![]() It was not until we left the docks and turned onto Christins Gate that we came to the point. And speaking of wrinkled skin, there were elephants in the parking lot where the bus dropped us off-two lumbering gray hulks with a baby between them, passing through like phantoms in the dusk, chains around their thick ankles, dragging in the dust. ![]() Somehow it is comforting, though, the joke about my new shoes, the scribbled note for drugs, and I can almost feel a slow deflation, picture the wrinkled skin and round pink scar like a third eye on the top of my foot. And I was right about the buckle, leave it flopping all though the safari, which is really an old bus packed with school kids and gets stuck in the mud after fifteen minutes, and then there is the whole drive back home in the dark blinded by screaming headlights and we fall into silence until Raj pulls up to a storefront doctor in town who glances at my foot while counting rupees and talking to a boy flat out on a cot behind a half-drawn curtain. I think it will explode any minute through the volcanic blister like Vesuvius, hot and nearly steaming. All I can think about is my foot and how I will never be able to buckle my sandal back on, how it looks like a ready-to-bust balloon or like the medical photos of elephantiasis that thrilled me as a kid. I stand on one foot while Raj chants with the priest, sips water from his hands, dots red to make a third eye and exchanges business cards. So now it’s throbbing as I limp barefoot into the dark temple toward the turbaned holy man gleaming with oil. It started as a red spot where the strap rubbed, then broke the skin, began to weep and swell the foot, the ankle, and the ointment I bought didn’t help and the streets, cow dung, garbage, puddles of pee and who knows what leaked in under the bandage. And here I must tell you about my foot-the blister from the sandals I bought the week before because the ones I packed had to be buckled every time I took them off to go barefoot in the temples as a matter of respect. But the refuge is closed for lunch and we have to take the safari, they call it, so in the meantime we drive to the temple that is very old and walk up a winding path to the yellow stone, guarded by red lions, and take our shoes off. To the Ghat mountains that are really hills by our standards. We drive in his little car, weave and honk along the two-lane potholed highways, pass three-wheel trucks grim with workers, motorbikes, auto rickshaws, flocks of sheep and pony carts. He says yes I will take you to the place where there are elephants. Red lions, piñatas, slanted air, thick plates of greywacke, bloodied pristine streets, home-cut hair, four-poster beds, salted flat-eyed fish & turbaned holy men gleaming with oil.īecause I’ve only seen them on nature shows or tail to tail in the circus, I tell Raj I want to see elephants up close, touch the gray skin, the speckles, the folds, feel the ground vibrate next to me.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |