Thursday, August 28, 2014

Monsoon

     I suppose it would be a good time to let everyone know my plans (or as much as I know of them) for these next 8ish months. I'll be here in Nasik, the city I lived for my exchange year, with my old host family, for a month. Then my dear friend Laura will be joining me and we'll travel for three months all over India. After that time, we'll renew our visas in Thailand, presumably having a few adventures there, and then I'll be spending the remainder of my time back in India volunteering (the details of which I don't have quite lined up yet). I'll be back in Portland when the sun comes back, likely around late April.
     This blog will be largely a continuation of the last blog I kept while here- http://indiameleah.blogspot.com/ and I will try not to repeat myself too very much, while still providing some context. This one will be a little different from the last, beyond just the change from the 16 year old self who makes me smile and occasionally cringe when I read back. This trip is not about making a home in a new place or understanding a different culture from scratch, although both of those are probably inevitable. This will be a chance for me to travel on more or less my own terms.
     These days I am mostly with my family, watching grating Hindi soap operas and laughing with my sisters and eating good, salty and spicy food. We are in the middle of a Jain holiday (the religion of my host family) which means a lot more time with the extended family and no fruits or vegetables as a sort of fast or penance.  I have nothing to compare with my aunt who is fasting for 11 days taking only water. Still I find myself daydreaming of big salads with plump sungold tomatoes, and my journal is increasingly filled with detailed descriptions of stir fries I'll cook next summer and love poems to zucchini. It is amazing that there are so many delicious meals you can make without meat, eggs, vegetables, fruits, or fresh herbs, but somehow we are living well on legumes, grains, milk, and oil. I've been cooking with my aunt, meaning occasionally stirring something while watching her throw ingredients together with a seemingly haphazard grace that produces consistently wonderful results.
     I've also had a bit of time to explore the city more, taking walks through the neighborhoods and busy streets, making exciting little discoveries while trying to avoid stepping in anything or running into a motorcycle. The rainy season is still upon us, providing billowing clouds and occasional downpours to shield the heat. The other day I went down to the Godavari river, which runs through Nasik and attracts lots of Hindu pilgrims to the holy waters. I sat on the ghats, the concrete steps leading into the river, right in the center of the water and all the life around it.
     On the lower steps women and a few men wash clothes. When you look down, there are hundreds of colorful articles of clothing being scrubbed and swung around to wring them out. The woman beside me in a dazzlingly bright sari gives me an inquisitive look, pours large silver bowlfuls of river water, scrubbing the steps to clean them and then the clothes, soap foaming up and disappearing into the river. Some trash floats down, but in this part it looks mostly clean. Someone above throws a pair of pants into the current and I watch as they drift down and slowly sink to join the other random treasures the river holds. Boys scream jumping into the water just where it channels into a stronger current under the walkway. One boy clings to the corner, singing at the top of his lungs, I am a disco dancer, I am a disco dancer. The slap of children's wet feet on pavement is the same everywhere. There are swallows and white birds above me, cows with painted orange horns on the banks, men flinging trash into a truck, some sweeping it into the river. The smell of burning incense and trash. The temples are so beautiful, the paint doesn't look too old, but the stone crumbles giving way to cascades of plants on the roof.
      I cannot pretend I am an invisible observer in this scene. As more women come to wash clothes, the conversation always comes back to the foreigner in their midst. I can barely understand any Marathi, which is the local language, but I talk with them a little in Hindi about where I came from, what the heck I'm doing just sitting on the steps, and eventually what the heck I'm doing in India. One woman speaks English, and I find out she's a middle class law student whose water had just gone out that day. It is always healthy for me to shatter my stereotypes with encounters like this. I didn't even know that I had romanticized these women until I found myself slightly surprised. After a while I fade into the background, their background at least, across the river and peripherally I can see people watching me. I don't mind too much anymore, curiosity is more than understandable, and I find myself watching a foreigner who passes by with the same unapologetic scrutiny. A group of teenage boys approaches and one stands in front of me as if to say something and touches my arm as he walks by, probably a bet with his friends. I tell them to get lost. These are always the strange in between moments, what to ignore and what not to. Sometimes calling attention to a situation just makes it worse. The women around me yell after them and call over the watchman. A woman instructs me on how I should have hit him, ideally with my shoe, and they're right. I need to remember to make a scene when I need to. It has been a long time since I've had to be assertive in that particular way. I tell this story not to make anyone worry, but to document my own learning process and to let people know who do worry about me travelling here that for every person with less than good intentions, there are dozens of aunties and didis and uncles who watch out for me.
     Some days are like this, the great wonder of India in all her confusing glory. Some days I sit around and do sudokus and eat and don't do much else. Life feels pretty darn pleasantly normal and occasionally boring until I write it out. It's always strange to be in a new place and realize how much can happen in a week. 

