Finding my calm

Nov. 20, 2008

For those of you who've been following my travels here for the past several months, you may have noticed that since I arrived in India the pace for posting entries has slackened. This is due to several reasons. One problem has been finding reliable internet. In the neighborhood in Delhi where I stayed several days ago, internet cafes are abundant. This however hasn't been the case in many of the other places I've visited.

Even when I've come across a computer that has been updated beyond Windows 95, many of the towns I've been in have been plagued by power cuts. I'll be in the middle of writing an e-mail and then the whole city goes dark and I lose everything I've written. In Varanasi, where I write now, the entire city goes without power between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. everyday. It's just a part of life here.

Those excuses aside, the major reason I haven't posted much is I find India a daunting subject to tackle. This place is tough to describe and impossible to sum up. I wrote earlier about how overwhelming Delhi was when I first arrived after the two month party that was Europe. But now after spending more than three weeks in this country, I've discovered a strange calm amidst all the chaos.

My friends at home can attest that I am not the most patient of beings. But here, on Indian time, where everything is rushed, yet takes forever, where docile cows lumber down streets as autorickshaws and motorcycles scream past, where women dressed in glittering bangles and flowing saris create a human rainbow as they walk along streets overflowing with refuse, where children bathe in busted pipelines in between the train tracks at the Old Delhi station, where young girls walk through the desert with a jug of water on their head and a bare-bottomed baby hanging on their hip, where beggers lacking limbs plead for rupees at every intersection, where a hundred brown faces and onyx eyes watch as a Western woman walks by, where the ceaseless honking of cars mixes with the chinga-chinga-chinga-chinga Indian pop music in the marketplaces, where the smells of spices, oils, animal feces and flowers fill the air, where every other Indian man wants to shake your hand and introduce you to their family, where people come to a sacred river in the midst of a holy city to die, I've discovered an internal calm.

I haven't been so hassled as I was when I first arrived. It could be that I've gotten a bit of tan from spending two weeks in the desert. It could be that I'm better at ignoring the calls from every other Indian man or street merchant and have taken on a bit of a thousand yard stare that keeps the hawkers at bay. I'm sure those things have something to do with it. But perhaps while taking this journey, I'm beginning to stumble upon my inner Om.