There was a plague in India in 1994. It sounded dangerous, in a romantic way. Those of us on the semester abroad trip remained in Sri Lanka for an extra week while the group leaders faxed the college and the college administrators faxed our parents who were no doubt baffled by what it all meant. A plague on the other side of the world?
This was before Instagram and hashtags and the collective consciousness of Facebook.
It’s worth noting that maps of the world, hung in classrooms in Sri Lanka, did not center the United States. I traveled 12,000 miles to learn that I had not, in fact, grown up at the exact middle of the universe.
The college eventually decided that to be safe, the students would fly to Madras and take a charter bus to Delhi, driving around Surat where the bubonic infection raged. Sleep deprived and sweating in the South India heat, we bought snacks from street vendors, drank from questionably sealed water bottles, sang lewd songs, and bickered amongst ourselves, already sick of our traveling companions.
The plague was a thing of rats and poverty, of a few “Stay Safe, Stay Home” style signs and a lot of rumors. We wrote hasty letters home on blue aerograms. Saw the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, the desert on a camel trek. We took weekly antimalarial tablets, which were possibly worse than any plague (the headaches, the nightmares, the depression, the stomach cramps) but we had nothing to compare it to. We bought jewelry, smoked bidis, spoke fragmented Hindi that jabbed and splintered in our mouths.
In Aghra, I befriended a cab driver and let him take me to lunch, where he touched my hand, my knee, my braided hair. He slipped a note under my hotel room door asking me to meet him that night.
I didn’t.
The next day he drove me to a rug shop to look at fine carpets, and then he stole my credit card.
There was a bubonic and pneumonic plague in South-central and Western India. Health officials were tipped off by all the dead rats. Between August 26 and October 18 there were 693 suspected cases but only 56 deaths. Rat deaths weren’t counted.
No death is “only” a death.
In Varanasi, I woke at dawn to take a boat ride on the Ganges. The sunrise through the smoke of the burning ghats was an orange smear. Flowers choked the dank water. Death was everywhere. River of death, air of death. I got sick in the squat toilet of my hotel room and crawled into bed without scrubbing the soot from my skin.
There was a plague of lice among the college students. A plague of filthy laundry and homesickness washed away with marijuana-infused smoothies.
In Kajuraho, I befriended two Americans: an uncle who told me the raunchy joke that turned out to be the crux of “The Aristocrats,” and his college-age nephew. We toured the Kama Sutra temples, bought pornographic key chains, drank tall bottles of Lion beer. We talked about New York and Paris, but not Surat.
No one we knew went to Surat. It wasn’t on the spice road or silk road. It wasn’t a beach party in Goa or a Buddhist temple in Sarnath.
Running low on cash, I traveled to Jaipur with the nephew, planning to share a room. He paid for a rickshaw and a hotel. We missed dinner and fell into bed hungry.
There was a plague of regret. I mapped India in mistakes. I documented my poor decisions with purple ink in a dogeared journal. I took photos of monkeys, children, and rainbows. I left the nephew while he was sleeping and escaped into the day with my backpack and my attitude.
In town, I met two guys with motorcycles who offered to take me to the Jaigarh Fort. We walked the walls and visited the cannons because that’s what one did. I made notes for a paper later.
Surely there would be a paper due, if we survived the plague.
On the way back to town, one of the motorcycles broke down. I rode behind the guy on the broken bike while the guy on the working bike followed. He kept an outstretched foot on our bike, pushing it downhill. We wove in and out of painted elephants moving like a parade. As if it was the most normal thing, to fly downhill, motionless, among the circus and the sights and bright birds that couldn’t be captured on film. Only in memory. And even then, fleetingly at best.
Alli Marshall is a poet, performer, writer, editor, filmmaker and creative community builder. She’s interested in moving writing beyond the page, seeking the golden in the mundane, finding the intersection of art and social justice, and reconnecting with mythology — both ancient and modern. She recently released her spoken-word mixtape, “Bury the pennies and hoard the rain,” on Bandcamp.com.
