Culture Shock
“A healing wind blows in India.”
- Banta Singh Sihota
Victoria, B.C. 1985
Early morning in a clearing mist and rising sun I am walking along a precarious crumbling curb carrying two year old Nika in my arms.
It is early January of 1986. The air is cold but the dry dusty street shows little sign of the night’s moisture. Karen follows close behind me with four year old Shannon in tow. We are leaving the hotel in Connaught Circle and walking into old Delhi towards the Red Fort, our first “tourist stop” in India.
I can’t believe these streets. The curbs are nearly a foot and a half high and breaking off in huge jagged chunks along the cement gully that passes for a sidewalk. It is not fully light yet. An ox cart creaks by pulled by two ancient white beasts of burden, the traffic weaving by around it.
At a bus stop ahead, a group of elderly sanyasins clothed in orange robes await the bus. They seem to have stepped out of another century and appear specter-like in the dim morning light.