My Passage into India

In response to a previous comment, I thought I would give a little discussion about my life in India. I know that I have mentioned that I had lived in India a number of times, but I have never really gone into any great details.

For a number of years I had wanted to go to India. Part of this stemmed from a personal challenge. I had always heard that traveling in India was the hardest place, so I thought if I could do it there, I could handle anything. And it was also a yearning to experience a place of true history. Where I grew up, if a building was 50 years old it was considered an historical landmark. In India, I knew that I would be confronted not only by centuries of history but by a culture completely opposite of my own.

And so I decided to save up and when I was 26 I went. And I went alone. Now I have traveled before with others and by myself and they are two very different experiences. When I travel with someone there is a shared bond that inevitably develops as well as an enjoyment of being able to discuss what we have been through. Being on your own though forces you to meet other people and provides an enormous flexibility. My big plan about India was that I was just going to stay in places until I wanted to leave and then just go off somewhere else.

But I also wanted to spend time living in India not traveling around. I didn’t want to just try to see as much of the country as I could, but to experience life there.

I arrived in Bombay well after midnight on scorching hot day. I had been bumped up to business class on my Singapore Airlines (got to love them!) flight and so the juxtaposition of that luxury to the devastating poverty floored me. The airport has the look and feel of a 1950s swimming pool. A layer of grime coating small tiled walls. And I was quick to learn that this grime was everywhere.

A city of 10,000,000 people with almost as many cars all driving with leaded gasoline. The air pollution coated everything with a layer of soot. By the end of my third day in Bombay, all my white clothing was grey, my spit had turned to black and the back of my throat burned from the pollution in the air.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

The trip from the airport to the more touristy area of Bombay was about a 45 minute drive through shanty towns of the barely living. Dogs were constantly running by the side of the road and oddly enough they all looked the same. In fact, for the entire time that I was in India, I only saw one breed of dog! And the drivers were absolutely crazy. Traffic lanes were non-existent and the air pollution was matched by its far more evil cousin – noise pollution. Instead of our rigid rules of the road, the Indian driver lives by the single Gold Rule – He Who Drives the Larger Vehicle has the Right of Way. And so horns honked incessantly to warn other drivers of an approach, a turn, anything. The cacophony of screeching horns would prove to be a braking point later on. But at that time, I was too fascinated by the excitement of this new world.

We finally made it to the hotel that I had booked for my first two days. Stepping out of the taxi the sidewalks were covered with the homeless sleeping where they could and the rats that ran rampant over their slumbering bodies. I made my way into hotel and tried to sleep.

The next day went I awoke, the heat was beating down inside my room. The ceiling fan sputtered around and I quickly got dressed in shorts and a T-Shirt. As I walked from the hotel in search of a restaurant I couldn’t help but notice that everyone kept staring at my legs with an expression of utter astonishment. I later learned that only small children wore shorts and to see a grown man wearing them is like seeing a woman in her forties with pigtails! But I was blissfully in ignorance and off I went to begin what is still in many ways a defining period of my life.

And what happened next will have to wait for another day.