Friday 11 November 2011

Spiritual journey


It was kind of fun to clamber into a 3-wheel tuk-tuk - or auto-rickshaw as the Indians call them. It took 20 minutes or more puttering along over bumpy, dirt roads in a fairly barren moon-like landscape to reach the young couple who wanted to see me.

Joshua makes a living digging sand out of a small area on his land and selling it to concrete block-makers. He and his attractive wife Happiness live with their two small children in a 2-room mud house with a tin roof... and an outside 'bathroom' - a hole in the ground with a screen of corn stalks around it.   

I have the privilege of meeting some beautiful people who live in utter poverty. These two were God-fearing and wanted to talk about their faith. It was a pleasure to listen to them describe their spiritual journey and I felt close to their hearts when we prayed together.

They apologised that they had nothing to offer by way of hospitality. It turned out to  be one of those days when I had nothing to eat between a meagre breakfast and an evening meal. But I reflected that my evening meal probably far surpassed their basic rations.

I took some photographs of Happiness... I liked her smile and her slender body. She was pleased to be photographed and she enjoyed the attention I gave her... I felt she was ready to give more of herself, had we been alone. But we both knew the connection we had established and that inner excitement that stirs the imagination.

She carried my small ruc-sac as we walked across the dry ground where corn had been harvested. She posed for more photos. She would have made a good model, and I would have been pleased to reward her.

But the tuk-tuk was coming back for me... and I could only hold her hand as I said farewell, shaking her husband's hand as I walked to my taxi and clambered into the seat. Soon we were careering over the bumpy landscape and I was giving them a last wave.

That night I slept naked under the mosquito net, with only the fan overhead as company. The call to prayer awoke me around 5 a.m. I became aware that a guest in another room had a TV blaring, with someone shouting about Jesus Christ.  It was bizarre...

I was conscious of my hardness - that morning hardness that seems even more intense when I am away from home... I found myself thinking of her lithe body and how she might have been if we had been able to share the shower and then the bed. Strangely, in my fantasy, I imagined her husband looking on.

It would have been very special in that rough room, with its flaking paint on the walls, with the fan turning in the heat while Muslim prayers echoed outside and a Pentecostal preacher yelled his message in another room...  And a man looked on wide-eyed as his wife tangled with a visiting white man.
 

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