Dirt, Mud, Dust.

When you mix all of the colours on a paint palette, only brown is left behind. It might seem, at first glance, like the colour of dirt, mud, dust, crap. But it isn’t, really. Behind it is each and every colour. Behind it is something kind of wonderful. India, I realised, is a lot like that.

It was 3:00am on Tuesday the 20th of November, late in autumn. But stepping through the sliding glass doors at Chennai Airport, the heat could still dry and yet drench my skin. It was like standing over a boiling pot. And the smell, like snorting lines of cumin off the seat of an unflushed toilet. I clutched the straps of my backpack, my short-sighted eyes squinting. I couldn’t find my hotel transfer, but ignored the drivers that sung, ‘Taxi! Taxi!’ in sync.

Eventually a beat up car sped towards me. Its number plate – a piece of cardboard with symbols drawn on in texta – flapped in the wind, and slowed. This was my ride to a hotel on Mosque Street.

We joined an assortment of vehicles that pulsated and spilled out off of the tarmac, blood racing to an open wound. I clutched the doorhandle, firmly, no seatbelt in sight, and found no comfort in the laminated picture of Jesus Christ that sat proudly atop the dashboard. Bodies lined the footpaths beside us, stretched out on blue tarps that I guessed would become street stalls by day. Body, cow, body, cow. I wondered: were they living? Still suffocating behind a plastic sheath, Christ stared back at me.

Alone, 21, female and more naïve than I knew, I wondered how and why I'd brought myself here. Was it pride? Foolishness? Ambition? Or a suicide mission? I couldn’t be sure; the noise of rickshaws, and cows, and rickshaws honking at cows would not let me answer my own question.

India was just the colour brown, wasn’t it? Dirt, mud, dust, crap. Nothing more.

No.

I would soon find the colours behind it – more than I knew existed.

And it would be kind of wonderful.