Looking back on my pictures from India, it is hard to
believe that I was actually there. It is hard to believe that I stroked the
grey, leathery skin of an elephant, rode camels into the grainy sands of a
Jaisalmer desert camp and swam with barracuda fish in the Bay of Bengal.
Sitting here at home—with my macbook pro at my fingertips and my iPhone
vibrating to the left—I feel worlds away from the pictures I am scanning on my
camera and, in reality, I suppose that I truly am. India was surreal. Every
person that has asked me about my trip receives the same response. I look them
in the eyes and shake my head back and forth a bit, explaining that my time in
India was simply the most incredible experience that I have ever had. The
memories I made, the friends I met, the people I talked to, the things I saw, and
the adventures I embarked upon were once in lifetime.
It is hard to find a place to begin as I reflect over those past three weeks. I
suppose an appropriate place to start—seeing that I am sitting in a heated,
sturdy home with a big meal in my stomach—would be the poverty and homelessness
that I witnessed abroad. I had this idea in my head before I left for India
about what the street life would be like. I envisioned poor people with hollow
eyes, feeling sorry for themselves and harassing me for money, and don’t get me
wrong, there certainly were plenty of those people. But, as we traveled across
the country, through the rural villages and overpopulated cities, I also saw a
different kind of people. I witnessed poor families that seemed perfectly
content with the little shack they had built for their home. I witnessed old
men with no shoes, who probably had nothing to eat all day, playing cards with
each other and laughing out loud without a care in the world. Before visiting
the impoverished villages, I had imagined that the locals would stare at us
with resentment over our first-world possessions, but instead, they simply did
so with a naïve wonder and piercing fascination. This realization especially
rang true when we visited the children’s orphanage. These kids had nothing. I
mean I could only imagine how hard their lives had been. Yet, they had the
ability to put everything behind them and laugh and play with us like they were
the luckiest kids in the world. It was an uplifting experience to see
these people living with hardly anything and modestly accepting their situation
for what it is.
There was one little girl I saw in India, a memory that lingers with me to this
day, that encapsulates this sense of hopefulness. We were on the tour bus
driving through some bustling city in some congested state, sitting in traffic
like usual. I was listening to my iPod aimlessly looking out the window, when I
saw two children, a boy and a girl, who were probably only seven or eight years
old. The children were dressed in costume, with their hair done up around their
heads and their faces painted with heavy makeup, doing acrobats on the side of
the hot highway begging for money. The boy would do a cartwheel and the girl
would swing her arms around her body in manner that is not humanly possible. As
I was watching them from the comfort of the bus, I looked closer at this little
girls face. She had big, pink circles drawn on the rounds of her cheeks. Smack
dab in the middle of one of those circles was a long, smeared tear streak. You
would have never known that the girl had been crying earlier if not for this
strip through the pink film of her makeup, as she was smiling, putting on an
animated show for the bystanders and delicately begging for money. Clearly
something had made this girl cry earlier in the day. Whether it was because her
father had beaten her, she had hurt herself or she was so hungry she couldn’t
stand it anymore I will never know. Nonetheless here she was, doing what she
had to do to survive. She was the only beggar I ever gave money to throughout
the entire trip. To this day I have never seen a bigger smile on anybody’s
face, as I opened the bus window and threw down 50 rupees into her
outstretched, dirty, little hands.
The India trip for me was a lot more than just the cultural experience of
traveling around a country that was vastly different from my own. It was about
the little things, like spending 12 hours on a bus, listening to music and
watching the passing landscape. It was about walking around the local artisan
marketplaces and purchasing my now beloved silk pashmina, or drinking the most
mouthwatering masala chai tea from a vendor who refused to let me pay because
he could “feel the energy of my soul.” Before experiencing India I was so
consumed by the trivialities of everyday life, worrying myself sick over
getting an A on my Shakespeare paper or deciding what dress to wear to my
sorority formal. Since traveling to India I have been instilled with a newfound
sense of gratitude and perspective. Whenever I am having a bad day or I am
upset over something that has happened in my near-perfect life, I think about
that little girl with the tear-stained cheek, and I remind myself that not only
does everybody has their own burden to handle, but that life always goes on.
