Day 68 - The End

I am leaving India today. I hate goodbyes. They confuse me; I don't think my brain knows how to to fully compute the given situation; and that's probably true for most people. Just as it is unnatural for the mind to understand death - to fully comprehend the idea of permanently leaving this world - so it is unnatural to be leaving particular people or places temporarily, but on a smaller scale, of course. Saying goodbyes is like momentarily meeting death, or rather, momentarily acknowledging death and impermanence. It's defiant acceptance of the inevitable; and I don't particularly like that. We weren't meant to live this way.  

Farewell India. 

America is on the horizon.

Day 66 - Recollections

My time is almost done here. I have a little over two days left to absorb what I can; and then Delhi is a dream, a dream I hope to return to later in life. I thought for this post I would include portions of my journal entries from throughout the trip.

June 6, 2009

The disappointing thing about the trip thus far is that in my mind it is difficult to separate Delhi from India, along with the images I've seen, the little reading-material I've read, and the movies I've watched - all shaping a shape I haven't really seen until now - and I don't know how agreeable I find everything. However, each day the city and its people grow on me; and every day my mind, and my heart too, perceives and feels for this place with a little more clarity, and in that clarity, out of the fog of my preconceived notions of Eastern myth and abject poverty emerges a heartbeat not so unlike my own, a human heartbeat. 

June 8

What a terrible night. I think I got at most three hours of sleep...I had to get up. It was useless lying in bed, allowing the mosquitos to feast on me. I don't know how many bites I got last night; enough to make me restless and force me out of bed. 

June 13

As the conches resounded inside the immaculately decorated temple, the enthusiastic congregates raised their arms and hands above their heads. They were preparing for the revealing of the idols. And it was at this point that I truly sensed something rather alien to me, an electricity I wasn't sure how to calculate: I sensed the breath of the divine over the people, I sensed the waking of the gods from their deep, primordial slumber. And I sensed the gods sinister appetite to devour the minds and hearts of the people eagerly waiting their approval. Their capricious laughter filled the room, and I stood stunned, for what could I do? 

June 13

I had this thought that I would stop living by the days, that days are really an illusion, and rather moments are the true reality. Instead of thinking, today I will accomplish this, or today I should go here or go there, or today I need to read my Bible, I should think, now I will do this or do that, now I will go here or go there, now I will no longer be afraid, and now I will love. 

June 30

I had never felt so close to what it really feels like to be a father as I did when she spontaneously wrapped her little arms around my legs.

July 3

What are my experiences so far? If I were to write a book about my experiences in India, would it be worth reading? Would the characters be compelling? What did I come here for in the first place? I came here to feel the heartbeat of India; to see faces; to hear voices; to give and be given to. And why haven't I wept yet? I came here to be human. Where are all the tears inside?

July 15

After mazing our way into the slum, we parked the car and looked apprehensively out at the drenched surroundings, not fully ready to step into the sheets of rain coming down. Concerning the surroundings, almost all the houses were made entirely of red brick; and nearly half of those looked as though they were in construction or simply in ruins - I couldn't tell the difference. The structures that looked more or less completed on average reached the height of three to four stories, which was rather impressive given their precarious-looking designs. For even the sturdiest of the homes looked as if though the smallest of earthquakes would collapse them. But I should be careful to judge so quickly. Despite their crude and curious architecture, like massive chimneys inhabited by people, which were a wonder to look at, the houses, in their plentitude, looked well-worn in and rather warm and cosy. For all I knew, generations of families could have been living in these brick homes, persevering through Mother Nature and the demands of rapidly developing society that wants brush the existence of slums under the table. No doubt, however, that over the years these structures have had to be reinforced. Or perhaps many of these homes have fallen in the past. But, to borrow a summary of India civilization from another writer: what Indians do best as a people, better than perhaps all other nations, is begin again. Instead of abandoning land to its demise, Indians simply build their lives on the tops of ruins. They are the masters of the cycle. They just accept their fates with passive tenacity. 

Day 53 - Naipual

Here is an excerpt from a book I am reading called An Area of Darkeness by V.S. Naipaul. The book is an account of Naipaul's first travels throughout India. It was published in 1964.

"India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an observation of no value; a thousand newcomers to the country before you have seen and said as you. And not only newcomers. Our own sons and daughters, when they return from Europe and America, have spoken in your very words. Do not think that your anger and contempt are marks of your sensitivity. You might have seen more: the smiles on the faces of the begging children, that domestic group among the pavement sleepers waking in the cool Bombay morning, father, mother and baby in a trinity of love, so self-contained that they are as private as if walls had separated them from you: it is your gaze that violates them, your sense of outrage that outrages them. You might have seen the boy sweeping his area of pavement, spreading his mat, lying down; exhaustion and undernourishment are in his tiny body and shrunken face, but lying flat on his back, oblivious of you and the thousands who walk past in the lane between sleepers' mats and house walls bright with advertisements and election slogans, oblivious of the warm, over-breathed air, he plays with fatigued concentration with a tiny pistol in blue plastic. It is your surprise, your anger that denies him humanity. But wait. Stay six months. The winter will bring fresh visitors. Their talk will also be of poverty; they too will show their anger. You will agree; but deep down there will be annoyance; it will seem to you then, too, that they are seeing only the obvious; and it will not please you to find your sensibility so accurately parodied...I had learned too that escape was always possible, that in every Indian town there was a corner of comparative order and cleanliness in which one could recover and cherish one's self-respect. In India the easiest and most necessary thing to ignore was the most obvious. Which no doubt was why, in spite of all that I had read about the country, nothing had prepared me for it."