Delhi

India.

Heavy wet heat and teeming streets. Construction workers napping using broken slate for a pillow, beggars, businessmen in impossibly starched suits, and cripples. Cows. Crumbling sandstone monuments hidden between jungle-trees and spectacular birds.

I'm staying in the YMCA tourist hostel in New Delhi until Tuesday, enjoying monkeys' morning antics and ogling the deliciously clear swimming pool. The beds are firm enough to remind me of Tibet, but, here in the tropics, the food has seven-million times more fire.

I visited Delhi when I was fifteen, and it's a very peculiar and dream-like sensation to retrace my steps of six years ago. Perpetual deja-vu.

It's exciting to be back in India with all of its color and vividness, and Delhi is fascinating, but I find myself oddly eager to settle in in Bodh Gaya. I've been on the move a lot lately, you see, and I'm ready for sit for a while, reflect, and wage a war of peace with my unkempt mind.