I'm sorry, I didn't revise

February 1st, 2012. I have never seen people more ugly, I think to myself. Most smell like soiled curry and all have rotting teeth, decaying amber pillars under bulging noses and crawling hair. I track years through stiff calluses and I shiver when I receive a hug. They hold my hand and I sweetly recoil. I watch as Kamla grabs dripping lentils in dirty fingers previously clawing out lice from her ear and dribbles the yellow brown into her hollow mouth. Rice cascades and splatters, the ripples of food extending down her stained sweater.
Jyoti screams and rubs her head back and forth across a leather pillow, and she laughs and cries out, and I am frightened and disgusted. She has a bucket under the barred bench to collect her excrement, and I cannot bear to rub her back, cannot bear to face her mother who tries to pour water into the tossing mouth, cannot hold her hand. 
I run from the washroom, ashamed that I cannot wash Najma, I do not want to wipe her raw skin, damp from the night before. 
I do not want to touch the untouchables. 
I remember my first days, weeks, at Mother Teresa's. I wished for sickness, for a broken limb, for relief from the horrid. 
I wished for beauty, in a country where I could see only the smog, the men whose hair crawls up their cheeks and whose eyes crawl over me also. For white lines and straight roads and some beautiful elderly I could tend to in plush beds and beeping monitors and clean white hair. 
And maybe still, I wish.
But to paint beauty in facial features, of lotioned limbs and verdant landscapes, is easy. 
To paint the beauty of a family, of friendship, of love in a screaming and silent center, is harder. 
Kamla pries the blanket from Ama, who shivers in the sliver of the morning, and I rise to stop her. Kamla cries, her vacant eyes not seeing me, and she sobs. She runs and comes back, and I guard the bed, and she pushes me, slaps me, elbows my stomach. Others stop her, and hit her face and I wish for words. She again returns from the washroom, her bare feet tracking in grey water, bedpan in hand, and I move, and I wish I knew the words for 'I am sorry, I did not understand.'
Mary, mouth sealed by folding skin, eyes almost closed as well, leads Fatima, who shakes with Parkinson's, into the courtyard. They sit unspeaking, unknowing of each others name, their hands with wrinkles bound in veins and tendons resting near. 
A woman comes, beautiful, and holds a box of orange sweets, precious in this world. I take one for Ama, and though she wishes for the foreign compound, she says, Kamla, Kamla. I call Kamla over, and give her the candy. To Ama she gives her own.
Can I pretend to give justice to this beauty?
I stare at my face in the crooked mirror, outlined in baby blue and bulging in the right corner.  
Beauty is fascinating, captivating, inspires ships and poems and music and wars, and I try to remember why I thought beauty is in the millimeters of difference in nostril size, in the angle of the eyebrow, in the size of an upper lip.