We Are Animals

Lately the flies have been attacking all of us with such voraciousness, it can only be Time To Die. According to Abbass, who is familiar with the nature of the fly having spent most his life in Ladakh, the flies whip up in a frenzy right before the weather drops to a degree so cold they drop dead. And sometimes wind up in your water glass. I’m still waiting for this day.

We’ve taken out the mosquito net to ward them off, especially when Aamir and me are napping together in the afternoons. The worst is when they get caught in your hair, because then you not only hear the frenzied buzzing of a fly trapped in net of strands, but you feel the damn thing whipping around its tiny legs and wings next to your scalp. The feeling is so horrid, I wonder why they don’t use it as a torture technique for prisoners of war in the last hours of the interrogation. My shoulders would be raised in the hot chair screaming out all my spy connections if they dumped buzzing flies in my hair.

Having so many flies around makes one an expert observer of the fly. When I was falling in love with my husband, he would show off his athletic prowess by catching flies with his bare hands. A fly would be on the table, he would open his palm and snatch it off the surface. He would hold his closed fist in front of me for dramatic effect. “Do you think I caught it?” he asked. I would have no idea. He opened his fist, and the fly, probably dazed from what just happened, would waywardly fly off. And yes, my heart would swoon during this moment because I found the Fly Samurai.

(Later I found out that anyone can do this by knowing two things: When flies try to escape, they fly forward, so you can scoop them up from the direction of their head. Second, they fly slower in colder temperatures, so it’s relatively easy to catch them when the winter in Ladakh starts setting in. Making me think Love is really a sick, sick drug.)

The touch of flies has been bothering me so much like having pins pricking your skin at various frequencies. I glare at them and wish them death. While glaring I’ve noticed they actually have conversations and dance with one another. Do I dare believe these little minions of the earth have consciousness? Carry out acts of justice? I actually witnessed a fly, in complete and unadulterated rage, tackle another fly off the edge of the bed. It was incredible. You could hear an accelerated buzzing noise, and bam! It hit another fly and both of them fell off the perch of the rounded wood border of the bedframe. There was anger. But mostly it’s about friends greeting friends, eating frenzies, and trying to get at moisture wherever you can.

Aamir is learning about death through flies. Today he grasped a potentially disease carrying fly in his forefinger and thumb, and told it to ‘wak.’ (i.e. “walk”). It lay drowned in a pool of chai on the bottom of a tea saucer as he nudged it, coated so deeply in liquid it looked like a black lump. “Don’t touch it,” I told him. “Oh, and Aamir, it’s dead.” “What?” he said. “It’s DEAD,” I said. “And DON’T touch it.” He touched it again, before leaving the black speck alone because it didn’t do anything fun.

So much for providing a compassionate education that everything alive in this world comes to an end to my child. About two weeks ago, I stepped beside a fluffy dead puppy in the street. It had no indication of death except in its eyes, which were dried out. Dare I say that it was tragically cute to gaze at, my heart was tempted to go numb, and I told Aamir to simply “move on” after he asked what was going on with it. In the U.S. this would be an image of grave mortal and societal concern. In India, it simply happens and no one could have done anything about it because it was destined to die as such. I’ve had fellow Indians wide-eyed when I tell them about the bakeries and fashion stores in southern California devoted only to dogs. That was when Abbass’ culture shock hit an all-time high during the first months in the U.S. as I saw him nearly smack his face into the window of one such store and then bowl over when a dog wheeled by in a dog-stroller wearing a fairly nice sweater. The thing that gets him the most is the dog wheelchairs.

Apart from the flies and dogs, India is a verifiable zoo-fest of birth, living and death. This country is so replete with every type of animal braying and buzzing about you, giving birth, having sex, and dying in the gutters, it is hard not to face facts about mortality and that humans aren’t really the only ones on the planet, although everything about the American cities makes us want to forget that. In Delhi I was sitting at a small stall sipping my morning chai near the street when an elephant walked past. I might as well have been sipping coffee at a Manhattan deli and have a mammoth thunder past the glass window. It was that unreal to have this momentous animal take its huge steps past me while doing a regular morning ritual. (My chai did not show vibrations in its surface, however.) The extraordinary thing about these large creatures is that one was able to pluck a single French fry from my hand with the end of its trunk, and gave me the gentlest hug. An elephant blessed me several times outside a South Indian temple as my camera jammed up and wouldn’t take a photo until the sixth try. Its mehendi-painted trunk hovered over my head again and again until the whole act pretty much lost its aura and its owner looked annoyed. Still, I cannot help but be in awe of their size and even the way their shoulder bones move in great slow motions when they walk.

