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“I’m a camel man, in the bloody sa-a-and!!! Life in desert, it’s fan-tastic!” he sang out to the tune of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” as we rode, spinning line after line of a hilarious desert-themed spoof. It was his wit I noticed first, the way he surprised us with his song, or the sharp turn at the end of a cuckold joke that left us laughing. It dawned on me as we rode that not only was he speaking good English to us, he was also making small jokes to the Koreans in their language, and directing the other camel drivers in rough Rajasthani Hindi. As the cold morning warmed into afternoon, Ajit began to seem decidedly wiser than just a low-caste man making a hard living humping tourists through the desert, and that night around our campfire in the undulating waves of a dune sea, I asked him about it.

“Did you study somewhere?” I asked.

“Only Camel College,” he said, smiling.

“What is Camel College?”

“I am illiterate,” he said to me, looking straight into my face. “I cannot even write my own name. Everything I know, everything, I know from Camel College.”

“You mean, just doing this?”

He poked at the fire with a stick. “The desert, my life,” he said, “is how I learn.”

His sly smile told me that he’d said these things before, to countless tourists before me. But though I felt pity for him then, a superior pity for the poverty of his education, there remained something about the way he said those words that struck me, something that I couldn’t place. The night wore on and the fire died, but the words kept floating through my head.

“Camel College… The desert…is how I learn.”

I left that desert a day later, but the words stayed with me. They became a Zen koan to be unraveled, a rash that I just had to scratch. Traveling another month across northern India in my accustomed state of fear and loathing, they sat like a bolus undigested in my gut, to be chewed up and swallowed down and then chewed back up again. And it wore on like this, my mind ruminating day after day, week after week, until one random evening in New Delhi.

On that day, I had journeyed south eight hours by train from the Sikh holy city of Amritsar, and exited the train at New Delhi station, directly across from the mouth of Paharganj, the Delhi tourist ghetto.

As I walked out in the burnt-orange light of dusk, the traffic swirled around the station junction like a maelstrom, autorickshaws with horns screaming, buses groaning beneath a weight of passengers so great that they hung from the doors and windows. The fruit-sellers’ tables across the street buzzed with fat black flies, skinny, sickly pariah dogs moving beneath them, searching for scraps. Cycle-rickshaws on the margins of the street detoured around cows, who stood placidly on their shit-smeared legs, munching garbage. The perfume of India hung in the air, smoke from burning garbage and exhaust, curry, incense, sewage, sweat, decay. “Cheeepest and best! Cheeepest and best!” screamed the touts in the Paharganj thoroughfare, as a legless man with filthy clothes and filthy hands, a filthy face, wheeled by on his stomach on a little ball-bearing cart.

Oh God. This scene, this exact moment, was everything about India that I hated and feared. It was the India I faced like an abattoir each morning as I went out for coffee, a reality in purest defiance of the sanitized brochures and postcards of the Taj. But in that moment, for the first time, faced with the things I hated, I did not turn away. I looked and, looking, saw with new eyes something exquisite in the chaos, the thousand players and dramas of the Delhi street all seamlessly meshing and mixing, animals and humans and traffic swirling balletically together.

God help me, I realized, this was actually beautiful. Why had I resisted this, I wondered? This mad borderless beauty, why had I hated it? I understood then how habitual my fear had become, a reaction so deeply internalized that I now hid automatically from what I had first found ugly, without ever really looking at it.

Standing