The central mistake I’m trying to avoid while being in and thinking about India concerns time, particularly Fabian’s “denial of coevalness.” Or, to paraphrase Conrad’s language from Heart of Darkness, to penetrate into the wilderness was to go back in time, back to the origins of the planet. The place you are exploring, then, does not exist at the same calendrical moment, but is rather what your own home must have looked like decades or centuries ago. This view is blind to the complexity of the globe, the false universalism of modernity and dislocates places from the present by rendering them “backward.”

My Athamma (maternal aunt) points to a large complex of buildings with small one room apartments and tells us––as we speed by in a (for India) luxury car––that these are government housing initiatives for the “backward classes.”

The hip clothing fashion here, as I said in a previous post, is mostly incongruous with a climate and, in my elitist view, a poor miming of Western dress. Middle and lower class men, especially in Karminagar (where I am right now), dress in 1970s fashion: bell bottoms that are tight at the thigh and flared at the bottom, shirts with wide collars and flared sleeves, in patterns that are dizzying and colors that rival the noon South Indian sun. But my language, and its underlying episteme, is wrong.

There are frequent power outages here. “Current poyindhi,” my relatives say. The electricity is gone. The electric current went away. The current, the present is elsewhere.