New Orleans Super Sunday Indian Parade

For the first time in months, I could feel the heat on my face. It reminds me of the weather back home – constant heat every day. This was the best weather anyone could have got – the Sun radiating heat and the Wind was feeling cold. This could possibly be the best day in ages – the Boston cold has sunk deep into my skin for two months and fourteen days.

Waiting for the parade to start, we wondered what’s its purpose. Perhaps it is to celebrate a history. Perhaps it is to celebrate a tradition. Perhaps people know how to have fun here. This was never the case back home. We enjoy parades – one with floats going past, with small Styrofoam pops making up large cat structures. But it was never purely for fun. It was for a religious festival…Wesak Day maybe, a public holiday that I never bothered to fully understand the underlying meaning of.

As we walked inwards on Washington Ave, we saw many vendors lining the street. Seafood platters, crayfish pie, ice cream, and oh, the alcohol – how could we forget that. Heineken, liquor, etc. Men walking along the streets were holding on to alcohol bottles. The bottles were whispering to me, asking me to buy them and consume the liquid that was inside.

The smell of humidity and smoke was in the air. The thickness of the air was satisfying. Yet having too much of it was suffocating. I wondered where the smoke came from. People had cigarettes in their hands. It probably comes from there. Galvin pointed out that the smoke may be marijuana and not tobacco. I breathed in the stuffy air. It smelled sweet. Like shisha in Doha, Qatar. Perhaps the smoke wasn’t from the cigarettes. Maybe they were, but marijuana was wrapped inside the roll of cigarettes.

The parade was walking towards us. Each team had a different dominant colour. I was attracted to the orange one – it reflected the colour of my top that day, and I could easily blend into the parade to be one of them, to take a photo with them. I wondered about the significance of the parade. Google says that each team represents a different native American tribe. My eyes tell me that 90% of the paraders are of African American decent. Was the parade ever dominated by native Americans? I questioned.

My mind was hallucinating then. The heat was getting to me. I was seeing men in feather costumes marching, unknowing of what they represent. Perhaps this sense of unknowness is shared by the passers-by too.

As we walked towards a street that was quieter, we saw people who were sitting outside just chilling around. We see  broad houses beside narrow ones, posh houses beside delapitated ones. We do not know which represents reality.

New Orleans has so much character that it is too much to bear. You can’t put it all in one box, you can’t characterise it as quaint – the poverty jumps out too much. You can’t say that it is a fun city – again, the poverty jumps out too much. You can’t say that it is a poor city – it has too much character to be characterised just as that. O help me please, describe what New Orleans is. Maybe it’s all of the above.