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Back in Bharat

     The subconscious has an extraordinary memory. Yesterday I walked through traffic, bargained with three rickshaw wallahs in broken Hindi until I found the right price, all the while wondering how the hell I'd got there and how I'd dodged several motorcycles, a dog and a cow without more than half a glance. The strangest thing about being back is how very simply and nonchalantly I slipped into a world I could barely remember just a few days ago. 
     It's been a little over two years ago since I left India, three since I arrived wide-eyed, bemused and mystified by everything I saw. I keep having flashbacks to the first time I saw each part of this home. (Our water comes from a clay pot? How am I supposed to eat rice with my hands?  I just touch my relatives' feet to greet them, wait you mean just bend over and touch their feet?). It was a very long and incredible year that left me a new person by the time I came back to America in June. 
     I have changed since then in ways I am only now starting to see. According to my family I am weaker (meaning that I lost the 10 kgs I gained on too much good Indian food). I have a high school diploma and a semester at a liberal arts college under my belt, as well as a refined vocabulary of car sounds and distraction strategies from nannying a sweet one and a half year old boy for the past eight months. I hadn't been planning on coming back to India so soon. I reached a point though where I desperately needed the color and chaos and majesty and ridiculousness I've only found in India. 
     I left on the 19th of August. After a rushed goodbye to my family owing to a punctual and grumpy bus driver, I left my beautiful city and rode to Seattle, where I had a lovely time with my uncle, driving around and savoring the pastries, evergreens, grocery stores, and good talks with relatives I'll be missing this year. I had a very easy flight to Dubai, all the while thinking that there must be something to stop me from going, surely there'd be some delay or accident or paperwork I was missing, perhaps a stern matron popping up saying, "Now listen here young lady, you can't just drop everything and go to India with your main plan as coming back sometime in spring." Somehow though, I managed to get myself in the right place and end up half way around the world. 
     There is nothing quite like flying, the way glaciers look from above, the way clouds shade different parts of the land and roads parallel rivers. How very small our little patches of settlement are and how unbelievably prevalent they are. The way the desert looks just the same as the beach after the tide goes out. And then there is the more mysterious phenomenon of looking up and seeing rows and rows of closed windows and movies playing. As we took off, a woman behind me sang a very long and desperate prayer, and I think I must have been praying as well, probably for different things. I'm pretty sure she was hoping we wouldn't crash; I kept hearing little gasps and exclamations in Arabic as we went through turbulence.
     I arrived at three in the morning to humidity and the wonderful surprise of my whole family coming to greet me at the airport. The sleepy ride back to Nasik was my first glimpse of my old home, and I found myself with lots of excitement, but not much surprise at the erratic traffic, cow herds, and people slowly waking up, gathering around chai stalls, relieving themselves in the trash-strewn roadside. It felt far less strange and exalted than returning to America had felt. Somehow my mindset doesn't seem too very much changed from the one that left Portland. This time around there is not the same awe and mystery to catapult me into a new self all at once. I wouldn't want it any other way. The drive was beautiful, mist covered, and green, and we finally reached our flat at 6:30am. 
     It doesn't seem possible that this is only my third day here, all of the relatives and old friends I've seen, all the walks I've been on, and all the time with no work to be done. I will leave some of the things I've seen already to different posts. I am always honored and a little surprised to see how many people like to follow my journey. If you ever have the chance, please write me at meleahcarlson@yahoo.com, tidbits from afar always keep me going. 
Jai ji nendra,
Namaste,
Much love,
Meleah