Leaving the comfort of Pina Paita behind, we headed to our next destination.
I woke up at 6:00 a.m. with a whimper and chewed on a piece of cut mango that Kero-chan had given me for lunch, injecting sugar into my blurry head and waking me up from drowsiness. Packing my luggage quickly, I sat on the back of the motorcycle at 7:00 a.m. and headed for the airport, taking in the morning scenery of Chiang Mai. Today's flight was Chiang Mai-Bangkok-Bangalore-Coimbatore. Transfers were short and I had to dash every time I arrived at the airport. I thought I had completed all the procedures to apply for an E-Visa for India, but it was too late to do the advance check. 2 days ago I checked and could not find the visa document that should have been issued, so I sent an e-mail to the embassy, but they said “no”. However, since Japanese can apply for an arrival visa on the spot after arriving in India, I quickly changed my strategy to get it done within the transit time. I arrived at Bangalore Airport in South India and hurried to the arrival visa application counter. The transfer time was one and a half hours. When I arrived at the counter with a sense of urgency, I found an old man playing solitaire while staring at his smartphone with a relaxed face. "Is he serious?" After a few seconds, he finally turned his head toward me.
He handed me an application form, and I filled it out in scribble. It was a piece of cake because the content was only one-tenth of E-VISA. When I returned to the counter, he was still playing solitaire. I explained to him that I was in a hurry because of the short transit time, but he seemed to be more interested in the cards that were being rolled up. I handed him the application form, and he looked at it alternately with his phone and the document, and after a few moments, he handed it back to me. "Write down your return flight number,” he told me. I had not yet bought a return ticket because I wanted to take a trip where I did not dare to decide. I wondered what I should do, but I decided to fill in the flight number of the plane I took from Japan to Thailand. I went to the counter again, handed over the document, and immediately got an okay. I guess it is all right as long as something is written on it. I guess Solitaire in front of him is far more important than my documents or my schedule to return to Japan. My irritation toward Solitaire and the old man turned to gratitude when my goal was accomplished.
After going to the screening gate and answering a few more questions, I paid the visa fee of 4,000 INR (8,000 yen) and they finally pushed the slump. It took almost an hour, though. Only 30 minutes remained before the gate closed. After a short run, I went outside once, took a bus to another terminal, smoked only three breaths, and headed back to the airline desk. As soon as I got to the desk, I was told, “There is no time to check in your baggage. Just hurry up.” I ran as fast as I could.
Bangalore airport is quite big and crowded. It was a pity that my favorite lighter with a mushroom sticker was thrown away at the baggage check, but I gave up because I thought there was no time to protest,and finally I got to my seat just in time.
From the Coimbatore airport, I took a cab to a hotel near the bus stop where I would board tomorrow. Buses, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians were randomly overflowing onto the narrow streets. There were no lanes. I was worried that one person's fall could cause a major accident involving many others, but I realized that this was the “usual scene” here, and I felt a strange sense of stability from the locals who were moving along with harmony. I looked out the window at the view that was so stable in such an unstable place, and in no time at all, I was at my hotel. After checking in at the hotel, I found a restaurant on Google Maps that looked like a good place to eat local food. Other than my morning mango and super-sweet Krispy Kreme doughnuts I had bought in a hurry at the Bangalore airport, I hadn't eaten anything else. I was starving.
Stepping out of the room, I found myself in a different world. The busy road was a sandwich of stores, stalls, parked motorcycles, and people. I walked step by step, tracing with my eyes the path of people walking that was faintly left there. When I arrived at the restaurant, I looked at the menu but didn't understand it, so I ordered at random. Instead of a plate, a large banana peel was laid out in front of me, and they brought me a chapati with stir-fried chicken, onions, and chili. After that, he brought me chicken curry and veggie curry. As I was enjoying them deliciously, they brought me three more kinds and poured them over my plate. I wondered what kind of system this was, or perhaps there was no such thing as a pattern anyway. As long as the food looked good, they would bring me more one after another. All the dishes were very spicy, but because I like spicy food, I ate them all with relish. I threw away the banana peel, washed my hands, thanked the waiter and the kitchen, and left the restaurant. I was very satisfied with my meal. Compared to Thai cuisine, spices are more strongly asserted in Indian cuisine. Spices seem to be one of the ingredients.
