A cool night in Jaipur and feeling heat come off the thick walls of the place we're staying in the Pink City. Many more questions about remembrance, testimony, memorialization. These things reverberate and shed a hazy but sure glow like the heat off the walls.
In conversation wondering why this matters to me, how I'm coming up with so many questions to frame it, questions I generate and not people I talk to. Could it be my questions come from the blank spaces, the quiet places where people won't talk? Why do my questions have more to do with feelings and sensations I imagine people to have than with so-called facts and figures that supposedly run the way people behave and experience. Can you get the facts wrong but always the feelings resonate?
Can we "use" feelings of a persecuted minority kicked out of their centuries-old home to understand what's going on now with the exodus from Syria? Other exodus experiences? Is there any use to using that? Why not try now than later?
If I talk to a young educated person who lives in England and thinks the war will continue in Sri Lanka then what about the jungle peasants who are uneducated who slip into their pineapple fields or cinnamon plantations or teak forests and are part of the next wave of war?
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