Outside the window an unimaginable vastness slid past, soundless but for the old-fashioned clickety clack of a train steadfast on its tracks, white noise for the thoughts of what lives lived in acres of red dirt beaten by heat and wind were like.
We were between Jaipur and Mumbai, several hours into the heart of Madhya Pradesh, a state that is home to a large tribal population largely cut off from development. We passed patches of trees bent low and stripped naked, cowed by the conditions, interspersed by low piles of layered cowpats, alongside equally lowly homes.
The train banked with a lopsided tilt, and I saw a young woman was turning over cowpats spread out on the ground, I supposed to dry the underside for a natural fuel. I had time to notice the drape of her terracotta sari falling as she bent, the cracks in the heels of her feet, the hair framing her face beginning to turn a wiry grey.
She looked up as the train passed, and I thought our eyes met. She had a round, deep copper face, the face of a woman who labors ceaselessly on the land; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate and self-sufficient expression I have ever seen.
There was a child in her peripheral vision of five, maybe less, picking up the already dried pats at the edge, and starting a new pile. The sound of my son’s voice brought me back into the carriage, “Santa doesn’t comes here, does he mum?”
He was seven.
“No, I don’t suppose so.”
“Why’s that?”
“Why do you think?”
Far from losing his childhood innocence, his world went from the black and white of certainty to the brilliant Technicolor of empathy.
He began to look for those differences and ask the questions, and then see the familiar with new eyes again.
