LOVE

Not to worry, this isn’t a lovely-dovie entry. It’s a memoir of my fumbled attempts to describe my romantic life and Western notions of love to a group of Indian twenty-somethings.

Picture a bull doing ballet in a china shop. Speaking as the person who played the part of the bull, it was a rather awkward scene. But hey, sometimes broken pieces are beautiful. Ever seen the mosaics of St. Marc’s in Venice?

This all begins on Tuesday, when my class talked about love. Every guys’ eyes light up at the mention and each of their mouths eagerly turn up into smiles. The one young women smiles at me, and shyly turns her head down, embarrassed.

We begin by trying to define love.

One young man says, “It’s a meeting of two souls.” Yes, everyone aggress, love is a meeting of two souls. “There’s nothing like it in the world,” he adds.

I find this strangely moving. 8000 plus miles of physical difference between our homelands, and even farther in terms of worldview, and yet the six of us, sitting in a small sweltering room together, describe love with the same terms. "A meeting of two souls.”

For them, love grows. This is a world of arranged marriages, where your parents pick a mate and you learn to love them. You grow to love them. You work with what is chosen for you.

In America children choose for themselves. And so we date (insert my own insight # 1 into the American dating scene). Because our parents do not do the choosing for us, children have the task of finding the best mate for themselves.

“Have you ever had a boyfriend mame?”

Oh jeez. “Um, yes, I have.” (I am not admitting to two. I really do not feel the need to be crowned the Western dating queen of these villages.)

“Have you ever been in love?”

“Yes.” (Gosh, is that even worse than admitting to having had a boyfriend? I attempt to read all of their faces. No shock. Just anticipation. What will she say next?)

The first young man thinks that true love only happens once. “Well, in the US we have this thing called 'first love'.” I give a very fumbled attempt at explaining this foreign idea, because this means that we have more than one love. (YOU try explaining American concepts of love and romance and relationships in one hour while re-hearing everything you say through the filters of their ears and dealing with a language barrier. Why do we even have something called “first love"? And how do you even begin to describe it when every person I have ever meet has experienced it differently?) Anyway, this entails me trying to explain that I think you love your first love differently than you love your last love, a notion that was either just silly or truly lost in translation.

Essentially, this is the point in the conversation where the bull tries to do a lot of dramatic tight spins in the middle of the dance piece and falls over. My explanation is met by mostly polite (and confused) head nods. Oh man, keep talking.

Somehow this leads into my mother’s perspective on my dating. (Mom if you are reading this I didn’t actually make it sound like you wanted me to date every man under the sun, despite how this may be interpreted). I tell them that after I broke up with my first boyfriend (damn, did I just admit to having had 2?) my mom said “You are NOT going to marry the next guy you date. You will meet many men in your life. You are only 16. Do NOT marry the next guy you date.”

Now there are very wide eyes and bewildered looks. Whoops, again.

P. says that marriage is a lottery. I tell him that that is why we date in the U.S. (insert my own insight into American dating # 2). Because you can never be 100% positive that you’re picking the right person, but we try to improve the odds by sorting through the selection before we choose one.

More explanation still necessary.

“Okay, so let’s say that my first boyfriend didn’t read a lot and wasn’t well educated but he was great with his family. So there’s one really good thing, but there’s one bad thing also, because we can’t connect intellectually. And say that my next boyfriend was incredibly articulate and read a lot but he hated his family and didn’t care about them. Well, I know that’s not someone I want to have children with. But say that my third boyfriend was educated, read a lot, and was great with his family. I know he has the important qualities I am looking for, so I marry him.”

JACKPOT. I have just explained American dating (albeit in a toned-down version, I get three boyfriends and apparently am only looking for two things in a life-mate) and it is cross-culturally acceptable. Western relationships make sense in an Indian context. I come extraordinarily close to jumping up and down and giving myself a high-five.

Now that American dating makes some sense they break off into small groups. P leans forward and says “Mame, I have been in love, once.”

She was in one of his classes. He never told her, always loved her from afar, and continued to love her, despite the fact that the feelings were not returned to him. "What do you call that?" he asks. "We call it unrequited love." "Yes, yes, it was unrequited love."

She had 30 Punjabi suits, all in different colors. So he had 30 shirts made, each one matching one of her suits. And he wore them as a testament to his love.

She is married now, he says, with a baby. That was her destiny.

This news is delivered peacefully, without resignation. For him destiny is acceptable, life goes on, and love does not have to be possible in order to be beautiful.

I spend the rest of the afternoon wandering between Indian and American love, between choice and destiny, between the expectations of what we want and the reality of those we fall for.

