Remembering India

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This is my favorite moment from my time in India:

We’d set out to pack over a small pass, maybe 10,000 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 wandered through the forested trail back to town, taking my time, resting, and looking at the view. For a while I walked with two Australian women who asked 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 the little hill 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 because the hotel was full up. I had no objections 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 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 drifting down the hallway like a dream. There are other times, places, too, from India that will come to the front of my memory as though they’d happened just twenty minutes ago, not more than twenty 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 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 a low wall at a bus stop in front of one of those giant carved Buddha’s, talking with a man from Delhi who was on his vacation. He apologized for mistaking me for one of the locals! Could I have been so brown at the time? I remember the wind burned 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 still don’t 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 wait for the day when I find a tiny hotel room surrounded by the mists of the Himalayas and draped the sound of the sitar. Until I can learn what caused such inconsolable tears when I flew home. Until I can remember everything all over again.

By Pam Mandel, a freelance writer who lives in Seattle, Washington.