The Worrier's Guide to the End of the World by Torre DeRoche

Author:Torre DeRoche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2017-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

15

MASHA GOT OUT of the airport taxi wearing a hot-pink scarf draped over her shoulders, her pale face enshrouded in a rose of magenta. We hugged for the first time in three months on a Delhi street.

“We’re in India,” I noted, pointing to our scenery, which was thrilling and terrifying and gorgeous and awful and every other adjective squished together to make up the world’s longest portmanteau.

Her body was rigid to the touch. “Torre… I… this place is…” was all she could manage. After only an hour in the country, she looked like a cat that had been tossed into a bath. “This place is…”

It was the home of the past, the future, and every other place in between. With so many people and such limited space, the new had to take residence upon the old in order to exist: buildings stacked upon buildings, adverts pasted over adverts, shops spilling into shops, men sitting on one another’s laps in rickshaws… My eyes made their way from a scabby dog to a woman in a jeweled emerald-green sari, a delicate tail of vibrant silk behind her, her cat eyes unbothered by the crush of humans. She was staggeringly beautiful, perhaps made more so against a backdrop of unapologetic havoc. I kept my eyes on her until the throng swallowed her up.

“Overwhelming?” I offered.

Each traffic-clogged street was lined with buildings teetering skyward in clustered tangles, their walls held together by a mess of electrical wires and layers of ancient gunk. Not a single square inch was boring. It was absolutely thrilling. I just didn’t know if hiking through it was the smartest idea.

“Torre, I don’t… I mean… this place is… I can’t…” She paused to find her words. “People always tell you India is confronting. I’ve read so much about this place and knew it would be difficult to walk through, but…”

We both squealed as we leapt out of the way of a car pushing straight into the crowd, fist to horn and bumper to flesh, trying to cleave space for itself to pass through.

“… but apparently cars drive straight into people here, and I didn’t know about that part. And I really like it when my body isn’t bleeding and broken, you know?”

The air we breathed was not so much oxygen as it was a muddy brown syrup of mixed pollutants that tasted like a pack of grit-filled cigarettes. Piles of toxic plastics smoked on the roadside. Passing trucks coughed up great burps of smoke that had nowhere to dissolve in the pea-soup air. Even the yell of car horns seemed to get trapped in the soup, resonating a constant discordant wahhhhhh like a bad case of tinnitus. The smells could not blow away either, and they floated like invisible stench bombs that would explode over my face with unimaginable awfulness. As we walked down the street, I smelled the worst thing I’ve ever smelled in my life. A few steps later, I smelled something even worse than that.

This hike was going to be the opposite of John Muir’s idea of adventure.

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