leave today have room for a bit 'of creativity' literature. Here is a commissioned piece by the writer and poet Anna Manna for an anthology. Anna Manna edited an article / interview on my experience of "live only" for the October / November of LA, The Journal of Lazio. E 'annoyingly abused cliché that travel helps to know yourself.
However, I can confirm that through several trips in about 39 years of life, especially when the trip began to coincide with my daily life, I have come to a vision / knowledge even "radical" of myself as a "man very oriental!
Born in Rome, sometimes called "Levantine" I started to love the size of the trip at the end of high school, living the first inter-rail travel - backpacker and sleeping bag - with a cheap train ticket for a month, Europe as a whole.
Since that time, including, in all my cells, the enormous potential of travel to engage a process of consciousness expansion. So not only mundane, but the educational potential psychological, anthropological and "integral development".
the academic year the attraction for the trip began to magnetize the East, for a more psychological, more anthropological and deeper integral growth.
I quote from my forthcoming book in which, among other things, carry- some of my experiences had on my first trip to India: "It is very hard bombay, told me [the driver], starting with the unmistakable aroma of betel that emanated from his mouth." It was 1998.
I had just come readily to direct me to the airport in Bombay to Poona, Rajneesh Osho's ashram and write my thesis in sociology of religion.
The impact of the town was very "nose." Today, Indian airports (at least the main ones) are worthy of a country that is becoming, despite the persistence of many of its contradictions and inadequacies, an indisputable political and economic centrality in the world. Then they were still the "barracks" and il primo odore che si sentiva, uscendo dall’aereo era, piuttosto, un “cocktail di odori”.
Potremmo quasi dire che c’era, innanzitutto, “odore di caldo”. Il caldo-umido era difatti talmente omnipervasivo che raggiungeva anche l’interno delle narici, vi aderiva e le intrideva e loro, in qualche modo, lo decodificavano mentre venivano investite, al contempo, dall’odore di frutta tropicale marcia e di fogna.
Ricordo distintamente questo cocktail olfattivo, appena giunto a Bombay e, appena incontrato il tassista che mi era stato spedito dall’ashram (allora era abbastanza sconsigliabile affidarsi ai tassisti locali per un viaggio di circa 3 ore nelle strade del Maharastra), l’iniziazione Bethel smell: pleasant, fresh, intense, spicy. Giving me a little hyperbole 'reckless, I think it can also be considered a kind of olfactory equivalent of the color red. It has the same, strong vibration that leads straight to the thought of blood. It seemed, in fact, what I saw blood spitting from the bike, by tuk tuk (small three-wheeled taxi, derived from the model Ape Calessino curiously, created in 1948 by Piaggio) or the deafening traffic and pedestrians in congested Bombay while he was still , betel, a red suit that Indians chew with obsessive frequency, stimulates salivation and thus gives the spit, a red-vivo, in principle, can also make impression. More than one person (including me), just arrived in India, had the feeling of having arrived in a country physically.
It also bears witness to a character in my novel A Garden of Eden, set half in India: Daddy, a veteran of country and soul searching. One night, rummaging in his memoirs, tells the protagonist (Siddhartha), "the first time I was in India, thirty years ago, I arrived at Delhi station ... it was something 100 times worse than today. On land there were red spitting everywhere, they can not walk, there was an inch off. I did not know then that the Indians chew betel all the time [...] and then spit streams that seem bloody everywhere. I thought they were all physically and I was afraid, then I decided to trust and think of me is what must be, and soon after, I discovered that I had worried needlessly. [...]. "
That journey from Bombay to Poona, in March 1998, was memorable. The impact of sound and smell of the city was above and was maintained until the exit dall'ipertrofico conurbation. Even the smell of tropical fruit march, still smell of sewage which was added the smell "often" smog that enveloped the city in a gray-brown halo.
