Udaipur is small, relatively speaking, and rises in layers around small, shallow lakes. It is strikingly beautiful. Many of the buildings are haphazard and crumbling, leaning on one another for support. From any rooftop, the domed tops of castles spread out against the sunset, the mirror of the lakes, the distant green hills. From the street, the city is laid out in a patchwork of tilted cracked walkways, which curl into one another so that even though the city sits along water, it is nearly impossible to keep your bearings.
Our days in Udaipur passed by in a whirlwind. We spent an afternoon pressed against a stone wall, watching as a band of monkeys, most with small and clinging babies pressed to their bellies, leaped back and forth above us, crawling along the outside of an abandoned building and eating bugs off of the bricks and one another, coming too close for comfort. We went to dinner at a Lonely Planet-recommended café that turned out to be the sunken, molding, mosquito-infested living room of someone’s home; there, an old man ignored us and shuffled back and forth from his armchair to the bathroom, watching Indian CNN, while his wife, toothless and silent, ushered us in, sat us down, brought us spicy rice and tender squash in small bowls, and then left for the evening with a friend. We shared the evening sky with bats so big they are called flying foxes; the roads with impossibly tall camels, with women in gold and red and blue saris driving small herds of donkeys.
In India I felt my blood pounding to the edges of my body: my skin, my hair, my dirty, sweating, disintegrating whole self on fire, inundated with sensation at every moment. I was at capacity. It still feels reductive and futile to put such a diversely sensory place into words; it also feels cowardly not to try.
My malaria medication doesn’t make me hallucinate, but it puts ordinary dreams into sharp and wild settings; it adds a little technicolor flourish. Lately, it is all I can do to see and smell and hear the surface level of the world around me. At night, I see it again through a subconscious kaleidoscope, the surreality of being where I am and the absolute simplicity of sensory perception combusting over and over so I wake, still exhausted, smelling masala already.
