I returned from India 10 months ago.
I expected the strange feeling to set in as I walked into my
mother’s arms. I expected the sudden rush to be gone: I was home. This is
normal: I get to have a closet with clothes in again, not a backpack. I was
home.
But I never quite figured out how to sum up India for those
who asked.
Beautiful. Wow. Challenging. Interesting.
Because I go numb when people ask how it was. My heart warms
and I think back to the standing on the Metro platform feeling the wind of the
metro passing me. I think back to the first monsoon storm I was caught in on my
way home & the cup of tea that came from the mechanic in whose store I went
to for cover. My heart warms and it’s as if words fail me. I think about how
happy I was walking home from work, looking up to the night sky and words
aren’t enough.
I’m very opinionated. Anything: ranging from politics,
democracy, animal cruelty, development in African countries, women abuse,
choice, freedom. You name it.
India turned my opinions to mash. Broken pieces.
Because all of a sudden I’m learning why they do arranged
marriages or why they have marigolds hanging on their door frames. Or why dowry
still exists. It didn’t make sense. We should be past all of that: choice,
remember? I spend 6 months learning, reading and trying to understand
everything that makes India India: child marriages, arranged marriages, extreme
poverty, dowry, the place of women in society… But for them its life.
I tried. It’s a complex society of hundreds of years,
several rulers, more religions and enough war. But a beautiful society with
patient people who opened their hearts and homes to me. Helping me understand
who they are.
It changed me. It turned my fierce opinions into bigger
blocks: because the world is not one-dimensional. India is most certainly not
& although I merely scratched the surface with trying to understand it, it
left me quiet and grateful and longing to learn more.
It also left me with a collection of Indian clothes & a
craving for paneer curry every third evening…
It left me without words. My opinions, now, are so different
from most people around me. How do I explain what I learned, what I saw and how
I miss the crazy, colourful life that is India? How I woke up to peacocks screaming and how the milkman at
the Mother Dairy around the corner knew my life story and knew which ice cream
I liked best?
I wonder how I ever got stuck in the place where money is
everything, where having the right title, the right address and the right car
means Ive arrived.
I don’t know how to fit into this place I call home.
