Whenever I am asked to write something interesting about India, I search through my fieldwork experiences to the most striking moments, found among random acts of daily life. Unassuming, almost illusory scenes that playfully transpose themselves, revealing the observer's tenuous grasp on reality. It was monsoon season in Rajasthan, but there was no rain. In fact, it hadn't rained for almost five weeks and everyone worried.
Drought is serious business in the desert.
The skies were often cloudy, but people took the indication as meaningless. I left the house where I stayed in an ancient fort just before noon on just such a cloudy day. Catching a lift on an auto-rickshaw I headed down into the main town populated by about 100,000 people. After my 2 rupee ride, I reached the edge of the main bazaar, the nucleus of which is the vegetable market where I usually waited for a local bus to take me into one of the several outlying villages where I did my fieldwork. Tickets were sold on the bus.