The End of Indian Days

I’ve ended out the more personal segments of this (rather long) diary, but I think it still provides the general gist of another closing cover…

May 19, 2010

Here, at the end of Indian days.

Kerala is another world of green and blue, their shades grayed by falling rain. Palms line the lake’s walls, little floating islands of sprouting greenery interlock and then move separate ways again, creating little shifting bridges that, while begging to be walked across, would sink under any approaching toe. The sky’s tears ebb and flow between trickle and storm, but with the kind of green they grow I can’t imagine they carry any drop of sorrow.

After Goa I felt almost flung back into India, completely unprepared. It was amazing how easily I slipped back into the lush life. Cocktails, beach wear, western company. Easy. Nice, even. Goa and not a care in the world. What’s there to worry about when the sea salt floats your weight and your worries. Nothing, sir-ji. It’s all a world of blue and gold.

And then after a 14 hr train ride (which turned into a 21 hr one after an unnecessary 7 hr delay) reminded me to be on guard, put my angry face on, don’t play with strangers.

I re-read the last blog I wrote but didn’t post. My eyes welled up with tears, because I remembered what immense joy India has brought me.

D and her head not of a thousand smiles.

Imagine your life as a novel. 21-year-old woman, fresh out of college. BA in her backpack, world at her feet, one-way plane ticket in hand. Hers is a world of courage and dreams and possibilities. Everything beyond that first plane-ride to Seoul is an unknown.

And then she makes it through the first leg of an unending journey, and throws it all to the wind. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. But it is, really, so daring? To do what you love, to live honestly with yourself, to take chances.

Or is it simply as it should be? This one way journey forward. This eager wide-eyed FRIGHTENED 21-year-old girl. Because in my mind she is. She’s too terrified of what comes after what next to think about it. So she focuses on next, and then next, and then next.

All the way to a sweltering Punjabi village.

Maybe this is a mark of wisdom. Just focus on what comes next. Because what comes next changes everything thereafter.

And everything thereafter was of but a dream. But not. The dust roads, the constant greetings, the trial and error and failure of foreign living. Intimate living. Because there is nothing left to hid from yourself. Not when it is 44 C with 32% humidity and every stable force in your life is gone.

Movement, movement forward and sideways and backwards again. We do not grow in linear fashion.

21 does not become 22 and a half overnight. There are seasons, crushes and loses. A floor is constructed, yellow paint is splattered over walls and bodies, girls begin to come. Real life and poetry intertwine between trials and triumphs………

.

Usually the 1st of the calendar year marks new beginnings. Before for her it is February’s dawn. The sun reappears after months of hiding. Maybe, actually, the world is not so very cold.

The days and weeks and memories that pass are colored by the people that shade them......


And then there is joy in the different shades and shapes of 5 adolescent girls. One with the slight chub of puberty, white stains on her chin, high class and English with a little mini attached to her hips. There is the fair one, long braids a light brown with village boys peering from afar. She is the coy one, the Jane Bennett of them all, always smiles but without an accompanying tale. There is the lean pretty one, name of 3 and smile of pearls. Sometimes there, sometimes not but always joyful. There is the one who is a little slower, a little younger, but full of kind surprises and her “is” English is a joy to hear. And then there is the rascal, the bottomless pit of curiosity, the one so brimming with life that you can’t decide if this is her first or fortieth time alive. She is either desperately excited for living because she doesn’t know what comes next, or indescribably joyful because she does.

And so the weather’s brutality is kept somewhat at bay by these characters and their voices, their stories overlapping to create a bizarre wall hanging of Rajasthan’s colors and Sotla’s morning call to prayer.

And this living, what was meant to be an adventure becomes… life. Days come and go, doctors trips and blood tests, calls hope and open-ended prayers. Highs and lows, just like the rest of the time zones.

But the clock and the motor keep moving, and August morphs into April and 21 becomes 22 and a half overnight, the passing between them but a mirage, save for the pages and memories that document their belonging.

Train rides lead southward and, at the end of it all, there is nothing left to prove. The self-competition is done, starved off with the last giardia strain. When you search for your limits and find that they cannot be found, that they are more vast than you’d ever hoped you live in the comfort of their open space. A little to the left or the right, it doesn’t matter. You are still in the grasp of possibility.

Possibility is everything. It is enchanting. The possibility that, when we allow it, reality surpasses our fantasy.

Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the hands of time…

Green, green, green, and then blue.

From green to green to blue again go the colors and days, until August becomes 22 and a half and bags have been packed and flights have been bought and then threatened with cancelation and then prayed over.

2 suitcases, Goa’s brown tan, and D’s head nod with the tilt of a thousand smiles.