It is Sunday in Guwahati , Assam, and it is monsoon season. The latte brown water from yesterday’s brief but powerful monsoon downpour is subsiding in today’s bright breezy sunlight. I am watching from my 4th floor hotel room’s window as a colorful and musical parade of young people marched along the street below. They carried banners and hand painted signs proclaiming “Peace” and “Non-Violence,” and looked jubilant and at ease in the heat, each group dressed in different types of native dress.
The first set marchers wore white robes with electric turquoise scarves and matching umbrellas (against the sunlight). Then came embroidered woven tunics that looked like they might be made of wool and reminded me of Andean dress. Then came people in red and white with spectacular headdresses that had at least 15 two-foot long sticks sticking out of the top, each stick wrapped in blue fabric and topped with what looked like a bright red golf ball.
Each set of like-clad youth was followed by at least as many soldiers, who looked even younger than the paraders. The soldiers were all in deep green, marching in two parallel lines, and trailing off into pairs of boys talking and laughing. On the young soldiers’ berets were big yellow pom poms that flapped as the gossiping pairs spontaneously and erratically sprinted to catch back up to the parade.
I thought the soldiers were bringing up the rear, but as soon as I went back inside, I would hear new music – flutes this time, or different drums or songs. I would run back out again and see the next portion of the parade, in the same formation but with different costumes. And with the same straggling, grinning soldiers behind them.
At least four of these mini parades passed by the “fly over” (overpass) construction site that comprises most of my view from the hotel. In the background, there is a four-story Government of India drug testing laboratory in pepto bismol pink with a bright yellow sign and currently a green and brown pond of stubborn monsoon water occupying its driveway.
I am staying “home” today for the second day in a row to rest and get over a bad cold. Our team occupies three bedrooms on this third floor hallway, and today one person from each room is home sick. The other two have stomach ailments. This is all par for the course for traveling in India paired with working hard and moving around a lot, I gather.
I am enjoying the quiet in my room. Well, the relative quiet anyway. I mentioned the parades, but really even without the parades, India in my experience has been consistently at parade decibel level. Right now, the ceiling fan is whirring and trucks are trundling over the rocky construction-site road outside the hotel. Someone is hammering, motorcycles rev their engines, and every single passerby, be it bicycle rikshaw, motorized rikshaw, motorbike, truck, van, car or cow (strolling right down the middle of every busy road), is making a noise as it passes. There are squeaky breaks, clanking chasis, bike bells and car horns of every style possible.
The variety of horns is impressive really. There are Herbie the Love Bug toots, foghorn blats, muted bleats, confident New York City taxi style honks, and one that I keep hearing sounds like it is meant to be a melody, but is painfully loud and flat, like someone playing bagpipes. And me, I am watching and listening from my blue-tiled refuge, and contributing to the noise by singing to myself.
-Sonya