On every carriage of the Delhi Metro there are small,white posters pasted above the sliding doors. Reading the quadtych one will learn that it is not ok to sneeze on the Delhi Metro, it is not ok to eat on the Delhi Metro and it is not ok to smoke on the Delhi Metro. The last image is more ambiguous. It depicts an unusually square and quite obviously ironed pair of pants with a hand hovering over what seems to be a pocket. The hand is a ghostly apparition – a floating, disembodied thing that teasingly seems to be sliding a finger inside the unseen depths of the material. Perhaps not unintentionally, the finger doing the sliding is the middle one. It seems the offender is offering a somewhat inglorious “fuck you” to his hapless square-panted victim. Though the artwork is less than transcendent, the message is clear – people like to steal shit on the Delhi Metro. Whether it is condoned or not is not clear.
I liked my wallet. It was a gift. It held things like old receipts, notes to oneself and redundant currency quite well. It that wallet I had 15 Ethiopian Birr which I was unable to change in Kenya. I also had about 1000 Somaliland Shillings which, in terms of changing your life, is about the equivalent of finding a piece of lint stuck in your ass crack. I had gone two and a half years without losing my wallet, without even misplacing it. We were old friends. But complacency is a funny thing – you don’t know you have it until you have a reason to. So this morning as I packed up language notes into my pink see-through folder with the worlds “My Clear Folder” emblazoned on the side and packed some pens into my adventure man bag (not to be confused with the more common “man bags” which are for douche cakes), I never thought to myself “gosh I am complacent today”. But, it seems, I was.
I don’t look for signs. I don’t look for the significant in the insignificant. And though I did stop when a hairy, turbaned man ordered me to stop from across the road the other day, I didn’t buy what he was selling – a clear understanding of my life’s path as dictated by the planets. I do believe in signs, however. I do believe things happen for a reason. The reason, though, has nothing to do with the alignment of Saturn, or my chakras being out of synch or the fact that I didn’t get a henna tatoo, dreadlocks, clown pants or buy weed from a dodgy Kashmiri in order to be in closer contact with the earth mother. I didn’t buy a bongo drum either. The reason some fucker stole my wallet was because on some level I was tired. Ten months going around the world and, on some level, I had stopped giving so much of a shit. I wasn’t as into it as I thought I was. And around this time every year for the past eight I have gotten ancy in October.
So what does one do when they get ancy? Well, you move on. You just read the signs.
