It has been three weeks and like a whirlwind tour....
fatigue takes the better of me now, it's more of the mind, and the body obliging the blunted neurons.....
many lessons learnt and unlearnt as well.....
And i don't know how my sense have jarred, but they have...
the inside of my mouth pains with excess of nicotine and grief, the inability to open my mouth and do something, anything for the people who recounted their stories to me, lives of people opened up like never before, and never encountered in history books, sometimes making one-liners in newspaper references after they have died a painful death...
people who were men and women, now chased like dogs, hounded like witches, bodies deposed in pits where the souls lose their way....
is this 'incredible India?'
Callouses form hard, and I am insensitive to pain, acting as a foreigner who shrieks at unimaginable sights with glee, and readies the camera out of her bag....
Grief?! for what?
In the course of learning about HIV/AIDS, people who die like flies in the UP countryside, and gargantuan words sp-oken with little effects and apathy by government functionaries and NGOS alike, i dreamt, slept and dreamt again of the lucknow labyrinths....
the shoes of the Nabab are still there.
Am i hallucinating?!
And fluttering doves, collapsing columns, melting heat....
wafting smells from the medical college morgue....
there is a man moving in the heat, painted green and red- a living hoarding for the samajvadi party, for there are to be elections in Uttar Pradesh
But there is warmth inside the labyrinths, and it costs only twenty rupees if you don't take a guide....who needs a guide anyway?
There's warmth inside the labyrinths, and darkness, for the passages to the underground have been sealed off after 1857.
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