Without order, Mosquitos bite my wrist

January 23, 2012. Alex, Kelly, Kathleen and I drove to Jaipur this weekend, a Sikh man named Jassi explaining the yellow flowers abundant on the roadside and braking and steering between camels and hundreds of multicolored trucks. We passed under the waning sun, turned amber through smog and cut by bare trees and telephone lines crossing the grey sky. Our hotel room a brothel, the lights dim and bedcover red silk, and we slept curled in tight knots. The voices of white tourists crept in from the lobby, and a singing man outside our window waited for the cries of birds in the morning.
We ate toast smothered in butter and pink jelly and then drove through the tiny town of Amer, filled with goats and camels and dirt a shade darker than Delhi. We left the car at Amer Fort, bridging the gap between curling pink walls that stood against the stark mountains surrounding the village. Alex and I rode an elephant, named Lucky, to the top of the fort, and caught the reflection of shimmering lakes and blue mountains in our bare faces. 
The elephant driver, swaying on the neck, asked for a tip, please, please, tip, tip. And we didn't give money because a sign forbid us, but I felt guilty, still. Lucky idled away, her painted trunk swaying in splashes of pink and blue and green. 
We visited palaces and temples and tombs, red and pink paint chipping from shrines. I stood in a tower, looking across the mountains, down onto the city of Jaipur, the sky clear and blue, experiencing the world through my camera lens. 
Kathleen drove to the hospital late Saturday night, Jassi accompanying, we followed hours later. Skin sallow in the green tinted fluorescents, imperfections bumpier and freckles louder. The pigeon rested in the window sill, mesh filled with skins of insects, those trapped in squares of soiled wire. We watched a Kung-Fu movie on the small screen, and we tried to follow but the pinches and punches and kicks and characters all blended, the frames melding, and I don't remember past the eyebrows of one man. 
We left the city hours and minutes later, ancient dust disturbed by our presence, the ghosts of temples and tombs awakened by children perched on rooftops, strings of kites pulling from their tiny hands. Red, blue, black dancing cloths rise and dart from the porches of the poor and the rich and the in-betweens and the city and sky are awake. 
I am awake too.