Rethinking India

Ross and I met in India. The monsoons arrived with us when our plane landed in Delhi, and for six weeks, we schlepped through muddy street floods, humid and bug-filled days, and torrential outbursts of rain. Whenever I tell stories about that trip, I always get a cock-eyed look from my listeners, a look that says, "And you went there because...?"

The thing is, I loved India. Monsoons and all. But it's hard to explain how or why to someone who hasn't been there (I tried, at the time, but I don't know how successful I was). It was the chaos, the colors, the food, the head waggle, the throngs of communities, the beaches, the flowers, the temples. But even that doesn't capture it. I tried to explain to our friend A., who recently moved to India, how much I loved it and why I thought he would, too. Unfortunately, in his first few days up in Northern India, in the foothills of the Himalaya, he was (1) bit by a mouse, (2) cohabitating with scorpions, (3) shitting on neighbors' doorsteps, and (4) obsessively watching the MLB post-season. I was a little worried about him and his new life on the subcontinent. Had we led him astray? Were we really crazy to love a country that, on the surface at least, is so hard to love?

We emailed A a few days ago, putting out feelers for a trip to visit him in the next year or so. As is A's usual way, he hemmed and hawed a bit: Maybe he was moving home, maybe he was moving to Delhi, maybe maybe. Did he even like India?! But after spending a few weeks traveling through Kerala and Tamil Nadu, he did mention in passing, "The south makes me realize why you and Melissa love this country." So maybe we hadn't led him completely astray... and I felt somewhat vindicated knowing that someone else could see what I saw in that place. I've been waiting a long time for someone to get it--instead of looking it me like I'm crazy--when I talk about India.

India has clearly been on our brains of late, and our friends have been mocking us for missing out on one of the year's best films, so Friday night we finally went to see Slumdog Millionaire. It was as captivating as everyone had said. But that's not the only reason why I loved it.

You see, it's the first film I've seen that actually captures what it's like to be in India, as painful and overwhelming as that is: The throngs of traffic; the side-by-side living of abject poverty and opulence; the mannerisms of the street children motioning for chapathi; the thumping music that is always everywhere at once; the rain that doesn't stop; the train car 'windows' through which passerby reach in their hands to either sell you chai or surreptitiously grab something; that head waggle-bobble that is sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes don't bother me; the police officers who uphold the law in name only; the rushing rivers of sewage water; the flurries of brightly colored fabric; the Taj, both Disneyfied and magnificent at once; the incessant energy of the cities; the rickshaws that wiggle through lanes of traffic while you hold on for dear life; and the Bollywood dance routines that are everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. (Noticeably missing, however, was the traffic moving every which way at once...Can Mumbai traffic actually be organized?)

As we drove home, Ross and I rehashed the film, the images, our memories--we both particularly shuddered to think about the real street children we met, missing limbs and eyes, following us and begging imploringly, "Chapathi. Chapathi." We're not sure we'll get to visit A. next year, but for a few hours, we were transported to that place we met almost six years ago.

And as we rehashed and reminisced, I realized that, all these years, maybe I've been describing my time in India wrong. How could I love it? That's such an over-simplified emotion and reaction to a place that is so utterly complex--what you see in Slumdog Millionaire is, at least in our experience, pretty close to the 'real' India. How, then, do I describe how much I didn't want to leave at the end of six weeks? How much I learned? How stimulated I was from every sensory input? How much fun I had? How that trip pushed and extended me and my world in ways I didn't even know possible? (And, you know, I did get Ross out of the deal!)

Or maybe saying I loved India is exactly right.