D for Dust

Before coming to live here, even when you came as a tourist, one thing about India you most likely have heard is that there’s a lot of dust.

What you don’t know unless you live here, try to have a house and keep it clean, is ho much dust is the lost of dust everyone speaks about. It’s only when you move here that you find out: India is the mother of Dust.

I really can’t understand why, what causes such an amount of dust to exist specifically in this place:they say it’s the near-by desert, it’s pollution… nothing really seems enough of a reason. It’s just the way it is.
You wipe your house in the morning and you can write on the dust that’s deposited on your furniture much before dinner time. This is a place where you have to clean your air conditioning filter every other day.

Dust is the first thing to welcome you once you land: you smell it in the air, you feel it under your nails, you see it while it gets sticked to your sweaty skin.
Dust stains. It stains your carpets, your pillows, your curtains: it stains them even before you buy them, when they still are in the shop. Dust makes it impossible for you to wear anything white and have it white ever again. Dust effects your sense of touch and your sensibility: everything is felt through a thin layer, no surface is pure.

So you notice it, it irritates you, you try to get rid of it, you clean it and clean it again, your cloths get constantly dirty and you get new ones, you get engaged in a never-ending fight of man against dust. Needless to say, dust always wins. You give up, you eventually tolerate it, but you never get used to it -and you know you never will-.

But dust’s power is much bigger than that. To fully understand it, you have assist to the terrific (both in a good and in a bad way) show of a dust storm. It begins with the sky: it was a sunny day, and all in a sudden everything gets dark. Then the birds fly around desperate, seeking refuge. After a while everything gets really quite, as if even the air was holding its breath. And then the wind arrives, strong. And the dust with it, even stronger. They shut the open windows and break them; they make the garbage fly and stuff falling off the rooftops; they destroy big trees as if they were little bushes.
Then the rains arrives with lightnings and thunders and the whole show goes on while you, inside (and scared), watch and wait until it’s over; when it is, the city is a mess of wrecked trees and broken streets but the air is fresh, and clean to breath.

You stop hating the dust, but only for a moment.