GPOYW - India edition.

Despite the wracking night of food poisoning that followed, the hours we spent at the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar was my first great experience in India — joining 60,000 others who also partook in that day’s barefoot communal meals on the temple floor.

According to the Sikhs: “The Langar or free kitchen was started by the first Sikh Guru, Guru Nanak Dev Ji. It is designed to uphold the principle of equality between all people of the world regardless of religion, caste, colour, creed, age, gender or social status. In addition to the ideals of equality, the tradition of Langar expresses the ethics of sharing, community, inclusiveness and oneness of all humankind. “..the Light of God is in all hearts.”

“For the first time in history, Guruji designed an institution in which all people would sit on the floor together, as equals, to eat the same simple food. It is here that all people high or low, rich or poor, male or female, all sit in the same pangat (literally “row” or “line”) to share and enjoy the food together.”

And you felt that equality, that inclusiveness, that respect — sitting cross legged beside tech barons and beggars, Indians and foreigners alike. All breaking the same modest bread together. All welcome, all worthy, all united.  It was one of those travel nights that finds you sort of floating back to your room, so filled and buoyed with an aching giddy gratitude for having found this crack in the wall and being allowed to slip right in.

Every evening when the border between Pakistan and India closes down, throngs of patriots gather at the edge of their respective countries for an elaborate, pomp and machismo filled ceremony. The chanting, frothy, delighted crowd was a site to behold. Kids climbing over each other, scampering up buildings and evading policemen just to get a glimpse. How can anyone rally this much national pride and antagonism every night? It was fantastic! I only wish I’d had a vuvuzela. And maybe that we hadn’t lost the cab driver who brought us out to this middle-of-nowhere sunset showdown.

The more I think about India, the more it becomes an ocean, a solar system. Engulfing and drowning and dense and seething with life so many layers thick it almost literally hurts to take it all in. I keep finding these frozen moments now and holding them, finally really seeing them with all the noise quieted and wondering what sort of discipline or focus or peace it would have taken to have drifted away from the Everything and zoomed into the beauty of Just. This. One. Thing. This one piece that exists despite everything else that also exists and out shouts it.

Of the things we carried home with us from India, wrapped in Hindi newsprint in a cheap blue nylon bag we bought in McCleod Ganj, one of these handmade puppets from Rajasthan is my very favorite.

The man who makes them owns a concrete shop in Udaipur, stuffed with half formed bodies and antique fabric swatches, tiny heads with unpainted crowns or one side of a coal black mustache. It was sort of magical to watch him come to life when we huddled in and started asking questions. He was just so Gepetto, you know? Just so hungry for someone to appreciate this little world he had carved.

He set aside our purchase and beckoned us back into the stuffy entrails of his stockroom, flipped on the lights and unveiled hundreds and hundreds of the dolls. A frozen troop of sizes and shapes and every one distinctly individual from the next.

While my dad waited out front, sweating on the stoop next to a cow and a boy with a great sales mouth, the shopkeeper made one of the puppets dance for us - swooping and demurring, throwing back her head and so delicately tipping and spinning across the floor. Swaying as he swayed her to music in his head. You could have stayed a long long time, entranced and clapping for more.

“Do you know about Hanuman, sir? He was the faithful servant of the god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love, and devotion.

These are the kinds of gods they have foisted on us, Mr. Jiabao. Understand, now, how hard it is for a man to win his freedom in India.”

― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

I read The White Tiger while we were gone and I can’t stop thinking about it and the complexities and layers and facades and reverence and disparities and traditions and anger of India. I’m in the middle of another Adiga now and there’s the same sticky silkiness of a spider’s web. Can you even fathom writing so well, so ensnaringly?

Reentry to Western reality is a pair of heavy boots. Things that are keeping me grateful this week:

Oh right - that we were lucky enough to get away at all;

LA finally found fall while we were gone. A cold open night window and a daytime sweater feels pretty damn good;

The joy of wading through a galaxy of pictures and finding one that brings back a day, a moment like a snap. I can almost still feel all these small strong faithful hands at my back, spinning and shuffling me aside on their way to temple. Can almost still hear the pedestrian river and collective chant and billow of smoke that separated us.

I still have this right here.

We wound down the trip in Varanasi, the depths and darkness and inspiration and mystery and mystical energy and explosive roiling life of which wholly dazzled and overwhelmed us. In some ways, made it harder to unstitch and pull ourselves home, just when we thought we were almost ready to go. 

I broke my own rules today. Not staying awake until our regular Pacific Standard bed time to combat the reentry jet lag. But something about this trip felt heavier and Aaron’s airport ride lead directly to a five hour couch nap that was better than anything, but also took Herculean will power to emerge from.  

Probably we are just feeling every one of the 9,000 miles and 38 hours home that drags behind us like a corpse. Maybe, I am just an unusually melancholy returner.

It wasn’t an easy trip. From transit strikes and sold out trains and the crust of pollution and calamity of traffic and curious cockroaches and throngs of domestic revelers traveling over the Diwali holiday and cold showers and bucket baths and the heartbreaking cycle of failing over and over to be your best self when cast back in Family Dynamics.   

And it was also an incredible trip. The honeyed roll of Keralan backwaters flanked by golden rice fields, observed from the top deck of a wooden house boat. Observed with almost-tears and a heavy realization in your gut that this is almost more happiness, more beauty, more rare goodness than you could ever deserve if you have 60 more years to earn it. Watching the palaces of Udaipur grow golden over the lake, playing cards on rooftops, smoking hookah with three of the men you love best in the world.  Communal floor dinners with Sikhs and the Taj Mahal at sunset and navigating the cars and cows and motorbikes and rickshaws and touts and goats and children and holy men - the 110% fullness of India that forces you to wiggle out to the edge of it and hang on fiercely, clamoring along just to remain a part of it at all.  

I am leeched and buzzing. Spinning and not nearly done processing any of it. Not nearly begun, really.

More to come soon, I am sure…

This is for C, who was violently ill on the train all night and passed out in the hotel room while we wandered out today. Who was an incredible trooper and kept laughing even as he missed everything that drew us to this town.

I think it’s a very difficult thing for an icon - something you have long admired remotely and formed suppositions about - to astound you. But you did, Taj.

She was solemn and magical and still, not the same without you, C.