Jodhpur, India

December 2015

The city looks like someone put a ‘filter’ on it. The colors are impossible— every shade of red and orange punctuated by an impossible blue. Inside the city gates the sun is always setting and so the hours are magical and last forever. Everything is equally ancient and new. A massive fort sits above the town that makes the idea of attack seem ridiculous. The roads are carefully planned and inviting and the gates haves spikes to keep out mongrel hordes and elephants. Death before dishonor and waxed handprints—the wives of a dead king gracefully and quietly walk into town and burn in the funeral pyre.

The streets here make no sense. Every one of them is different but somehow the same. Everything is on display. Everything is for sale. Everyone says hello. I meet a man who invites me into his home and tells me, over a cup of tea, that he is the 7th generation of his family to live in his home. He shows me pictures of his father and his grandfather and his grandfather’s father. Before that there were no pictures. His grandfather once made a statue for the Maharaja. Up a steep staircase is a workshop where he once made hinges that open to 100 degrees. He shows me these hinges. Each hinge has his initials hammered into it. He gives me four hinges to remember him by.