Blessed be the poor

This is not the same group of people I saw from the roof of the hotel that day. But areas like this were common in New Delhi and the other places that we visited.

A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to visit India. Some friends were adopting a child from there, and asked me to accompany them and document the event with my camera. In those two weeks, I took almost three-thousand images. I’ll be posting a few of those here, along with some written memories.

 2014 

On the roof level of a luxury hotel in India, I walked past the swimming pool that appeared at the far end to be spilling over the edge to the ground far below. The deck chairs and tables and the beautiful, perfect plants in their enormous planters made me sharply feel my childhood of growing up in an old, rusty trailer. It felt like I was trespassing on this beautiful property.

I walked to the low wall at the edge of the building. Looking over, I saw several small campfires where people were cooking their dinner. Their houses were fashioned from boards, tin, tarps and cardboard. A haze of smoke separated me from them. I wanted to taste what was cooking in those pots. I wanted to squat in the dirt and look the women in the eye and connect with them. I wanted to hear their lyrical conversations. I wanted to smell the earth that was their home.

I turned and looked at the extravagant hotel and felt the disorienting feeling of standing between two worlds and belonging to neither.

-Melanie Patterson

© Forged in Words 2021