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Remembering India – Rain and Sitars and Garam Masala

It's possible that my head is just a lot fuller than it used to be, but I don't think so. When, about 10 years ago, I visited the family that I stayed with as an exchange student, Maggan, the youngest daughter and I did some reminiscing about things I simply did not remember. She said something very insightful: "For you, everything was new; for us, it was just you that was new." This was how she explained her ability to remember the way I'd interacted in their community in so much greater detail than I could remember myself. I was sixteen when I stayed with the family in Sweden for the summer. Three years later, when I was nineteen, I saw India. I remember things about India in ways that I can remember nothing that happened before and nothing that happened afterwards.

What is it about India that stays with you so? People I've met in my life who have been there feel the same way, even though it is a big country and few people I've talked to about traveling in India have been in the same places as myself. Not that I was anywhere so off the beaten track (though I did go trekking from Leh to Manali over the Himalayas). Everyone I've talked to who has been there has had a vastly different experience than mine, yet everyone talks about it in the same way, as an experience that stays with you your whole life, that changes you somehow, that gets under your skin and will not go away. Pictures of India, movies filmed in India, documentaries made there, will inspire in me – and fellow travelers – a feeling something like nostalgia. It's almost a sort of homesickness for a place that isn't home.

I've had Indian friends in the US from not long after I returned from my subcontinental adventures. I hung out with three beautiful Indian men in Sunnyvale for a while, one of them worked, like I did, at an electronics company doing assembly, and when he found out I'd been to his country, he brought me home to meet his room mates. We couldn't get enough of each other's company, they'd show up at my house with their dates and flowers for me, they invited me to dinner parties with their Indian friends, it was a lovely time. I had a girlfriend in college who was Indian and I visited her after her arranged marriage in London. One of my lunch buddies at work now is Indian, she tells me about her visits back to India where she still has much family. I never heard any of my Indian friends pine for their home country. They derided the poverty, deconstructed the politics, and told stories of their families, but not one of them was – or is – in a big hurry to get back there. They never got a far away look in their eyes when watching a National Geographic special with me. I, on the other hand, get teary eyed when there's an unexpected smell of curry or a wisp of sitar music.

This is my favorite moment from my time in India:

We'd set out to pack over a small pass, maybe 10000 feet, after visiting a hill town. We thought we'd walk back to Srinigar, rather than travel the return route by bus. It had been rainy and cool and I had a cold. After the first day out, I didn't have the strength to make the walk and decided to head back around the way we'd come in. I walked back to town, taking my time, resting and looking at the view. For a while I walked with two Australian women who wondered if I wasn't afraid to be on my own. Truth be told, I was thrilled. I was really enjoying myself. When I got back in to town, I checked in to a guest house, really a little hotel, and went to bed. I met the other guests, mostly Europeans, at breakfast and then spent most of my day napping. My room was tiny and had two high, fluffy beds. The manager of the hotel asked if I wouldn't mind sharing my room with another American traveler, as the hotel was full up. I had no objections at all, as long as he was quiet and let me to my own thoughts. The hotel was quiet during the day, except for the sound of a German student practicing his classical sitar down the hall from me. I lay in bed with the window open, the cool wet air and the sound of rain mixing with the muffled sounds of the sitar down the hall.

Even as I write this, I can transport myself to that place and time. It's truly as though I was there yesterday. And I pine for that moment, for that feeling. Pictures and stories and sounds from India remind me of waking up in that bed to the early morning rain, the stranger that was my roommate an anonymous pile of blankets, the music sounding as though I was dreaming it. There are other times, places, too, from India, that will come to the front of my memory as though they'd happened just 20 minutes ago, not 20 years ago. I couldn't remember the family dog from my time as an exchange student in Sweden, but I can recall, in complete detail, the face of the man on the bus behind me who asked me, in all seriousness, how I could eat the food in the US. "I was there for three months," he said, "and I could not taste anything. Tasteless! Everything was tasteless to me." I can remember the man in the souvenir shop showing me how to test for real jade, rubbing the ashes away with his hands. I remember sitting on the wall at a bus stop, in front of one of those giant carved Buddhas, talking with a man from Delhi who was on his vacation and then apologized for mistaking me for one of the locals! Could I have been so brown at the time? I remember the windburned faces of the Ladakhis, especially at the festival at the monastery, I remember the screams of the prairie dogs, I remember the meal I ate when we came down out of the mountains. The taste of yak butter tea, the grayish color of the water, the smoky smell of the house I went in to when our stove broke and I wanted to borrow the use of some fire to cook my dinner. All of it is clear and present at the front of my mind.

I also remember when I decided it was time to go home. I had a nasty bug in my belly and was dropping weight, I was often feverish, and I was very tired. I was with a bad boyfriend, a mean English man that many of the Indians we met underway refused to talk to, preferring my short stature and gullible demeanor. (How did they see, so quickly, what had taken me so long?) We were walking through the market in Old Delhi, and all of a sudden, it became too much to bear. I insisted we go back to the hostel and I booked a flight home the next day. I wept uncontrollably most of the flight home and I'm not sure I can tell you why. Perhaps it was the natural conclusion of so much experience crammed in to so little time. I must have been full. Three months in India was like a lifetime and perhaps it was the end of that life that I was grieving for. I don't really know.

There is one thing I do know for sure. It's that I long to return to India. I ache for India sometimes, the way I ache for the loss of an old friend. India has got herself inside me and TV shows and music and a really well made curry will bring whatever it is she has done to me right back to the surface of my skin, to the front of my memory. I will lie in a tiny hotel room surrounded by the mists of the Himalayas and the sound of the sitar and learn what caused such inconsolable tears when I flew home. I will remember everything again.

Subscribe to TravelBlogs Posted by Pam Mandel on April 4th, 2005 in Articles.