Back in Bhopal

From the medicine garden behind Sambhavna Clinic

The Tamil Nadu Express arrived in Bhopal at about 9 a.m. this morning. The train was (and still is, as I write this, almost a day later) on its way to Chennai. Afraid to sleep through its brief pause in Bhopal, I spent the last hour of my ride in the vestibule with my belongings, watching the Madhya Pradesh landscape roll by through the open door of the train.

I hadn't got much sleep, despite perfect conditions. I was exhausted, the train was comfortable, and I felt at ease with the five other men with whom I shared a nook of bunks. I was on the bottom bunk, though, my favorite because that is where the window is. And I spent most of the night propped up on my elbows, lips pressed against hands pressed against the window's edge, watching things pass. What made it impossible to stop was that the train route was closely parallel to the way we walked in the other direction, and as I tried to catch little signs of which town was which and what village was where, all of the past two and a half months just had my mind and my memory in their grip.

Bhopal was beautiful today. It took me by surprise. The air seemed cleaner than it ever did before. And the trees seemed greener. Sambhava was especially beautiful. I had all but completely forgotten how much I like being here. Here at Sambhavna, but also just here in Bhopal. It is a wonderful place to be. Maybe I've just finally gone insane from being in India, but I don't think so. Beauty comes in strange forms, and Bhopal is strangely beautiful to me.

View from a terrace at Sambhavna. The tower on the left is what is left of Union Carbide's inadequate and malfunctioning flare tower and the jumbled tower on the right is where the methyl isocyanate gas tank ruptured.

I came here with the intention of staying no more than a week to ten days to get some things done and then take a break of indefinite length to go to the Himalayas. That plan is now called into question by the way I feel here (very happy) and the fact that there is actually lots of stuff to be done at the moment -- more than I could probably get done in only a week. The temperature is expected to rise soon as high as 47 C / 116 F, though. If that happens and the action slows down, I just might check the train schedules and wait for the monsoon somewhere else.