just your normal commute

On the drive home Tuesday I looked up at one point, saw something large in the street with a guy sitting on it, and thought, "Hmm. Elephant." Then I went back to reading my novel (Sons and Lovers, if you must know; my literary tastes are nothing if not hifalutin, as Dan likes to tease me about).

Then today on the drive home I looked up and I knew something was weird, because a bunch of guys were walking across the street amid heavy traffic (that part is not the weird part) and they held their hands up to indicate that cars should slow down for them and the cars did slow down. This is unheard of. And then I looked a little behind them, saw that some other guys were pulling a rickety hand cart with a corpse and some flowers on it, and I thought, "Hmm. Dead guy."

As long as we're discussing my reading habits, I should confess that in two of the hifalutin novels I've read in the last week or so, people have used the expression "do the needful" (or at least said something similar involving the word 'needful'). Now, I had in the meantime figured out that this was not just something that the crazy Indian people had made up to make me laugh, and that in fact it was a somewhat archaic British-ism, of which one encounters many on this here subcontinent. But it still made me light up with glee to see it being used by Somerset Maugham and Jane Austen (in Of Human Bondage and Northanger Abbey). Come to think of it, I believe it made an appearance in Howard's End as well. (You can tell the internet has been out a lot this trip, can't you? I have been reduced to reading actual books.)

Another recent literature/India light bulb moment came while I was reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle--a graphic indictment of, among other things, the scandalous living and working conditions in early 20th century Chicago. There were a startling number of passages that made me think, "Hmm. That sounds like India now." Oh what the hell, here's some of what I am talking about:

[T]here were no pavements--there were mountains and valleys and rivers, gullies and ditches, and great hollows full of stinking green water. In these pools the children played, and rolled about in the mud of the streets; here and there one noticed them digging in it, after trophies which they had stumbled on. One wondered about this, as also about the swarms of flies which hung about the scene, literally blackening the air, and the strange, fetid odor which assailed one's nostrils, a ghastly odor, of all the dead things in the universe.

You know...that sort of thing.