India was never a place that called my name. I never longed for it in the way that I long for the lands to come and still I am here nevertheless. I live without regret, except perhaps for having chosen April as my month of departure for the sweetness of spring, which had only just begun in New York, is no match for the swelter of the subcontinent.
Since my time in India is but brief, I will not be so arrogant or ignorant to speak of things I do not and may not ever understand. I will only tell of what I have witnessed. For so intricately entwined, so deeply entrenched are the history and culture of this place that it is no small wonder that it was Alexander who was conquered by India thousands of years ago and not he who conquered it. And even now, having forgotten the chrysoprase necklace that I meant to wear around my neck, I realize, like Alexander, how easy it is here to step into the arms of fallen empires to be embraced one moment only to be shunned the next.
In Jaipur I encountered palaces of pink and forts of amber. In Delhi there were Muslim mosques and Mogul mausoleums standing side by side with Sikh and Hindu temples. In all of these places I cannot help but imagine what India had been like in all of its majesty, but who am I to say that there is not a certain majesty to India at present?
In Varanasi, when both the sun and the heat were at their highest, I visited a slum along the river where children were covered in sand and little else. How they reached for my hand before I even realized that they were there. And so again and again I threw them in the air as they shrieked with laughter. How light they were. How light, how heavy this is. After the setting of the sun I wandered down to the ghats to witness what I have never witnessed before. Here, children jumped into the dark waters as men prepared the dead for their final ritual. A young Indian man, born in this city of Shiva, sat by my side. He spoke of happiness, he spoke of energy, he spoke of peace
At the Taj Mahal, my guide walked slowly and it was only later that he revealed that he had been in an accident; thrown from the back of a motorbike and now has metal rods rather than bones in his legs. And so together we walked slowly and our conversation flowed between the history of this place and the story of his life; somewhere on the brink of past and present, life and death. Of the place of his birth, he repeated the words written by Persian poet Amir Khusru:“If there is a paradise upon earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.” And for a moment I am jealous of his home for I have yet to find a paradise of my own. But it is only a fleeting jealously until I remembered that I was standing in front of a centuries old wonder of the world weaving my hands through latticed screens and tracing my fingers around floral patterns made of agate, jade, and onyx and that this, too, was paradise.
That night the rickshaw driver, long used to these wild and reckless roads that make even thunder road look tame, drove the wrong way down a one way street, expelling any doubt that I might have had that he had no idea what he was doing with these few words:
“This is India, Madam. Nothing is impossible.”
That is why I now find myself at the beach in Goa, my paradise, my place of possibilities where the sound of the ocean echoes in the night. Although it is past midnight I do not sleep; awake with the awareness that I am on the wrong side of the sea. For it is the lands across the way that call my name in the darkness. Soon enough will I be there for that is where this real journey will begin. But for now, I am here. For now I am India.
Eventually sleep does arrive, ridden on the backs of waves that roar and whisper only this:
“This is India, Madam. Nothing is impossible.”