I am preparing. In two months, I will be in India for the first time in my life. (Or, considering my destination, I should say, for the first time in this life.)
I will be spending six months alone in a country I've dreamed about much, but in fact, know very little. I'm mostly going on suspicions and hearsay. As a child, my first impression of India was a place where people poop in the streets among wandering cows. This image has stayed with me as I consider my upcoming voyage. The cows are fine - I grew up on a farm and am used to being around bovines - but I don't want to see anyone poop in the street. Or poop anywhere, really. I also don't want to get sick. No. Not even a little "traveller's diarrhea" so I can trade shit stories with other backpackers. Nor do I want to be pestered by begging, starving children, trailing me for blocks for a rupee or two. And I really don't want to fend off curious Indian men who think that all American women are sexually available and attracted to them.
Clearly sometimes my fears get the upper hand, and I have to remind myself of why in fact I am going. Because I suspect that yes, there will be street poop. And sickness. And beggars. And there are likely to be men. Really hard to avoid those things in life, and especially so in India.
So why am I going? I have to tread carefully here, as it's easy to get sucked into the quicksand of cliche. But, friends, I am not going to India to "find myself." Nor am I going to "lose myself," tempting as those options - especially the latter - are.
The seed was planted during my first backpacking trip through Mexico fourteen years ago. A gutsy, gorgeous Australian blonde, Kerry was one of the backpackers I'd traveled with for a time, part of the makeshift family I'd found to reconvene on a little island near Cancun to spend Christmas together. I was 22 and shy, on my first trip out of the U.S.; she was in her 30s, had been all over the world, and always got the best deals bartering, despite her complete ignorance of the Spanish language. She'd been to India and said that everyone should go. Yes, it was challenging, but it was an important experience. Like going away to college - difficult but necessary if you wanted to truly understand the world. And truly understanding the world was something I really wanted, more than money, almost more than love.
A few years later, I was deep into a quintessential New Orleans experience: working in the service industry, drinking too much, and sleeping with my boss. Owner of an Indian-fusion restaurant uptown, he was from northern India and returned there frequently. He offered to bring me to India with him, and despite the facts - he was married, thirty years older than me, and repulsive on many levels - I really wanted to go. I'd had tiny tastes of India when we'd visit his siblings living in New Orleans, who ate entire meals using a single piece of naan as a utensil, and I thought it would do me good to visit a place where people didn't need forks. It goes without saying that everything they cooked - my boss included - tasted incredible. No one had told me that lentils, or eggplant, or okra, could be so good. I was also smoking a lot of weed in those days, and my boss often reminded me that there was plenty of that to be had in his homeland. Of course, he would spring for everything.
Blessedly, I didn't go. I wasn't smoking that much weed.
I didn't go, but I began to feel a sense of entitlement towards going, as if the universe owed me a trip to India. I had just performed the daunting moral feat of not exploiting a married man whom I found repulsive just to indulge my escapist nature: surely there was to be some sort of reward. In the meantime, I cheered myself up by telling myself that I would go "someday." But the "someday" list was long, and as I was no longer surrounded by Indian food, my motivation lessened.
One doesn't need to be a Hindu or a Buddhist to have many distinct lives in New Orleans. In a later reincarnation, but in the same neighborhood, I moved into a community of slightly-Buddhist libertines, the property owned by a Buddhist with a nonprofit located in India. He spent half the year living in Dharamsala, working at his community center for Tibetan refugees. He took groups of college students every summer, which sounded insane. Why escape the second-hottest place in the world for the hottest? This is when I learned that Dharamsala was high up in the Himalaya mountains, and was quite pleasant in the summertime. I became instantly jealous.
Suddenly everyone in my acquaintance had been to India at least once. Some of them studied with lamas or had heard the Dalai Lama speak. Perhaps not coincidentally, these were some of the nicest people I'd met during my many New Orleans lives, and I wanted to be more like them. I had an India trip coming - right? - and all the other kids had been there. Why not me?
The fact that I had been studying yoga for several years at that point was not as much of a factor as one might expect. My yoga practice had been so integral to my life for so long, that it didn't inspire me to leave. It would be like travelling to Italy to look for the Italian-made pair of glasses lying on my bedside table. Sure, it would be neat to see where they came from, but utterly unnecessary.
That said, when I was training to be a yoga teacher, I began to learn that yoga was more than doing tree pose safely. It was what you ate and how you thought. It was cultivating the awareness to observe your thoughts. It was being honest and it was being content with what's present. It was paying respect to the lineage that came before, which is why we took the trouble to make flash cards to learn the Sanskrit names for yoga poses.
We watched Naked in the Ashes, a documentary about the Indian sadhus, the holy men who dedicate their lives to seemingly-strange practices in order to purify themselves and become closer to God. I learned that in India, it's normal for some people to stand on one leg for several years, or to hike barefoot through snow to get to the base of the holy Ganges. You pull that stuff in America - even in New Orleans - and you get locked up. But in India, what seems insane may actually be enlightened.
My curiosity about India reached a fever pitch. I was in Europe for my teacher training, and so the idea of travelling further seemed out of the question. But when I returned home to New Orleans, I wanted nothing to do with America. Immediately I got embroiled in a romance with a French man who decided I was "the one" for him. Several months later, when I refused to marry him, he went to India to lick his wounds. During our regular skype sessions, he repeatedly invited me to join him there. Again, India. This time being implored to go in a charming French accent.
Again, I didn't go. My Frenchman wanted me to go as his girlfriend, and that is not how I am to see India. I want to go as myself, like Kerry from my Mexican travels, tall and wild and free.
But this time, the bait dangled too close. I'd been in an extended transitional period - read: on unemployment - and had to Do Something. I'd considered getting a Real Job, or going Back To School, but then realized that it could be the perfect time to finally go to India, and go in a way that I can take my time. Driving myself crazy with indecision - the threat of making the Wrong Decision just gets worse as I get older - I consulted a psychic for the first time. She agreed: just go. Make 2010 the year to see this thing through. On later reflection, I realized that I can't even see myself in a Real Job or in a Graduate Program - India keeps blocking that view of myself.
So why am I going? Because I can't not go. I can find myself at home, I can lose myself at home, but I can only find India by going there.
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