5 Minute Writing Exercise for Class

[x_los]

Because it was a five minute prompt writing thing, I would have felt cheap about cleaning it up. So here it is in its dubious glory. And I have NO idea about whether Delhi is actually in a basin and ringed by mountains, let alone mountains topped with temples. I was imagining it looking a lot like Mexico D.F., which I have been to, rather than India, which I haven't (yet, here's hoping for someday).

Prompt:

While they were distracted by collecting vegetation samples, I snuck up on the aliens and put their shoebox-sized ship in the trunk of my car.

               Response:

While I drove it rattled alarmingly in the back, clinking—I couldn’t decide if it was animated by some internal processes or simply clanking against the cricket equipment left in the boot. I resolved not to think about it, to simply get it out of the city and up the mountain without any unnecessary prevacation.

Delhi is nestled in a basin, and to get out into the mountains is like looking down into a cup of tea—a swimming, bleary, liquid mess of lights with gritty precipitate in the bottom, forming patterns only intelligible to those schooled in their arcane interpretation. Even then, the correlation of that pattern to any predictable external reality was as sketchy as the road to the temple: more concept than substance.

I’d gone to college in London. When I came back I thought I’d learned such arts. It took several years before I realized that a cramped little uni thousands of miles away couldn’t teach you about life in Delhi, any more than you could teach the endless stream of raccoon-eyed chav girls who put out, or girls from mediocre Indian families, girls born in South London, who sat across from you in cafes with Bollywood musak and plastic table mats, who did not, as a rule, put out, what life in Delhi was like.

Old solutions to new problems: the shrine at the top of the mountain has always been for getting rid of things that made life miserable. Women let the river, whose source blossomed in the heart of the temple, whose might reached furious proportions in white-caped roils, carry off tears, pictures of dead sons they still mourned, love letters from men they hadn’t married that soured their girlhoods in their minds.

Aliens in a shoebox were going to love us, like parents. But I know that kind of love means awkward cricket whites and English words and shame. It’s that kind of love that belongs to the river.

 

Also check out mister_duster 's. He elaborated and edited, the fuck, but who trusts a red head in good conscience anyway?