davidjoshuajennings

Galloping over the uneven ground towards the nomads’ tents I tug at the reins to slow my horse to a trot, leading the bridle around to look with me at the riders following far behind. Fifty or so gruff yaks graze around the black tents up ahead, their heavy coats shaggy with dung and mud, their maws tugging up mouthfuls of grass.

I wait for the others and together we ride up and dismount.

A woman with deep wrinkles and leathery skin emerges through the tent flap, her apron covered with ash and tsampa, her long black hair braided with red silk, a turquoise pendant around her neck. She shades her eyes with her forearm and holds open the heavy hide so we may enter.

Tashi delek, she says as we pass.

The interior of the tent is hazy with smoke. A fire licks at a black cauldron of boiling dhree milk in the hearth. In the corner near the mound of shawls and blankets is a mound of dried and flattened yak dung piled high as my knees. Down the right side of the tent a dozen or so calves are roped to the ground, roped so low they cannot stand. The ground is matted with dung. The dried stomach of a yak, filled with tsampa, swings like a pendulum above the fire.

Two young boys warm their dark, thick-skinned feet on the flames. Their cheeks are red and wind-burned. Streaks of snot have crusted below their nostrils. The woman crouches, feeds a few patties of dung to the fire, and cranks the bellows to swell the flames.

Read the rest in Nowhere Magazine…

I’m $100 HKD up and feeling pretty good.

I buy a pack of Chinese Marlboros and smoke as I watch a parenthesis of Mainlanders gambling at a baccarat table. The slouching drunk man at the parenthesis’ center is flanked by two porcelain-skinned women in pearls and skin-tight mini-dresses.

They laugh when those around them laugh.

The gambler they’re monitoring so closely takes a long pensive drag of his cigarette as he slowly bends the edge of his two cards up and slowly, ever so slowly reveals them to himself and then shouts and slams them on the table.

The dealer emotionlessly rakes in the mangled cards and his $1000 HKD bet, and deals again.

I take a secret sip of the Tsing Tao I bought at the 7/11 across the road, trying to hide it from the eyes of the Nepali men working security, though I secretly feel they are some of the very few people in this casino who possess souls.

Read the rest in Nowhere Magazine…

Summer’s tent is broken and the monsoon has unfurled its vaporous belly over these mountains again, bringing with it a world of mists and uncertain landscapes.

The heat has become amorphous – neither warm nor cool but also both somehow. Moisture perfuses everything. Surfaces have taken on amphibious qualities. The trash that was dumped around Mcleod Ganj all summer is now being washed down the mountain in swollen streams. My skin this evening has taken on the texture of a salamander’s.

Over the next two months it will rain nearly every day.

Read the rest in Nowhere Magazine…

Forget what it’s like to have an air-conditioner and a refrigerator.
Forget the taste of meat and the way it made your belly all piquant and full.
Forget what it’s like to drive a car or to ascend in an elevator.
Forget Mickey Mouse and Donald Trump and movie theatres.
Forget the American supermarket’s block-long aisles of cereal and shampoo…

Read the rest in Nowhere Magazine…

I am lying in a hospital bed, bleeding. In a room somewhere down the hall I hear monks chanting verses from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is mid-day and outside the weather is gloomy.
The fact that the monks are chanting means someone has died here recently, meaning that whatever hospital room the monks are chanting in will be unusable for a few days, as Tibetan Buddhists don’t move the bodies of the dead until a week after the heart stops beating. Before I encountered Tibetan Buddhism I had always assumed that the cessation of the heartbeat signified the death of the person. For them, the cessation of the heartbeat is only the inaugural step towards the moment when the consciousness exits the body to seek its next reincarnation. The monks chant over the dead body to help the consciousness find its way…

Read more in Nowhere Magazine…

[9:03am]

I am standing on the third-floor balcony of my Indian friend Anupriya’s house, looking down on a relatively quiet neighborhood in Faridabad — a suburb of Delhi. Here and there old men are wandering up and down the road in a desultory fashion. Their clothes are wet and they are covered from head to toe with pink and yellow powder. Across the street, a dozen or so grown women are throwing buckets of colored water at one another.

Holi 2013 has begun.

[9:30am]

I have moved to the rooftop and am now throwing water balloons at random people in the street. I am accompanied by a Frenchman named Thomas. Thomas is dressed completely in white and is wearing orange ski goggles.

Read more in Nowhere Magazine…

Mcleod Ganj, India—It feels there are things to be tapped into here, that there is a poetry to this place.

Spring is coming and the tourists are beginning to arrive in droves. They arrive alone or in eclectic groups of strangers who met days or weeks ago, wearing headbands and lots of bracelets and pants with billowing crotches and long blonde scraggly dreadlocks.

A few nights ago I met young Englishman who doesn’t wear shoes.

Read more in Nowhere Magazine…