How it is I am Liking India

I wrote this travel essay in my nonfiction writing class this past quarter. More than any other piece, I had so much fun writing this essay, sorting through all the stories and memories, and selecting the few that could best work together to represent my experience as a whole, including the stories I left out. It was easy to write the scenes, not so easy to pick through and decide which ones to cut out. But in the end I was pretty pleased with how the ones I kept fit together.


How it is I am Liking India


India is a country of one billion people and counting. Taxi drivers, rickshaw peddlers, merchants, touts, chai walas—through these billion strangers I was shown a grace as abundant as the population. As a foreigner in India, I was subject on many accounts to a routine interrogation by the strangers I met, like a welcome-wagon of sorts that brought friendly inquisitions instead of casseroles. Every conversation centered around the same questions.

First, the foreigner’s country of origin is established. “Where you from?” the eager steward of Mother India asks. I would answer, “The United States,” humbly and timidly. Most of what they see of American culture is more akin to MTV and eighties B-movies, perceptions I’m not too pleased to be associated with.

But nevertheless, when I’d say it to a rickshaw driver, most times rather than not, he’d stand up on the pedals of his rickshaw and pedal harder to go faster to impress the American, while I clutched the bar harder, drained my knuckles bloodless, closed my eyes, and bit my tongue as we darted through ten times more lanes of traffic than the painted lines dictated. Every rickshaw driver I hired was the self-proclaimed Best Most Fastest rickshaw driver in town.

From certain political perspectives, the current era is not the safest for Americans traveling abroad. I’ve heard some
American travelers will lie and say they’re from Canada to avoid sparking controversy with passing strangers. Considering the weight of the lie, I decided to stick to the truth about my citizenship, hoping I could act politely and courteously enough to chip away at stereotypes.

On Election Day, November 20, 2008, I was in the small Himalayan village of Dharamsala. As polls closed in the United States, I was a date ahead and just waking up with a new hope that everyone, not just Americans, could stake a claim to. Being abroad during such a historic election helped me understand the far reach of America’s influence.
In Dharamsala I saw the same faces everyday, and was well recognized as an American. I didn’t realize how obvious it was until I walked down the street the morning after the election. Almost everyone I passed shouted, “Hey Obama!” to greet me, where before a slight head-nod was enough to suffice as civil. I was acquaintances with a Kashmiri shop owner who said to me over tea that afternoon, “You know, Miss America, a woman will be next. This time it was Obama’s turn. But next time—a woman.”

“But still,” he went on, “you must be very happy for such a man to be elected president. Indians are very happy too.” No one understands the conflicts that fester from issues of race and class better than Indian society, and it meant a lot to many of the friends I had made that America, the role-model Democracy, had elected its first black president who had also grown up poor.
While I gained a unique international perspective, not being home for election night made me homesick. Being abroad gave me a very worldly experience, but at the same time I wish I could have filed out of the bars to fill the downtown streets in America with friends drunk on Hope and police officers standing by helpless to the Liberal hugging mob. I saw pictures of such a scene in downtown Bellingham on Facebook the next day and got a sour taste from what I missed.

But where you are from is not all they care to know about you. After establishing a foreigner’s country of origin, the season of the traveler must be tested. “First time being in India?” my Indian converser asks. This is such a tricky question, even when the answer is obvious.

Yes, it was my first time in India, but to admit that can set you up for scams or double-priced taxi fare. While it was my first time in India, I tried my hardest to somehow establish I had been in the country for a while. Without the clarification, the inquirer always assumed I just moments ago stepped off the plane onto the subcontinent, and while I realize four months is no where near long enough to have seen it or done it all, any more than it would be long enough to have done so in America, I was at least weathered enough to know when the auto-rickshaw driver was trying to cheat me, and for that I wanted credit.
Aboard the train from Varanasi to Delhi, I was at the absolute tail end of my journey and would be flying out late that same night. Exhausted and strained, I planned to sleep through the train ride, get off at Old Delhi Station, and head straight for the airport with blinders over my eyes like a carriage horse. Even then, after four months, I was still wide-eyed and foolish, unsuspecting that the train ride itself would be one of my most lasting memories.

Across from my berth a family of four piled on, overlapping one another’s lap to all fit on the bench. There was a middle-aged man, his elderly mother, an adolescent girl, and two toddler boys about four and five. The grandmother wore a maroon silk sari and really thick glasses. It must have taken her a little while to realize I wasn’t Indian because right when she sat down and got settled, she turned to me and started speaking in rapid and aggravated Hindi, fluttering her hand for emphasis as only an Indian woman can do. When she finally paused to take a breath, I managed to stutter, “Hindi nahi.” She stopped, confused, and leaned in across the compartment to look me over closer. Sitting back, she slapped her hands together and chuckled. I wasn’t sure if she was laughing at me specifically, or at her mistaking my dirty-blond hair and green eyes for more native tones.

