“You choose! This is your India!” he exclaimed. Pasar’s final destination was also mine, though his journey started twenty-four hours before. We had joined up on the same bus from Agra to Mathura, an eighty-minute journey in a lunchbox on wheels. Having stepped into the chaos of the bus terminal, I asked him if it would matter how we should move forward, either by shared rickshaw or grab one of the several private ones on the side of the road. His emphatic answer pleased me. With a youthful tangled beard and white robe fastened at the waist by a red sash, the student of Sanskrit from India’s northeast state of Arunachal Pradesh and I hopped aboard. The rickshaw driver opened the hood of the engine to strike up the motor with a soiled cord, like how
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