Identifying with India
By scott.poniewaz | April 19, 2008
Life at the edge of beauty. The Taj Mahal. Agra, India.
Please click this main image to see a gallery of images. There are a few from Olympic National Park in Washington from a trip I took before I left Seattle right at the beginning. If you place the cursor over images in the gallery, you can see captions. Click a thumbnail to move forward, or use the buttons in the lower right hand corner to advance photos.
A picture of the Dalai Lama nestled between movie posters of Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill” and Leonardo DiCaprio in “Blood Diamond,” as I sat in a local Dharamsala, India pizza parlor ignited thoughts about what home was to me these days. It was an east meets west moment that sent my mind into a whirlwind of confusion. Thoughts started to spin and for some reason, I was trying to put myself somewhere, anywhere, and give it a label. I had never had this feeling before, or maybe I had, but I just ignored it. It was then I realized home no longer existed as it once had.
I currently have a simple, small apartment that consists of a bed, bathroom and a gas burner for a kitchen and most of my friends here are local Tibetans in exile that for the most part are people that I work with. My western friends I met last year are long gone after their temporary stays studying Buddhism, yoga or meditation; the main draws of this mountain community that is also home to the Dalai Lama.
As I walk along the street, there are the familiar faces that haven’t left, such as the Tibetan woman selling fried mystery meat sausages by the Tibetan clinic, the young Indian guys that run the internet café near the top of the steps that go to my apartment and enthusiastically say, “Hello sir!” each time I pass. There is the beggar with missing limbs that sits by the vegetable stalls and asks me for change with a smile every time I pass, and of course, the famous Saddhu that wanders the streets posing for tourist photos and graces many postcards for sale here. There is the waiter at a local Indian restaurant that asks me where I’ve been when I haven’t stopped in for awhile, usually while away to somewhere like Delhi, or Ladakh. Then there is my apartment manager that doesn’t understand what I do all day working on a computer and why I travel so much.
When I’m in Delhi, there are the hotel staff that know me by name, the little hole in the wall restaurant around the corner that knows my order. I still think I am the only westerner that has ever eaten there. The flies that buzz along the floor and “Disco Mary,” flashing LED lights around a Virgin Mary portrait on the wall, may be a deterrent to most foreigners, but the dosa’s there are what dreams are made of.
In India it is not uncommon to stare, and I find myself locking eyes in a survival of the fittest with Indian men on motorbikes as I sit in the Delhi traffic. At first this was something extremely uncomfortable for me, but now I’m used to it and catch myself doing it unknowingly.
During my time spent on the Indian roads, I’ve finally started to make sense of the game of Ro-Sham-Bo that goes on. Bikes beat people, auto rickshaws beat bikes, cars beat auto rickshaws, trucks beat cars, and public buses pretty much beat everything, so if you see one rumbling toward you, you better get the hell out of the way fast, because they stop for nothing. The only exception for the game of Ro-Sham-Bo on the Indian roadway, is the cow.
The cow is the trump card that takes all. There is an area near the Red Fort that is notorious for its traffic and almost always has a traffic jam no matter what time of day, and more times than not, when we get to the end, there is a cow taking a respite from the Delhi heat under the overpass and blocking one of the lanes of traffic. Nobody is trying to move the cow; they respect the animal that lies in the middle of the road with a string of drool hanging from its mouth and nose up in the air flaunting his power. That is just the way it is. The cow is holy to the Hindu people and they must let it be and everyone understands this, even if it makes a 3-minute stretch of road turn into a 30-minute stretch. The cow does not quell the horn honking that is present. That will never be silenced. Each time I pass through the gauntlet, it is a test of patience that I have now been trained to overcome.
In observance of April 7, which is world health day, Mumbai attempted to ban the honking of horns in the city in observance of the day to reduce stress and improve overall well-being by keeping everyone’s horns silenced. The news the next day said it failed miserably and the people interviewed said the streets would be chaos without horns. This is probably true, but to make it through a day in India without hearing a single horn would be miraculous!
While I’ll still be moving around India constantly with short stints in the same bed, it is the place that I’ll spend the majority of 2008. When I get back to Thailand in August, I’ll catch back up with old friends and settle back into what has become almost a home away from home. But what is my home these days? People ask me where I am from and I have no idea how to answer anymore. I try to say America, but they ask where, expecting me to respond with New York or California, where everyone seems to have a friend or family member living. I gave up trying to explain Madison, or even Wisconsin, instead opting for the easier answer of Chicago. But when I look back at the time since I last lived in Wisconsin at the age of 18, I probably haven’t spent more than a few weeks there. The recent realization spurred frustration with the tax system when I realized I would actually owe the state of Wisconsin money for 2007.
I went to school in Montana and spent my summers in places like Jackson, Wyoming or exploring the Alaskan wilderness. Since graduating college, I’ve been living out of a bag for most of the year, Thailand one day, Burma the next, Cambodia the following week, then India. I spend a couple months in Thailand, then jump to Fiji or Africa, then back to the US for a couple months to continue to live out of a bag.
In this time, I’ve come to realize that home isn’t something physical. Wisconsin, the home of my youth, no longer really feels like home, since it has been so long, though my parents still provide the comforts of home. If I went back to Missoula, it probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either, even though it was where I spent several years of my recent life and a place I thought I would never leave. When I go back to Seattle, I think I will start to feel like it is home, it did when I left and I still think about it everyday, yet I have no permanent place to walk back into or pillow to rest my head upon.
When I wake up in the morning now, my cup of chai on the balcony that offers views of the Himalaya is my daily dose of comfort and has replaced the Seattle coffee I had in the months prior. When I walk down the McLeod Ganj streets and the familiar faces are still there to say hello, I have the feeling of familiarity. When I ask the rickshaw driver to take me to Connaught Place in Delhi and he tries to tell me where I’m going is closed, but he knows of another good restaurant, I simply respond with the fact that I’m meeting a friend and he acknowledges that I know where I’m going and takes me right there as he would any other local. I still may have to pay 10 more rupees than an Indian, but at least the hassling has subsided.
When I first came to India I wondered how a foreigner could ever survive here on a long-term basis and how one could ever even begin to assimilate into a country filled with so many scams, shady drivers, and touts. The heat, the crowded streets, and noise were overwhelming, but now I have found them to have a sense of order. The more time I spend, the more this country becomes etched into my soul and the more welcoming it becomes. The mix of east and west allows me to can catch the latest Bollywood film and have a pizza. I have come to realize that home is not physical, but merely a collection of comforts in our daily life that are found anywhere in the world. And for now, other than the bags that travel with me wherever I go, India is as close to a home that I have.
Topics: Travel, Photo Galleries, General, Thailand, India, Myanmar, The Fiji Islands, Tibet, United States, Montana, Washington |
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