:india:

PHOTO: NUSRAT DURRANI

After 21 planes, 7 trains, 18 taxis and 55 variations of sky I'm back to the slow magic infuriating inequity, illogical reality stranger than any fiction, the too-loud airport music with its many flavors of the same endless nightmare Bollywood-lite song, the cold-blooded, heartbreaking murder of secularism, the orange God men ministers with guns and gasoline blood, the treacherous video game traffic, the goddess women and superstar children and vicious monkeys and sacred cows, the holiness of everything, the miracle in everything, the nonsense in everything, the beauty in everything, the wild exasperating crookedness, and deadly violence and inexplicable kindness, the otherworldly faces, places, and humid embraces of the only country in the world where darkness and light and joy and strife and ugliness and beauty and life and death, loudspeakers gone mad, unhinged animals and 68 types of its 1.3 billion humans speaking in 250 tongues rush to seize your throat as you set foot on its surreal ground: