Why I Am Here

"So why did you come to India?"

"Did you come just for the wedding?"

"Do you have any other plans?"

"How long is your stay?"

These are good questions.  I'm still trying to figure out the answers.  I guess I'm living them, but I'm not entirely satisfied with the way I'm doing so.  Just for any of you who thought I would, perhaps, be able to be a little kinder to myself, I assure you, I can still dish it out and criticize myself to shreds.  This becomes apparent as I travel with a woman I didn't know at all prior to this trip, or live with an exceedingly kind and generous and gracious family I had never met before arriving, or go to an Indian wedding where the families have pulled out all the stops and the women are decked to the nines in their finest gold, silks, colors, saris, bracelets and beads, or try to navigate a teeming city of somewhere around 12 million people.  I may have that number wrong.  I'm thinking you already understand this place is busy, loud, crowded, hazy, dusty, rich, poor, full of a lot of living.  

For example, a list of the animals I have seen on the street or by the side of the road to date: 

     cows

     horses

     pigs

     boars

     camels

     elephants

     black cobra

     one other snake I couldn't identify that a man had next to the car window to "pet" 

     (that one may have been another cobra without his neck all tricked out like they do to scare the bejesus out of us)

     peacocks

     monkeys, on leashes 

     monkeys, just walking around, you know, being a monkey

     goats

     dogs

     parrots

     did I mention the cobra?  I like snakes, but I'm just not sure about the cobras randomly out with your neighbor on the street.

This is lame, but the Mister Rogers song about the "people in your neighborhood, the people that you meet each day" just popped into my head.  That means a lot of hungry people.  

I think there are a lot of hungry people in the US, but we REALLY don't like to see them.  We really don't want to be reminded on a daily basis, multiple times a day, countless times a day, that there are very hungry people around us all the time.  It feels uncomfortable when we see a homeless person and are oh-so-quick to point out how they probably just want to get drunk.  Never mind the fact that a whole lot of us just want to get drunk, and if we were in their (missing) shoes, getting drunk might be just the ticket for the afternoon.  I know it isn't, (for them or me,) and I'm writing all this righteous sounding bullshit because I still am grappling with what the hell I am doing here.   Seriously, why am I here???  Why did I come here?

I said I would tell you that when I entitled this entry.  The quickest way to let myself off the hook, to be able to socially respond to the question with some semblance of sanity, and get the monkey off my back, is to say I came to attend a three day Hindu wedding.  My routine answer has been along these lines.  I've wanted to visit India since I was about 20 years old.  That when I understood Nandita's invitation to attend her brother's wedding ....  her brother that I had never met ....  was extended in earnest, I thought to myself, "how many times during this lifetime will I get asked to go to India for a three day Hindu wedding?"  

Just the other day I had a woman call me on this.  She noted the number of Indian people on the planet and said it could very well happen again.  Hmmmm, she does have a point there.

Sometimes I also mention that it feels like a transitional kind of journey for me.  In a way paralleling the trip I made to London when I was twenty.   This is another big shift.  I left for that trip to study abroad.  I knew I had to leave the University of Connecticut, but didn't know where to transfer and when I said out loud that maybe I should just go abroad instead, there were two other students nearby who had come back from France and Spain.  The two of them practically started to shake me to say, "you MUST go abroad!!!"   

It ended up changing my life.  I like to say it was the first best decision I ever made.  That still sounds pretty fair to say.  Simply stated, my world got bigger.  I realized I had so many more choices than I could have imagined.  There is no one "right" way to live.  The world is teeming with people who don't put me or my country first.  That I wasn't the only person who thought Ronald Reagan was an idiot, whole nations might think he's one, too!  That I love listening to people learn from each other.  You can meet new friends anywhere.  There is ALWAYS something interesting to look at.  I'm not so great at navigating new ways of communicating when what I know seems to work (even if what I need to learn might be better.)  But then I'll figure out how to do it, despite the frustration.  That I love Indian food!  And falafel!  And Earl Grey tea.  I love, love, love to travel.  That the way I travel is VERY different than a bunch of other people and I don't care too much about what time it is.  (I knew I didn't care about what time it is before, but when others' schedules are in the mix it can either seem incredibly flexible or incredibly difficult.)       

I might go on with this later, but these are just some of the things I learned in London.  And this trip .... I'll need to make a list about India and what I've learned during this first week, but I'm hungry.  There are a lot of things that make us hungry.  (not eating breakfast is my reason at the moment and I need to go fix that)

So I guess RIGHT NOW I'm here to get myself some breakfast.