The great revelations of my first trip to India, which lasted more than two months, were the grace, femininity and the sensuality of Indian women. I remember I was looking for looks, soft and elusive, passionate, melancholy, alluring and sensual. The eyes and also tried the nose, when I passed by. I do not think I ever caught their scent trails. Rather than "odor of saris, cleaning sober shades of stench of sweat. The sweat of a dark-skinned and spicy food. A smell unobtrusive, and just decided, however, inspiring. Arouse the curiosity to take the bodies to the nose in order to discover the peak intensity.
move a few miles to the south, more defined nose has been the recent experience in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan bus, with whom I are often found along Colombo, are a good source of odor. The use of the singular is not accidental. Women (usually very feminine, wearing saris or large, comfortable and modest skirts of cotton) that go up and down - often when the bus is in slow motion - the doors always open, nearly all bear the smell of soap strong fragrance. Their skin, strengthened by the sun, does not ask for a mild soap. The fresh scent and decided that soap is fairly uniform on the island crowds (to use a definition of Tiziano Terzani). Recurs consistently pleasant but predictable, while not losing, in turn, sensuality. Another applicant
smell, Sri Lanka, is coconut. In daba (inns) but also in shops of bakery products is relentlessly at home as the result, reperibilissimo island, is used in almost all the local cuisine. In my first visit, three months, I was privileged to discover the main mode of use.
I started working with a major Sri Lankan NGO, Sarvodaya, founded in the 50s to bring basic services like water, electricity, first aid clinics and small schools in inland areas is completely left to themselves, in the tropical forest. I lived in the headquarters of the organization, Moratuwa, a town that, in reality, it seems more a suburb of Colombo. The weekend felt the need to leave the urban dimension and reached Gampaha, just 45 minutes from the capital, a time to spend, often standing on a train you can remember our subway lines, except that he ran, regularly, with the doors open. Ran along riccoverdi landscapes where rice fields or rivers quietly broken souls intensity of coccheti and lush banana trees. He ran and stood in sub-stations, preserved by the cold anonymity of our small stations in Europe, colored and sober life.
Gampaha is a small town like many in the swelling of the forest of Sri Lanka. With its Buddhist temples and churches, its markets, daba “moscheolenti”, i suoi tuk tuk, i vestiti sobri e pudichi delle donne, le loro lunghe capigliature nere, qualche cane malandato, qualche insegna di compagnia telefonica, poca ressa, poche smanie, poco clamore. Il distretto di Sarvodaya rimane un po’ fuori città. È costituito da un paio di edifici a piano unico su un francobollo di terreno preso in prestito alla foresta.
Un terreno con un vecchio pozzo, un paio di tettoie per poche bufale e qualche vitello, dove si aggirano visibili, nel verde, un grosso gallo bianco e più discrete galline. Nel distretto vive Nimal-Aya con la moglie e due figli maschi, di 7 e 14 anni. Persone semplici, in simbiosi con il loro ambiente naturale. Il francobollo di terreno dà loro l’indispensabile per vivere: le banane (da mangiare crude o cotte), i jack fruits (da mangiare crudi o cotti), il latte delle bufale e le immancabili noci di cocco. Scoprii presto, nella primitiva cucina della moglie di Nimal-Aya (dove si utilizza solo legna), un utensile quasi altrettanto primitivo, a manovella, per raschiare scaglie di frutto dall’interno delle noci aperte. Le scaglie vengono mescolate con dell’acqua che ne acquisisce il sapore. Questa, mischiata con altra acqua spremuta dall’impasto delle scaglie, viene usata nella cottura di quasi ogni pietanza. Ecco l’odore così ricorrente, identificativo nelle mie memorie, assieme a quello di sapone, del paese. Odori che ritrovo con amore ma che non riesco a dissociare dalla sensazione di una certa “prevedibilità”.
In India, invece, qualunque dimensione, finanche olfattiva, è più contrastata, come testimonia questo breve passaggio da un brano in cui descrivo il mio primo impatto con Varanasi, città indiana in cui sono arrivato nel 2005 e dove ho messo alcune solide radici:
«L’impatto con Varanasi coinvolge tutti i sensi […]. All’uscita dal piccolo aereoporto
la luce del sole è quasi accecante ed il calore sulla pelle (più o meno intenso a seconda del periodo) può essere confortante o insopportabile.
Nel momento in cui si sale su un taxi per raggiungere la città ha inizio un’avventura che nessuno potrebbe definire banale.
Protagonisti […] gli odori: di letame, date le tante mucche, di spazzatura e di combustibili di bassa qualità ma anche di incenso, che fuoriesce furtivo da qualche bottega — o, più facilmente, da piccoli o grandi templi ― e di fiori per le offerte religiose.
Protagonisti anche i suoni, primi tra tutti i clacson — usati senza risparmio per segnalare sorpassi al di là di ogni norma del codice della strada ― i campanelli delle tante biciclette e dei rickshaw a pedali ma anche le campane delle puje, ancora all’uscita dei templi che punteggiano la città ed il vociare di un popolo che vive per buona parte della giornata in strada.