Unfortunately sometimes these encounters can turn into a porn-fest, like when two donkeys did their thing at a football game in the Leh polo ground one afternoon. There was a lot of yah-yah’s from the crowd of male fans. Worst of all are the monkeys, whose anatomy is so directly related to humans, it is pretty much like observing a live show in a red light district window. When I took a trip to Varanasi years ago, two little monkeys were doing it “doggy-style” while perched on top of a temple rooftop next to the most sacred river on the planet. I remember watching them, laughing and feeling embarrassed like when you watch a sex scene in a movie with your parents in the room, along with all the chai-wallahs and Hindu priests along the soft pink ghat, all of us coo-ing and gawking that life, well, always has the will to perpetuate itself.

Monkeys are everywhere in India. They are calculating, playful, crazy funny and malicious. They will gather on top of the hill to watch the sunsets. You can only surmise how much they are aware as humans are aware if they appreciate that level of beauty. They are expert thieves, as I lost a number of bananas and melons through windows. A monkey even stole my black bra from the laundry line. Abbass envisioned that monkey thief doing a provocative lingerie cha-cha while holding my bra to its furry chest as I fumed about it. One time I fed a monkey round, red berries off the coast of Bombay. I picked up one and handed it to a small monkey with a delicate face and circular black eyes. The moment I handed it over, it reached out its hand, and its thumb and forefinger met my thumb and forefinger. The touch of an animal thumb against my thumb made my breath suspend itself for a moment. The next immediate thought was, Darwin’s challengers were idiots.

So as the yak meets my gaze with calm solemnity, or the donkey brays next to my jeep, or as one contemplates how the cow can signify one’s mom, and how that rat became to be the size of a small dog, the ultimate lesson India has to offer is that life feeds on life, and you will come to know this intimately. There are the usual goat sacrifices at weddings to be sure; the furry fellow will often be munching on some leaves of grass while tied to a nearby tree while children pet it. The Hindu ceremony ensues, the goat disappears with a man wielding a large knife behind a bush, and next thing you know, its head is displayed on top of a rock while the pieces of meat are being divided up.

Among the streets of Leh, like among many streets in India, the butcher shops display all the parts of the animal. I’ve pointed the entrails and heads and hooves out to Aamir matter-of-factly, ID-ing which part is which, and he nods his head and absorbs it all without a wince or a whine of disgust. One butcher took a lower leg and pretended it was clopping towards Aamir on the table. Aamir wasn’t too amused. In Old Delhi the heads of the goats would be laid out in massive piles among the Muslim butcher shops, their eyes glistening and completely inert. I took black and white photos of them, and the resulting image, with all the sinews and veins and shining surfaces, would somehow morph into a thing of beauty. How we all are of the same flesh. What does it mean to be alive when you can study death like this? We are all made of these parts, the muscles and the tendons holding everything together in a delicate circulatory dance. How tenuous the surface of the body. How meaningless in a way, although while we’re alive we put so much meaning into it.

Facing the fact that life feeds on life, nothing beats going shopping for chicken in Leh. The difference between the U.S. and India is that I have to anticipate death while shopping for chicken. Can you imagine how to anticipate death? The butcher selects the clucking animal from its cage. I intensely read the newspaper used to wrap the meat to avoid the fact this man will have to kill this animal in order for me to eat it. Kashmir is getting worse these days. There were some honor killings in the eastern region of India by the women’s relatives. My mind sings newspaper lines to itself as the butcher disappears behind the dark blue floral curtain hanging languidly in front of a single faint bulb. When the deed is done, and the clucking goes silent, the thing I fail to anticipate, while carrying back the freshly killed meat wrapped in a single layer of newspaper, is that the meat is actually emanating warmth through my fingers. Now that is a little too fresh. Even my manly-man hubby, donning his tough guy shades and ordering the helpers about the house, scurries away at the prospect of buying fresh chicken for dinner. Wimp.