an accurate description.

there were 2 novels that the CHAI people gave us to keep. i've finished the first and am half-way through the second. they're by an indian author who is able to capture in words the experience that i cannot. so here are her words, not mine:

"Taxashila was then a good replica of India's filthy cities. Its citizens, like those in most other Indian cities, prided in the neatness of their homes. They kept their homes and premises clean by disposing of garbage, carrion and ordure onto public thoroughfares and open spaces. Its inhabitants maintained, with equanimity, the dichotomy of clean houses in a filthy and stinking environment, of the luxury of skyscrapers that soared to the skies from the squalor of slums, of the seductive nakedness of the fashionable amidst the revulsive nakedness of the ill clad, of BMWs that slugged behind bullock-carts, of serene Holy Cows that stood in the centre of the road and meditated as a chaotic traffic honked and whirled around, of billionaires who lowered the glasses of their stately cars and spat out on the unsuspecting passers-by.
"The city's municipal corporation took care that nothing was done to disturb the delicate balance of contradictions. Its employees let carrion and garbage decay and stink till nature did its own cleaning. People defecated and urinated on neatly laid roads just as their previous generations did on open fields. They made voluntary contributions for the beautification of the city by daily coating its roads, walks and walls of public offices with generous contributions of red pan-spit and phlegm."
In God's Own Country
~ Ponmala, 2000