I linger in the possibilities.

I Might Just Be A Tad Bit Crazy

It honestly didn't strike me that picking up and moving across the world to an Indian village to work with an NGO that I only knew a couple things about was crazy. It really didn't.

I just sort of figured that that is what you do when you're 21 and you're in love with living and seeing the sun rise over an Eastern sky makes your heart soar. I started to get small again after Ghana, to get too comfortable. I needed something BIG. Something to shake the dirt off and leave my soul bare. So I figured hey, why not. Constant stomach discomfort? Adventure? India? Where do I sign up?

Then the very nice young man on my plane to Seoul very politely suggested that that was not something a normal person does. "You're going to India? For 10 months? BY YOURSELF!?" Oh, right. Not so normal.

Every day here is an emotional roller coaster. Gosh, the highs and lows. In two weeks I have already developed a love-hate relationship with India. But it's passionate. And there's nothing I want in life more than passion: passion in love, in dance, in movement, in speech, in seeking and finding and stumbling in between.

And it's dangerous, I suppose. Letting your heart write your life story, allowing it to lead-- always four steps ahead of your body, bounding forward into the deep unknown. Because somehow it led me to a remote village and left me awkwardly confusing Punjabi words and trying to devise different ways to remove my intestines but still be able to digest food and falling so madly in love with life that I am not ashamed about my sappy hippy feelings about beauty and passion and heart.

Yes. I just might be a tad bit crazy.

Because I take shared taxis with 9 squished people to the Pakistani border:

And I shower here (often accompanied by a gecko who appears to have a thing for brunettes):

And as a result of this crazy living, I am absolutely overwhelmed by beauty everywhere I go:

The Top 7 Moments of My First Week

7. I get on the bus on Saturday morning to go to Amritsar, and the driver is burning incense on the dash-board. I'm still not clear as to whether this is extraordinarily dangerous, somewhat of a bad idea, or just interesting.

6. On my second night here this is a party because one of the interns is leaving to go back to Hong Kong. My boss takes off his turban before entering the house pretending to be his drunk, disorderly, and problematic twin brother and questions me for an hour about who I am and what I am doing and what is development and why I do not work in agriculture. I completely fall for it, but in the confusion I think I manage to accidently pretend that I knew it was him the whole time and he is impressed. Wtf.

5. Indian restaurant in H. doesn’t actually have the choices listed on the menu. Eventually after pointing at seven different choices we finally ask what they do have. Well, they have chicken burgers. The other interns are confused as to why you would list a multitude of things you don’t actually sell. I am comforted. GHANA!

4. Some of the interns have a chicken slaughtered in D. This means 2 things: that I only have to go one town over to find meat, and that my body gets to digest precious, precious protein.

3. Visiting the India-Pakistan border for the border closing ceremony. Pakistan is not, actually, just desert and rocks and a cliff falling off to nowhere as I imagined it. It looks like India but, you know, the other side.

2. Sleeping on marble and seeing THIS all night:

1. I HAVE FOUND THE TOILET PAPER STASH (In this situation 4 bags of toilet paper constitute a stash). It is located in the next city, about 30 minutes away by bus. It should be noted that not only did I find toilet paper, but I got it for half the price that others have been paying for it (50 cents a roll instead of a dollar). I can now wipe my butt and save. Sahhweet.

I am Woman

Usually that would be followed by "hear me roar." But today it will not be. Today it will be "I am Woman. Hear me cry. Hear me breathe. But HEAR me."

One of my best friends sent me an article to read. And it made her cry. And it made me cry. Because there is despair. And there is tragedy. And then, also, there is hope. (Read The Women’s Crusade - NYTimes.com)

Yesterday in my class we began talking about AIDS and the outrageous rates of HIV prevalence among pregnant women in the state of Karanatka. Two of the young women are studying at a nurse's training college, and casually they relayed first-hand experiences, of doctors re-using unwashed surgical utensils, of another student who accidently pricked her finger with a needle used on an HIV patient and now lives as an outcast, and of the abortions. Of baby girls, baby girls, baby girls.

You should see the women here. They are vibrant, not in color of dress but in spirit. It is impossible not to fall in love with every sparkling set of eyes you meet.

And yet girls in India from 1 to 5 years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys their age.

In the face of this the harassment and cat calls and misogynistic comments and ass-slaps of my own experiences dim into shadows. I have LIFE. How many women have been denied even that?

Slowly, as your read, as you breathe, fragments of hope appear.

"As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long." - W.E.B. Du Bois.

We cannot move time but we can move our feet. Move our hands, move our hearts, join together for the girls both born and lost.