Altri protagonisti i colori, da quelli della frutta esposta sui carretti, ai tanti che vivacizzano i cumuli di spazzatura o a quelli delle montagnole di polveri sacre — rosse, gialle o arancione ― usate per segnare il tilak sulla fronte (all’altezza del terzo occhio), fino ai colori sommessi dei sari delle donne o allo stesso colore della strada — con le sfumature gialle e rossastre di una terra che non risparmia la città ―, acceso dai forti raggi del sole».
Vivere in India, come sto facendo io da oltre 5 anni, ha senz’altro i suoi inconvenienti. Mi sono cimentato con una poesia semiseria sul paese, per esprimerne alcuni tratti peculiari:
Problems, tomorrow,
Tomorrow, problems,
Problems, tomorrow,
Tomorrow, problems!
I can make, even remotely, the idea.
One of the main problems for a long life in India is to obtain a proper visa. Recently it has become a real obsessive leitmotif indofili between senior and junior. He speaks in restaurants, on the beach in Goa, the chai-shops (kiosks with a few benches or plastic chairs are formed where knots of people who indulge what the British call it, with unfailing aplomb, a tea-break), the slopes of the Himalayas and elsewhere.
I also found I have to seriously address this problem and it was an opportunity to learn more about a country where I had been but a couple of times where I had not talked enough.
Let's talk about Nepal. Poor and devastated (starting in the suburbs of Kathmandu, the Nepalese, in the face of a desperate shortage of health facilities, yet they often turn to shamans, and this has kept alive an ancestral knowledge), turbid and tantric, multiethnic, and syncretic oasis with some surprisingly well kept.
One of these, probably the most famous is the Thamel district in central Kathmandu, which, among other things, full of craft shops, souvenirs, antiques, valuable products like tea, and so on.
In one of these, small and not at all noisy, I met a lovely boy, Suman, specializing in the sale of tribal art objects, in particular array shamanic and Buddhist Vajrayana. Suman
I bought two beautiful depictions of the goddess Tara and Milarepa on Yak bones, an old glass timber, still smells of buttered tea, a stone engraved with the Tibetan mantra om mani padme um and an ancient manuscript traditional Tibetan on different pages of rice paper collected from two slabs of wood, narrow and long, on which is carved the same mantra.
Suman has no objects of great commercial value, is a bit 'the equivalent of our junk in his shop but if you do not have large claims antiques, you can find unusual products, good cultural and anthropological value. I seem to have realized that Suman is a valuable reference for people living in rural Nepal and are in possession of an old shaman's drum or hat, an old kukuri (typical Nepalese knife) or what has been saved from the fire or decay of a monastery. Driven by poverty, discards it for a few rupees, to the delight of some traveler, fond of anthropology, who is en route to Kathmandu in a Seller Suman little exorbitant.
"Where are you, French?" Suman asks me, after that, made purchases, we have entered a minimum confidence. "No, I'm Italian," I reply.
His shop is little more than a closet, each packed with "antique" Nepalese, Indian, Tibetan and Bhutanese. He sticks his hand into a gap between the goods piled on old shelves. He pulls out a book and hands it to me: Himalaya doors of heaven to the shamans, Massimo and Andrea Andreuzza Bocconi, published by irradiation.
"I do not understand the Italian," he says Suman, "but I'm happy to have this book, is a gift." Give me to browse and it looks really interesting, I think I underestimated until now, the Nepalese shamanic heritage. I decide to be cheeky, "I have to stay several days in Kathmandu," I say to Suman, "are at the Hotel Encounter, a short walk from here. Do you trust to borrow this book? I read it quickly and I will carry over tomorrow. " Suman smiles, revealing a molar badly destroyed and rebuilt and set in a little gold, "Yes." I cordially greet
leave. He, shaking my hand, ceremonious bows with ease, it is clearly happy to have aroused my curiosity.
To conclude with the smell of the trip, I can not forget that book, read quickly and returned promptly, as I promised, the smell of incense, woody and pleasant experience, a sort of measure of olfactory unraveling of months and years, in a few square meters, dimly lit, cluttered extension. An odor is not reproducible and non-recoverable se non con un’altra visita a Suman, nel suo piccolo sgabuzzino, dove mi viene da pensare ed un po’ sperare che quell’ “odore di tempo” sia rimasto quasi intatto.
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