Though from what I could gather of what she said, she was chiding her grandsons about being so naughty. They were quite naughty, really, and took to swinging from the berths overhead, but they were also lively and adorable. The grandmother tried to appease them with biscuits to sit still, and every time she’d hand one to the little boys, she’d hand one to me out of politeness. The young girl, about fifteen or so, sat very quietly the whole ride, her eyes fixed on the floor. But every now and then I’d catch her eye and smile as she glanced up at me.

While the grandmother fed the boys biscuits, their father fed them English vocabulary. They could count the number of heads riding in our compartment, name the colors on their clothing, and were more than happy to show off. The father, also taking advantage of an opportunity to practice English asked me, “This your very first time being in India?”

“Yes, it is but I’ve…” before I could give the disclaimer that I had in fact been here four months already, he cut me off.

“Oh! So very nice. You must try some sabji.” On his cue the grandmother reached into a cooler packed with the family’s lunch and began scooping the sabji—a yellow-curried vegetable dish with potatoes and cauliflower—onto palm-sized pieces of fried bread called pooti. She pushed the sabji and pooti towards me, persisting in Hindi that I take it.

“Just try a little taste,” the man said. “Sabji finest vegetable dish in India. You must try. Just a little. Take, take.”
I tried to decline politely, but knew it was already a lost battle. While in India I ate more sabji in just a few months than all the macaroni and cheese I’ve eaten in a lifetime. It’s a staple dish in a cuisine culture not exactly known for variety. A typical North Indian diet followed a very basic formula. For breakfast: sabji and parantha (a more tortilla-like fried bread often made with potatoes). For lunch: sabji, dahl, rice, and chapatti (rather like a pita). Dinner: same as lunch, add curd for dessert.
So I took the piece of pooti piled with sabji the grandmother held out to me. “Mmm! Bahhot accha!” I laid on thick, to express my gratitude and cover my dislike.

I felt like the little boy from the Life Cereal commercials. That kid, through all the takes, probably ate a hundred bowls of that cereal and had to pretend with each bite he was experiencing something new, while his stage brother exclaimed, “He likes it! He really likes it!”

After swallowing the last bite, I thanked her. “Danyabar,” I said. The grandmother grinned so big and clapped her hands with pleasure.

The man, pleased that she and I were both so pleased, turned to me again and said, “Very good you like. Please, have some more.”

“Oh, no. Really. Thank you, but…oh…ah…um, ok then. Thank you. Danyabar.” Another pooti with sabji was thrust in my face, then another, and another. I felt almost bullied by their hospitality. “Ok, seriously. No more. Please. Very delicious, thank you very much.” I get it, most wonderful vegetable dish in India, but I’m sure it wouldn’t taste so good coming back up. The grandmother finally got the point and was satisfied that I was satisfied, no translation needed. She took the pooti she had been holding out to me and gave it to the little boys.

With the boys distracted by their lunch, the father continued to engage me in conversation. “And how are you liking India?” he asked. Ah, there it was—the next question of the welcome-wagon interrogation.

How was it I was liking India? There were bad days—there always have been and always will be bad days. But it’s hard to handle the realization of a bad day in a foreign place. A bad day stateside can make me feel mechanically numb like all I have to do is make it through the day to lay my head down on my pillow at night to get a second go at it tomorrow. But in India, a bad day feels manic like the Delhi traffic, and it can be hard to breathe through its thick air. It can be nearly impossible to catch your breath or clear your mind.

At home in the Pacific Northwest there are things, like the winter rains, you can just accept. There are things you can accept and there are things you can fight against. The distinction between the two is clear. You wear a Gore-tex raincoat, sort your food wastes, paper, and plastic from your garbage, and you take public transportation to lower carbon emissions. The strategy to right and wrong we’ve all grown up to understand, and everyone knows to dial 9-1-1. But I’d left all that at home.

Crossing the street in front of my guesthouse in Varanasi I saw a black and white puppy from profile view. He sat right in the middle of the road licking at his paw, letting rickshaws and taxicabs swerve around him. As I crossed through the street traffic, I looked back at the puppy. From the opposite side now, I could see the other side of his face was ripped of its fur and the white of its skull poked out from the red flesh of his cheek as raw and ripe as a sliced tomato. I gasped like a melodramatic film actress, bringing my hand to cover my mouth as my knees locked, holding me to the spot where I stood on the edge of the street. I felt helpless in wanting to help it and stupid in my pity, which wasn’t helping anything. It seemed so unfazed by its own suffering as it sat licking its paw, and so did everyone else passing by.

