This place smells the same.
It’s a very specific sort of mustiness. It lingered in the cards and papers that the
kids give us, reminding us of where we had been and the love we had
experienced. While the smell is
undeniably musty, it also smells of the white flowers on the tree outside my
window. It smells of spices (there are
more than enough to go around, trust me) and of the jungle.
It smells like home.
The food tastes the same, but now I am actually getting used
to the spiciness. The sun rises bright
red and the moon rises bright orange every day here. The ladies still sweep the courtyard every
morning with straw brooms. It sounds as
though they are scraping a layer off the cobblestones, making it impossible to
sleep in. Oddly enough, I had forgotten
about the bell . . . it sounds like somebody robbed a bank or something at 7
every morning. It is right outside our
room. And they don’t just ring it
once. Whoever is ringing that bell hangs
on the button for a while and then will tap on it in a random pattern,
seemingly operating on the assumption that if they are more insistent and
irritating with the bell the girls will be more willing to get up.
The last time I was here, I came with a team. I had been aware that we had been getting
special treatment, but I wasn’t aware of how much. The power is usually on when we wake up . .
. and then goes off approximately 30
seconds after my roommate plugs her hair straightener in. It will then usually come on again at around
11. It will go out once around 9PM for
about a minute, and then it will also go out for 30 seconds whenever I'm
taking a bucket bath at night. The
regularity of this is quite comical.
Whenever the power goes out at night, it is out for just long enough for
me to find my headlamp and turn it on. I
have gotten to the point where I don’t even reach for it when the power cuts
out. As for the water . . . that’s
totally hit or miss, but usually misses right after I put shampoo in my
hair. The sound of water gurgling
through the pipes sends me and my roommate scrambling to the spigots. The one in the shower gets the black tube to
refill the blue 50 gallon drum in the bathroom, the one by the toilet refills
every bucket we have. When both the
power and the water are running at the same time, it’s a very good day.
I’m having a blast.
Really. This is awesome.
I got here without too much of a problem (unless you count
the bag-packing adventure), except for a 2 hour delay in Dubai for fog. (Yeah, thick fog in the middle of the
desert. It was weird enough to make the
news in India, so I’m told) When I got
to my gate at DC, I found that Dan Riechard from ANM was taking a team to
Bangladesh, and they were on my flight too.
They were even in my row. The
flight wasn’t full, so I had an empty seat next to me. I certainly appreciated that for the nearly
13 hour flight. I read all of Mockingjay
and two-thirds of Perks of Being a Wallflower before my Kindle died, and then
promptly went to knocking out the power on my computer playing Peggle in
turbulence. Sometimes that worked
out. Most of the time, it didn’t. When I got tired of that, I looked out the
window and followed the plane’s progress tracker on the seatback screen to see
what city I was flying over. I saw
Madrid, Valencia, and Ibiza at night.
Turkey lit up the night like crazy.
We took a few turns over Saudi Arabia to avoid restricted airspace in
countries nearby, but I’m fairly certain that I saw Baghdad and some cities in
Syria from the air. That was
surreal. I had been hearing about these
cities in the news, and now I was looking at them.
I didn’t remember this until I was experiencing it a second
time, but flying into Mumbai is kind of infuriating. We would get to the point where I could see
the city out the window, and then we would do a circle out over the ocean. This happened at least 4 times. This wouldn’t be so irritating if I hadn’t
been waiting a stinking year and a half (plus 17 hours on a plane) to just get to this city. I then remembered that it seemed like it took
forever to get the plane down the first time I came, and that was at night in a
monsoon. As we taxied around to our
gate, I saw the slum that Catherine Boo was talking about when she spent months
living there to write Behind the Beautiful Forevers. I breezed through customs (as I tried to
nonchalantly scream prayers in my head as the guy examined my hard-won visa)
and I actually got my bags really fast . . . the problem was hauling that huge
65-pound bag on and off the baggage trolley to make it through various stages
of security/customs/whatever-the-heck-that-was leaving the airport. Michael, being the smart person he is, had
known that my plane was 2 hours late and had already seen the news clip on the
fog in Dubai. He had been waiting a half
an hour by the time I got there . . . long enough to secure himself some much-coveted
Pringles.
When our driver got a call that the road we usually take to
get to Badlapur was under construction, we went a different route . . . and thus began my true re-entry into
India. It was 3 hours, through 3 towns,
over roads so torn up that I wondered if they had ever been paved in their
pathetic existence. I ran out of words to
describe how absurd it was, as did Michael.
We just started laughing that my smashed vertebrae would actually make
me shorter, making me more Indian. Oddly
enough though, there was construction occurring: for the decorative marble arches
over the dirt path traffic-jam road.
Welcome to India.
When I got to
Ashagram, I threw my bags in my room and met my roommates Then I went to dinner with the girls, all the while checking over
my shoulder for when Alok would put his hands over my eyes. He didn’t disappoint. I showed Santosh that yes, I did keep my
promise and yes, I didn’t take that bracelet off. He looked at the tattered bracelet and said,
“You need a new one!” I said hi to the
rest of the boys too, but I was so tired that I was having trouble putting
sentences together. Inder walked me back
to the girls unit, gave me a hug and said, “Welcome home.”
I stood out in the chilly Indian night for a moment, looking
at the orange moon, thinking, “Finally, I actually made it!”
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