"Good Morning"

We are here in Badami after my first train ride ever. We were in sleeper cars and traveled from Mysore during the night. I had trouble sleeping, part of me wished it was daylight so that I could see all the countryside that we were passing. I stepped off the train in a daze (I’d finally fallen asleep) and quickly remembered that I was in India after inhaling the “pleasant” fumes of the train station.

We drove through the countryside for two hours before reaching our hotel. I wish I could convey what I saw but picture this: butt cheeks. Butt cheeks everywhere. Little butt cheeks, brothers and sisters squatting next to each other. Old man butt cheeks in the distant fields, fields that would later be toiled by the men owning those butt cheeks. You see in India, one begins the morning by clearing out all of the body’s toxins. These include of course brushing your teeth, cleaning your ears, sticking oil in your nose to clean there too. But one of the most important things is to defecate in the morning. In the words of our guest lecturer who was an Ayurvedic doctor, a “good morning” implies that you defecated. When you say “good morning” to your neighbor, you are implying that both you and your neighbor got rid of all the body’s toxins.

I found this notion of a “good morning” hard to believe until I saw it on the countryside, the villages of North Karnataka. All of the squatting, all of the butt cheeks showed people beginning their morning’s right according to ancient Ayurvedic medicine. I felt a little awkward watching but they were watching the bus pass and some even waved and shouted hello.

Driving through the countryside was the first time I got to see India waking up in the morning. As we passed little villages, I saw bodies wrapped in blankets still lying outside. Men were huddled around having coffee and tea. Women were sweeping the front of their houses, which weren’t really houses but more like shacks. The poverty amazes me but people wake up and know that having a “good morning” is always possible.