Delhi thus far has been a city of countless heartbreaks. Between the beggars, the trash-picking children, the hordes of malnourished street dogs, and the awareness of my own opulence, I fluctuate between emotionally steeling myself and being rocked by waves of helplessness and sorrow.
There is so much to take in here—each moment is a new inundation of movement, noise, oppressive heat, small and large injustices. Each time I step into a temple and walk into miraculous quiet, I nearly fool myself into believing my sense of empathy can stand another day of walking these streets.
I do not want to be hard hearted, but it is very much a pick-your battles, pick-your-heartache kind of place. Sitting under a tree at the Red Fort yesterday, seeking shade and respite from the blistering heat, I found myself torn between enjoying the amazing compound and feeling sorrow for a street dog that sauntered in. With ribs popping, an open wound, panting, the dog found his own piece of shade and rested. After about ten minutes, he started wandering through the enclosed garden, approaching, but never completely coming to the families similarly finding space in the shade. He nosed around like any friendly, abused, domesticated dog would, looking for attention, but warily remote, knowing better than to come too close.
It was just a dog. Street dogs and people seem to be in equal numbers here. But feeling I could really do nothing for this half-starved, street-wild, lonesome dog stung me. I can do nothing lasting here—while short-term fixes risk dog bites, theft, or other threats to personal safety. I may momentarily salve my conscience with a handout, but I can’t give the garbage-picking children health or an education. I can’t mend the feet of the shoeless beggars I pass daily. The magnitude of this place breaks me, and it happens with each sad situation I see, that I am helpless to resolve.
I wonder how people live amongst daily tragedy and sustain any compassion. The god of small things seems to even be failing at that here. Nevertheless, we find people who are gentle, despite the aggressive pace of this city; who are kind when self-preservation would seem to require one be hard.
As we meandered through a Jain temple yesterday, shoeless in religious observance, we wandered haphazardly into the temple’s avian hospital. Barefoot and acutely aware of air and foot-borne disease, we were welcomed into a cage-lined room where the smell of ammonia and bird shit was only matched by the clatter of the patients. Mangled, injured and malformed birds that otherwise would meet certain death squawked and flopped in their cages. A few, with impossible birth defects made me momentarily wonder what Darwin might think of caring for the weakest of the species.
On the floor, along the second row of cages, sat a man spoon-feeding a soggy-downed hatchling. He had wisely and more hygienically retained his sandals for this part of the temple complex, but I could see his feet were calloused, cracked and grey, like so many people in this city who have enough, but still tolerate discomfort that most Americans would find intolerable.
He was Jain, of course, the sort who really do use brooms to spare insects from dying underfoot. Relative to most, he was bound to be careful with life. But he needn’t spend the afternoon painstakingly saving that baby bird. In a place of so many horrors, he chose to mend a tiny life.
There are so many small sorrows that could numb a person, but there are also minor miracles—and patient souls create them.While I am unsure where god is in all this, it is the moral weight of simple human activity that can allow a person to face her own smallness and powerlessness intact.
