Home alone on Saturday night, turning down offers of coffee and booze and barbecued goodness to curl up in bed and sort through pictures of my trip. While I was there, I had so many words but nothing to write them with. Partial recollections of how easy it is to fall back in love with a country where cars stop to let cows cross the dusty red stained streets, or my heart skipping a beat while watching the sunset over vast fields on the three hour drive to the airport, punctuated at intervals by the most ridiculous billboards, the hands down winner of which must be the one that said in proud, bold letters, “Fastest Erection in India – Up in Just Four Hours!” Maybe it’s easier to love when you’re only there in the winters, when the fields are green with crops, vegetables I cannot name in English, can barely name in one of three Indian languages, that I usually hate with a vengeance but eat with undisguisable glee when cooked over an open flame in a village or fried in giant vats with spicy green chillis. Then you don’t have to deal with 46C sunshine, or thigh deep floods, or mud and mosquitos.
To be fair I think I prefer not having total recall. The alternative would involve email access, and telephone calls, and it was brilliant to spend a fortnight without so much as knowing what time it was without having to walk halfway across the house to the only clock – the one on the microwave, which more often than not was stuck at 2:14am.
Everyone would fight over the use of a pen if one was ever discovered – mom had grocery lists to make, and dad had bills and forms to sign. There was always so much to do, so much going on, but I’d left everything behind, so all I had were books. Even my mp3 player was dangerously low on battery, I figured I’d be better off conserving it for the five hour train ride on day 4. So I read. And I read, and I dreamt, and I loved just about every minute of it.
India to me isn’t home, although it’s where most of my family is, it’s where I spent so much of my childhood, where my parents and grandparents grew up and built their lives and every street corner holds a different memory and story. I still hold my breath when stepping over cow patties, I’m still terrified of the monkeys that nip into kitchens and steal entire boxes of handrolled chappatis, I still contemplate brushing my teeth with Bisleri. It’s not a land of mysticism, although I would like to know the symbolism behind the water and milk I had to spoon over and over into little bowls for four hours during house warming prayers, or understand even a fraction of what the priests chanted, or know what festival the mosque two streets away from my house was gearing up for. It’s a country where touching a stranger’s feet and accepting their blessings is no less out of the ordinary than ordering a double hazelnut latte and an almond croissant, where men live out of the city limits all alone, taking care of a house, tending it’s gardens, ensuring that the hibiscus grow beautifully for when memsahib comes back, cycling 16km to her house in the city, and 16km back, in his Levis jeans. It’s where the village ladies squat in front of an open brick oven to make rotis in the fields, only to whip out Motorola phones from the folds of their immaculate saris. It’s where the 25 rupee plates of pani puri taste a hundred times better than the 500 rupee buffet dinner in a five star hotel. It’s where hotels are bombed, and rebuilt in time for weddings to be carried out, weddings where every direction you look there is bling and shine and opulence, more fresh flowers than could fill every vase and pot and glass in your house, and over a hundred different dishes, where old beggar ladies sit on the roadside in the cold, eating ice cream with a smile on their face so big you feel your heart will burst.
