me. A little culture shock? He asks. I nod reluctantly.

After walking around to a half dozen guest houses and asking questions at each, the Aussie is satisfied with one. For what the taxi ride should’ve cost, we get rooms for the night. After we check in and clean up a bit, we meet in the café on the ground floor and order up some omelets and chai. I can’t believe there’s actually a café in this place. The Aussie complains about the prices a little, 60 rupees for an omelet, but the food is way better than the walk in would indicate. And I begin to learn that cost is relative to place. He says I have to forget what things cost in the States and learn what they are worth here, so I don’t get ripped off. It becomes an art for backpackers. Some even take it to extremes, like opting to sleep on the open roofs of guest houses, rather than pay for a room. These frugal purists will haggle over the price of almost everything, not satisfied until they know they’ve chiseled the profit margin down until it’s see-through.

There’s another conversation that often gets layered over the one about what things are worth in India. It’s the one about what things should be worth. Should the world be flat? Should money be the same everywhere? And what does that do to culture? Some would say America has homogenized too much already. Leave things as they are. Others would say that’s just veiled xenophobia, that these people deserve a higher standard of living. I’m on the fence. But I don’t have a lot of money, either. And this is one of the few places left in the world where a guy like me can still do this kind of traveling.

None of this money-talk matters to me right now though. All the excited anxiety of travel, all the wondering if the planes will be on time, if me and my luggage will both get to where we’re heading, if I’ll be able to figure out how to get around once I get there, all that’s gone. I’m there. Or rather, here. Unless of course, this is a dream.