It’s late in the evening and I return with my friend in her car, driving through the night streets of Delhi. The congestion of the daytime, or even the evening not so long ago, are gone, and the action consolidates around stoplights. At a red light we stop, and a man wipes a rag over our windshield as my friend waves him away. He steps in front of the car, arms up, as another vender selling colorful whirligigs atop sticks passes behind him, bonks him playfully on the head with one of the whirligigs and continues on. To our left, I see a shadow of a woman from the corner of my eye, holding a baby in her arms, just on the other side of my rolled up window. I’ll always wrestle with these moments of naked asking, of naked refusal. She moves on when we don’t respond, but the man is still in front of the car. His arms still raised, he brings them together in namsaste, reaches up, bends down, and up again, an asana that ends when he leans over and plants a kiss on the hood of the car. Everyone in the surrounding vehicles and doubled up on motorcycles is watching. Even for late-night, street-life Delhi, this appears beyond the range of normal behavior. The man straightens himself, takes a couple steps back, but still blocking the passage of our car, and begins to dance. His arms flow like underwater kelp, loose and extended. His hips undulate, side-to-side. I want to look at the expression on his face, extract some understanding, but eye contact seems far from the right thing to do in the situation. The streets of New York taught that lesson. The invite and encouragement even the most fleeting moment of eye contact extends. Instead I hold my peripheral gaze as his body sways with some song only he can hear, and then he steps away. My friend moves the car up to avoid him, and the light turns green.
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