On the way back to the restaurant, I walked along the opposite lane of the road I came from. While paying attention to the motorcycles rushing ahead, I had to watch my step. Trash, pipes, trees, holes, the ground was full of obstacles. As I was walking along in a good mood with a full stomach, I saw a toilet placed under a tree. At first I passed by it without difficulty, thinking, “Oh, a toilet bowl.” There was a toilet bowl under the tree that someone had thrown away because they didn't need it any more. It was not something that had been placed there recently, but had the appearance of having been there for a long time. It had the appearance of having been here for a long time. The discarded toilet had completely blended in with the road.
Why was it there? Who dumped it there? Did he get a new one and no longer need the old one, but was at a loss for a place to dump it, so he strapped it to his motorcycle in the middle of the night and quietly dumped it under a tree that looked just right? Even if he was going to illegally dump it, shouldn't he have chosen a better place? Or perhaps he did not throw them away, but rather placed them here on a dare. Did he offer his precious toilet bowl at the foot of a tree that seemed to be the incarnation of God?
When you go outside in the morning, you find a toilet bowl you have never seen before lying under a tree by the side of the road, which you had not even paid attention to. How does that make you feel? I wonder how many days people who pass this road on their morning commute have stopped paying attention to the fact that there is a toilet bowl there. The depth of the society as a whole that has decided to leave it as it is, as natural as it is, without touching it or removing it, is far beyond my imagination and shows me a different world. The toilet bowls that were used for doing one's business were no longer used and were left lying on the street, where they had remained for a long time. As I gazed at it for a while, a high-pitched bell rang out from somewhere, as if to return the chaos of my thoughts to a blank slate, “Welcome to India.
I thought I was going back the way I came, but after a little while I realized I had taken a wrong turn. However, I could see a large number of motorcycles and people between the walls in front of me. Wondering what it was, I went inside and found it was a temple. Music was playing in the main shrine at the back of the temple, and many people were crowding around. As I slowly entered the main hall, I realized that the sound I had thought was a recording was a live performance. The sound quality was indescribable, but all in all, it was a great setting. There were six women singing under the altar, a young man playing the tabla, a master-like old man clapping his hands, and several others playing some kind of instrument. There was a long, thick procession around the center of the altar, and after people finished praying with flowers and water, they went out like tokoroten, and then one by one people got in line. There were so many people that I doubted if there were any second laps or not.
I put my luggage in an empty space next to the performers and sat down among the people who had finished praying. The space was filled with music, prayer, meditation, religion, and the original purpose of playing sound, rather than music by performance. It was music that was not intended primarily for people to hear. In fact, when a piece of music ended, no one clapped or looked at the performers. Everyone was looking at the statue of God in the center of the altar and clasping their hands together in front of their chests. The performers were present in the temple as if they were an indispensable part of the temple. It was as if I had never experienced a space where religion had become so much a part of the “life itself” of the masses. It was a space of extreme beauty. I felt that when prayer becomes a part of the consciousness of society as a whole, humanity will be united and peace will be established in the world.
There is no such thing as a born evil person. Everyone is an imperfect being who occasionally says or does the wrong thing. I believe we already have the capacity to accept all people, even if we deny their actions, but never their existence. Even if someone throws away a toilet bowl on the street, you accept it. And you accept even the urinal placed there. It is always people's concepts that create problems. People create problems and people solve problems. If it does not even become a problem, there is no need to solve it. The toilet paper is not there because Indians don't need it, not because they don't have money to replenish it. On the way home, I saw the light of shining philosophy in the degree of Indian people, who are like a deep trench, not unlike Japan, which is like a small dish that is so riddled with all kinds of problems that they are nervous about not causing problems.
No use for it.
A toilet bowl
fallen on the road.
At the temple,
people are praying.
