Movement and sound.

Here it seems that every restaurant is tucked in a corner, or set into an opening small enough that you cannot look inside unless directly in front, but large enough to move hungry crowds in and out in a flurry. While the door may only be wide enough to allow a peek, here movement and sound are enough to pull your senses the rest of the way.

The movement: a new generation in jeans and t-shirts, or older men that appear to have just stepped out of a storybook in their white kurtas, thick beards grown with the years, and old thick rimmed glasses with deep lenses but simple character in their frames. The women enter in colorful saris draped over and around. Primary colors, absent in this unstitched cloth, are replaced by violet, Oxblood, magenta, periwinkle, tangerine, and Han purple.

The sound: it changes. Chatter spoken over reckless taxi cabs, and rickshaw wheels that *click clack* on rough streets. A busy kitchen with an atmosphere of its own in fierce spices, aroma and heat. A Sikh man with an orange turban, tightly wrapped, and iron bracelet speaks the few words necessary to instruct his staff in their grimy t-shirts and cuffed jeans. Sometimes there is only silence, but this is a neglected sound in itself. Since most eat with their fingers there is the rare scrape of fork against plate, but at times only silence.

Now here I sit by myself but enjoy the minutes I have in this atmosphere. Everything is worn and in dark spots it shows. The places where plates and bowls have slid in minute increments, back and forth; the vinyl covered seats, cracked to open stuffing inside. Neither are ancient by age; only by use. Those who slide in and out; who sit heavy with drooping fat, the weight of the years, or heavy with empty stares, the weight of the mind. Those who move fast in order to continue the night, or quiet groups of companions without words in their midst.

And then there is me. I sit alone but soak in this tiny room of atmosphere and heat. I listen for the stories in the cracked plaster and crooked picture frames. Those that have been written and the ones still to come. Today my story is in India, but it is more than my story alone, it is yours too. We are much more alike than we are different. I feel in Kolkata and you feel from where you read.

I do not understand all that surrounds me, but I will keep trying. I am chasing after change, trying to comprehend its monumental movements or sneaking reforms. Maybe change is chasing me. Maybe it makes all that difference that I am moving; I refuse to be stagnate.