I dreamt that I was still in India. Needing to travel from one point to the other, I had many miles to walk. And each time that I lifted a foot to take a step I had to consider the contradicting advice from a hundred head-waggling Indians while stumbling over broken brick walls and gaping open sewers only to someday arrive late at my destination; and then only to fill out numerous copies of the same long forms. It was the kind of dream that I had as a feverish child, one where I’d awake and all I could say of the overwhelming mental jumble was that ‘the numbers in my head are mixed up and I cannot count all of the stars (or grains of sand… or people on earth…or…)’. And whereas when I was young, I desperately needed to take control and make linear sense of my abstruse life, today I arose from my chaotic India dream, simply missing India.
And I grasped for any last traces of India, in my nose, on my skin... But the forced air of the 20 hour flight home had sanitized the exotic scents of burning sandalwood, night blooming flower essences, divinely combined spices, smoldering garbage, Himalayan breath, fresh mountain Ganges water, and lowland desert dust from within and around me. The song of India, a thick melody of the beeps and horn sequences of trucks blaring, the gentle buzz of a million voices haggling, overlapping ashram loudspeakers spiritually chanting, peacocks singing, ceiling fans whirring, donkey/camel/bull/horse hooves beating on uneven cement, tinny sounds of chai pots clanging- had departed, and in the empty silences of my countryside home all that existed was the sound of my own blood pounding through my body.
When I was just there, exploring the streets of India with Simone, my 13 year old daughter- I knew that the trip was fleeting and too rapidly disappearing behind me. As I cradled each moment with longing, wanting to sear it into my memory, wanting to wrap my arms around each experience and hold it tightly in my heart, I wondered why. Why India? Why this land teeming with cracked open buildings surrounded with piles of brick or gravel or dirt-buildings that I could not decide whether they were half built or half in ruins? Why India and its system of haggling and mysterious train schedules and Giardia laden waters and garbage strewn underfoot and marble palaces flanked by extreme poverty and 16 million children- homeless, parentless and begging? Why did I bring Simone all the way to the other side of the world and our reality, to India?
And it is this: India is so very, very raw. India is an experience of the beautiful range and explosive expression of the human plight. India passionately exists without obscuring anything- she is all there, layered out in colorful splendor and pungent grotesqueness and vivid dreaminess and history and with scars and hopes and mistakes and dramas and reverent spirituality and contradictions and beliefs. India is honest and faithful in her perfect imperfection. I know exactly what I can expect from India, so much more than here in the US with our noble attempts at hiding behind thick plasticized masks of fearlessness and organization and youth and beauty and success. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the incredible gifts, ease and richness of my American living and I appreciate how my people built this country upon the lessons learned from the old countries; but I ache for the colorful truth of humanity and spirituality that I had lost and now find in India.
And this is what I wanted to share with my child. Human truth and how it is translated and explained by the many humans, religions, languages, cultures, philosophies abound. I wanted her to witness India and how India deals with the depth of humanness with the heights of spirituality and all that lives in between. What Simone makes of her experience with me I cannot say, but I will one day die knowing that I did everything I could to crack open our earthy and ethereal world and expose her heart and perhaps reconnect her soul to the fabulously unruly and tragic and sweet and spicy and all encompassing realm of utter existence.
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