Fitting in

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.