I was facebooking a fellow India-phile the other day and I broke down. “Am I allowed to say that I miss India?” I asked him, it made me feel like such a wimp. After all I had only been out of the place a fortnight, and was still rocking and rolling around SE Asia. It was not as if I was chained to a desk or slogging it out on a building site as he was in order to earn the cash to get back on the road again. To all intents and purposes, I was still an Eco Warrior Queen on the road.
“Hell yes!” he typed faster than I ever knew he could, “I do!”
To be honest, I miss India before I even leave. That last week in my hideaway mountain cabin, just grabbing a jar of chilli off the shelf would send pangs right up my arm and directly into my heart.
“Won’t be able to get chillies like that where you are going,” some evil voice inside me warned. “Can’t get vegetarian food as a right and not some new age overpriced pimped out experience either.”
My stomach rumbled in anticipation of a crap western diet where everything is made in factories or frozen in factories and corn fed meat based garbage burgers are available on every corner. As a vegetarian, India is the Mecca of eating. You have to go out of your way to find a meat dish there and it’s the carnivores that are considered slightly freakish.
Everything was tinged with the sepia ache of nostalgia that last week in India. I began, as I always do, to notice the face of my beloved in the way of a lover about to depart.
But time and visas wait for no woman and I flew out with only hours to spare on my visa, already I had stretched this stay one year. No mean feat when it was the Year the Face of Indian Visa’s changed forever. Sniffing an opportunity in Laos, I imagined the scent of frangipani calling me but really I was delaying leaving the world of Asia.
The closest country in the world to that fabulous slice of the world that the rest of us call Asia, a slice of land that stretches from the furtherest reaches of Australia to the far flung stations of Afghanistan and beyond, India remains as the beating heart of the area. At least for me.
I noticed something as I trawled with terrorist tourists in Laos, and was shunted like a parcel across train stations, airports and ferries until I landed finally in the Wild West of Australia. I noticed that there is nowhere in the world where the idea of brotherhood is quite so alive as it is in India. True there are random meetings of people who become friends, but what I noticed the lack of was the determination to make a connection that is happening all over India on a hundred different levels at one time and for a thousand different reasons.
India forces you to engage with her. Whether it is a beggar on the street or a rickshaw wallah grabbing your fare, or a stranger you pass on the street (especially if the stranger is an eve teaser and you have to guard your breasts from being engaged with the eve teasers body bits), participation is required. Just say “no thank you” to a beggar in India and see what I mean, Even punching an eve teaser in the jaw is a way of engaging. (In the struggle of women’s right to walk unmolested in the streets).
I think it’s that kind of In Your Face expectation that you WILL participate in the great play of life that they know as Lila that draws me back time and time again, and scares a lot of people off at the same time.
It’s getting easier and easier and even more habitual for us Not to engage with each other in what we call the ‘developed’ world. I noticed this in Singapore when I was trying to talk to the bus driver, he refused to speak because he was busy swiping his card to prove he had arrived at the collection spot on time and departed in the manner of a robot.
No Indian would ignore a human in order to engage with a machine, I thought to myself as I watched the Manchurian bus driver load the bus of little robotic people. At that point I experienced a pang of nostalgia for the Rajasthani bus driver, the like of which I have never seen in the whole world. They swear and toot and thump and chase people all in the course of a journey, the bus rattles and slows and stops and is rarely on time and they are never air-conditioned. I wondered if I would trade the comfort of an AC coach with doors that hiss closed on a highway that must be swept clean every five minutes for a local rattle across the plains of Rajasthan and I have to admit that as much as I love my creature comforts, that I would swap this impersonal developed world for the rattletrap reality of Rajasthan or anywhere in India in a heartbeat.