When I was a little girl I saw my mother kill a chicken wounded by the neighbor’s dog. Its intestines were exposed and feathers were dropping like breadcrumbs as it tried and failed to fly into the coup. “It’s the right thing to do,” my mother said, so she smashed its head with a brick. She had to put it out of its misery, but she couldn’t bring herself to wring its neck. Somehow that seemed crueler.

I turned away from the puppy and the busy street and ran into the sanctuary of my guesthouse. I felt ten years old and wanted to run up to the building manager and tell him he had to do something for the puppy to put it out of its misery, but he was so hostile handing me my key that I kept my mouth shut and did nothing.

What if, on such a bad day, a stranger asked me then, “How is it you are liking India?” What would I say to him? I could speak bluntly and answer how I felt right then. I could tell him that the smell of piss and paan in the streets made me nauseous, that I couldn’t clear my head from all the vendors and touts shouting in my ears, that I was sick of the taste of dhal—what would he say to that? I never did. I figured it was my bad day, not his, and there was no reason to burden a stranger. So every time I answered that question, I smiled and said, “I am liking it very much, thank you.” And because it always made them, one of a billion stranger hosts, beam with pride at the pleasure I’d found in their homeland, the little white lie was always worth its sin.
In Dharamsala my next-door neighbor in my guesthouse was an ex-pat Israeli jazz musician who lived off whatever pension he’d earned and wages from giving tabla lessons to dabbling tourists. I never learned his name, I just knew him by the title Guruji, a Hindi title of respect for a teacher. He was the only person I met in India who knew Miles Davis.

Like the daily weather report, Guruji would tell me what he’d been listening to, and I could usually hear it faintly through the wall. One morning the walls were quiet. When I saw him up in the café that evening, I told him I missed his jazz that morning.

“Too much jazz,” he said. “All the time listening to jazz. I had to go walking to clear my head so I can come home to listen to more jazz.” Yeah, I understood how that felt. India resonates through your ears just like good fast jazz, but sometimes you have to stop to clear your head before you can take in another note.

In the few weeks before I left the States for India, I traveled across an emotional spectrum from sheer elation to cancel-my-ticket anxiety attacks. By my last week in Bellingham, I’d resolved to just make it through the next four months and I’d be back in December. The time would fly by, and unfortunately, it did.

Right before I left town I went out for brunch with my closest friends. For fear of a public meltdown I made everyone at the table promise to not mention or bring up India, anything about India, or anything about how I’d be gone for four months. My nerves felt as strained as the remaining space in my suitcase, and I just wanted to enjoy their company and pretend we’d all be right back here around this table same time next week. As we stood in line at the cashier’s counter waiting to pay, I broke open my fortune cookie. The sliver of paper inside read, “You will have a pleasant experience.” I didn’t show it to anyone, and keeping it as sacred as a birthday wish, slipped it into my wallet right next to my passport.

Now that I am back home, I’m rarely asked where I’m from. Strangers can look at me and tell by my Gore-tex raincoat and green clogs that I’ve been living here awhile. But I still get asked quite often, “How did you like India?”

I think of the family on the train, the rickshaw rides, and how it felt as an ex-pat on election night, and I always answer truthfully: India smells like piss and paan, the trains are always late, and I’ve had all I can stand of sabji and pootie, but I am liking it very much, thank you.

“Do you think you’ll go back?” they ask.

The flight home was nineteen hours. I spent every second of the flight suspended high in the atmosphere in a pressurized cabin homesick for two places across opposite ends of the world at the same time. When the plane touched down at SeaTac Airport, my heart was pulled in two.

Small worlds filled with great people

Since I've gotten resettled in Bellingham, I keep meeting people who are connected to the people and places I experienced in India. It's so wild to take a place that seemed so foreign and exotic while I was there, and see that its ties to my life at home are stealth but strong.

Here are some examples:
1. Within my first week back in Bellingham, I ran into my friend Jared when he came into the Registrar's office where I was working. He told me he was leaving in a week for India and Nepal to do a village studies program through Fairhaven College, and would be spending a few weeks in Dharamsala. I gave him a few contacts and suggestions for what he couldn't miss and what he would do best to avoid (like the food at Hotel Tibet).

2. At poetry night at the Darkroom, Sean Conlon read as the feature. He just recently graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst. While I was in Dharamsala, I made friends with students from Hampshire who were also in Dharamsala: Alana and Khenrab. Speaking to Sean after the reading, we made the connection of our mutual friends.

3. Just Thursday night, I met a friend's roommate who just got back from traveling around India. He spent two and a half weeks in Dharamsala, the majority of those nights on the roof of Carpe Diem Cafe kicking it with the usual crowd: Raju, Ramu, Artu, Satary, and Company.

Of course, relating these connections makes me heartsick for the village, but it's also an incredibly encouraging realization that the people we meet, come to love, and then leave behind are in many ways always with us.