So,
how was India?
We're some 35,000
feet above the Atlantic Ocean and I'm racking my mind trying to figure out how
I'm going to answer this looming question.
It's been nearly a year since I left the city where I was born to work
with Oasis India and the anticipation of my homecoming stretches the 22 hour
flight time to what feels like 22 years. It gives me plenty of time to collect
my thoughts on the past year, though it does me little good.
In the following
days I reunite with friend after friend, aunt after uncle, all asking that same
unanswerable question:
"So, how was
India?"
It's so seemingly
simple and certainly expected, considering my long absence, and yet every time,
I'm caught off guard. I don't know what to say. "Crazy, but amazing"
becomes my automated response because it's easier than trying to describe the
home-cooked meals eaten at a stranger's table, the street children forced to
tug on my sleeves and demand money, the schools of auto-rickshaws swimming
through narrow streets, the woman cured of tuberculosis, the man who died of
it, the walls of water that fell all
night, the orphanage that had no beds, the joy that bubbled up from even the
poorest neighborhoods…
Trying to describe
this country that defies definition and rejects summary only gets more
difficult with each attempt.
When I try to talk
about India, I find myself telling stories about another place. A place less
exciting, desaturated and flavorless, like wax fruit compared to the real
thing. The people I had grown to love become cardboard cutouts and the late
night expeditions through the city become boring and uneventful. I've never had
language fail me so completely, so utterly. India, I've come to accept, isn't a
place that can be captured in an anecdote or even by the thousand-word pictures
filling up my hard drive. It requires something else, something more. Don't ask
me what though-I don't know.
I've been home for
over a month now and I've had plenty of opportunities to answer the 'How was
India' question, though I've come no closer to a satisfactory answer. It's been
admittedly frustrating; there's so much I want to share, but don't have the words
for. Perhaps my new automated response from here on out will simply be
"Buy a plane ticket. Go see for yourself."
