Remembering India

It’s possible that my head is just a lot fuller than it used to be, but I don’t think so. When, some years back I visited the family that I stayed with as an exchange student, 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 my stay 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? The people I’ve met who have been there feel the same way, even though it is a big country and few people I’ve talked 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 with 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 have many Indian friends in the US. Not long after I returned from my subcontinental adventures. I hung out with three beautiful Indian men in Silicon Valley, one of them worked, like I did, at an electronics company doing assembly. When he found out I’d been to his country, he brought me home to meet his roommates. 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, and it was a lovely time. I had an Indian girlfriend in college—I visited her in London after her arranged marriage moved her away from her California home. One of my good friends is Indian, she tells me about her visits back to India where she still has much family. I’ve 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 documentary or a Merchant Ivory film. On the other hand, I get teary eyed when there’s an unexpected smell of curry or a wisp of sitar music.