Aerosmith loves the Sweet Taste of India.

Ahhhhhh, it finally feels like springtime. I can tell immediately when spring is here for good--the smell of curried eggs wafting through the house, day after day, reminding me of the first spring I spent in India, when my mom and I were a mother-daughter team of prostitutes turning tricks in Bangalore. Our Caucasian pallor colored us exotic in the Land of Boiled Beans, and we fared quite well within the world's oldest occupation. While Americans lazed in their mild springtime weather, I remember my first Easter in India with my mother when the "Indian summer" heat (109 degrees) nearly killed us. My mother and I worked out of a small, clay hut, roasting like chicken tikka on a skewer. We slept with the crippled and the deformed... mainly the lepers, "Untouchables" who were relegated to the outermost fringes of abandoned Indian society. Though our work was difficult, it was in a strange way rewarding. I felt like Gandhi if he had lost a high-stake bet, been thrown in prison in a foreign country, and forced into sexual slavery... never able to erase the violent stain of scab-covered cocks invading his dreams.

Kalakshetra, a veritable shroud of a woman, taught us the tricks of the trade. She had once killed a john right outside of The Bull Temple in Basavangudi--an act so blasphemous she barely escaped being stoned to death and has since wandered throughout Southern India, a reluctant nomad obscured by a full-body black veil. Not entirely a bad thing, seeing as that she is completely toothless and has boils covering at least 70 percent of her face. Though Kalakshetra's voice was not one register above a whisper, she patiently taught us how to cope with being "the shattered whores of Bangalore"... which mainly entailed an ample supply of opium.

I don't remember how long my mother and I lived in that sweltering shantytown... three years, maybe four. Even more tenuous would be an account of the innumerable life lessons learned. Still, I remember my mother's annual efforts to celebrate Easter-- she tried her best, despite the Hindu calendar being totally incongruent with our own Christian faith. Sometimes, a few of the lepers and my mother would re-enact Christ's Resurrection to the delight of other Untouchables and the rare lost tourist/ Anthropological student. My mother's "Resurrection" typically involved slaughtering a live stray hen and consuming its blood through a spout created in the neck by its decapitated head. She would later shit out her own "eggs" and our dismal little enclave of living ghosts would embark on an Easter egg hunt. Some say the heat made her crazy; I think it was the wild spirit of India... that proverbial Whirling Dervish, seducing and consuming all those who dare step in its path. Though my mother's allegorical storytelling skills left a bit to be desired, the message was always there: Resurrection. Renewal. Rebirth. The two of us had been reborn in a sense; thrown out of a brutal Indian prison, we were forced to live, born-again, as whores in a lawless land... our strange love for that strange land growing every second spent on its pungent, wild, alien soil.

And that's what springtime means to me.