The Passage to India

I grew up in a small town that was the kind of place people stopped off at before they got to where they really wanted to go. It felt like a limbo of some kind, with the residents stupefied by the aromas of the takeaways that lined the high street, grease and ashy paper turning into forlorn mush on the pavement. The church, a supposed ‘pillar of the community’, seemed only to echo the in-between transition of bus stops or train stations, elderly people parking themselves on benches and staring at the headstones as if pondering who would fill the next vacancy, the next patch of fraying grass, before calling their dog and moving on at a speed punctuated by sighs and pauses, hobbling away into the day after, into tomorrow . I resented all of it, feeling trapped in an endless cycle of hazy afternoons and woebegone mornings, and it was only when I traveled that I could really see it in an altogether different light. It was home.

When I started volunteering overseas in Tanzania, it was the first time I had gotten on a plane. The organisation I was working with allocated the projects depending on the time of year, and I had wanted to be sent on placement to Bangladesh, because it would have been all together far closer to India, my namesake. My whole life I had felt isolated, obscured on a tiny revolving planet far from the orbit of the earth and from adventure, and I had been wistful hearing my mother recount the tales of her travels. They seemed entirely fiction, her every word plucked before the open ‘o’ of my awe, my questions relentless and without mercy, never letting her pause for breath. In Pakistan she had been shot at alongside the group she had been travelling with, fleeing for her life from a threat previously unknown in her sheltered upbringing. In Egypt she followed the tails of crocodiles down the Nile, the jade of their heads slinking into view and then to obscurity every few moments. She cradled a Tasmanian devil in her arms in Australia, and met my father, beating him at a game of droughts. ‘But it was India where I really fell in love,’ she would say, and the smile would play into her eyes as she drifted dreamily into memories I couldn’t touch, couldn’t see.

She’d been there several times, visiting the workers in the slums as they cooked spiced snacks and sugared vegetables, later to be thrown into the faces of the impatient drivers restless in the bustle of the roads, smoke and heat curdling the air so that everything had a pale orange glow, the taste of sulphur bitter and acrid as boys spoke in one breath, shouting their wares. She visited the Taj Mahal, left her shoes in the corner under someone else’s so they wouldn’t get stolen, and felt at peace with the marble, the swirls of grey smattered with blush as the sun sank into the faint hum of a new evening, feeling awake and feeling free. Nothing was quiet, and yet she surrendered herself to thinking clearly for the first time, the noise fading into welcome monotony. She made friends, she sat in the trains and watched the cattle get piled onto another, she sang in the street, gasped at the markets full of colour and fine cloth, tapestries that were frayed and sometimes soaked in mud, and she sobbed at the children on the streets begging for money, some riding skateboards with no legs and using their hands to steer. She paid her respects as families laid their dead in the Ganges, as little boys washed by its banks and their mothers stood by soaking linens. She was lost constantly under the garble of all the language, all the people, but altogether enraptured and she was transported back there every time she would tell me of her travels. I couldn’t reach her after that, so would instead look at the fabrics in our house she had bought back with her, the pictures she had kept of her smiles and laughter at each new place she found something of herself in, something of who she wanted to be.

I became almost feverish with longing to go there, to see all of the color and all of the beauty for myself, and could never understand why growing up we did not have holidays like other people I went to school with, never going abroad. Though when they were young my parents had been able to see part of the world, those travels belonged to their youth, to their time allocated before life and routine got in the way, and that nostalgia was perhaps what made my mother’s memories all the more wistful, all the more sad. They couldn’t afford that for us, and she would at times become fixated on the ideals of her past adventures, so withdrawn that we couldn’t pull her back when we were foreigners, tourists with no sense of direction when it came to her stories and the life that came before us.

It frightened me, her longing, and yet it also furthered my own fascination, my own thirst for travelling and excitement, I lived through movies and books, rereading the Secret Garden where the young Mary Lennox grew spoiled in a house in India, known only to the servants and ignored by her parents. I watched the Little Princess and dreamed of one day seeing an elephant, of eating food that transcended the trying tastes of the town takeaways with spices I hadn’t yet tried, though they already felt like they were on the tip of my tongue. It replayed in my mind, a storybook of all my mother's wanderings and my namesake, and it felt like a part of my identity in a way I couldn’t fathom, because I was young and still didn’t know myself, still didn’t understand.

I was eighteen when I was given my placement to Tanzania. There was a part of me that had been so invested in the idea that it could be closer to India that I couldn’t believe what I had been given. And then. I shook myself for not truly relishing the opportunity. I’d never been abroad with my parents, only on school trips confined to museums and coaches filled with surly students. I got on a plane, on several planes, and I spent the next three months teaching English in a school in a rural community. I laughed, I danced, I made friends for life. I found beauty in unknown places, found wisdom in elders whose language I didn’t share. It changed my life and gave me nourishment that I didn’t know I needed. In spite of our differences, I felt closer to my mother than I had in a long time.

Returning home was tough, adjusting to all the privileges that I had never noticed before. I realized that though my town was small and in some ways confined, it had its own beauty. People were friendly, mostly, and the pavements were lined with scuffs and scratches of the lives they had lived all in one place, tied to it in a way I couldn’t understand. It felt like something ancient, some sort of rite for this town to belong to its people so utterly, and I had never lived in a city. For the most part, I breathed clean air, I cycled to the beach with my friends on weekends, I could walk for hours through trees and bushes on the old train line and constantly be surrounded with history and something rich, earthy. There were imprints everywhere of living people and I had forgotten the imprint my parents had had on me, confusing the notion of India with their role as my parents. I still wanted to see it, to bear witness to the part of me that felt like it belonged there, and I know that I will visit one day, and that it will be more than I ever dreamed.

There’s a book called Invisible Cities by Italo Calvo. I took it with me on my placement and would spend the evenings with my host family reading and re reading the descriptions of each city. In the book, Marco Polo the great traveler, recounts to an Emperor the great cities of his empire that he hasn’t seen. The Emperor discovers that Marco is actually re describing the same city over and over again in different ways, his home city, Venice. It is unlike anything else he has ever seen, because something of it has lodged itself within him, and he can’t quite escape it. I reflected on this, thinking back to my small hometown with its nosy old ladies and the blossom trees that bloom every spring. It was home, and it felt like a part of me, the child I had been wanting out and the adult who felt on the outside looking in. Then I thought of India, of its vibrancy. Of the very poor and the very rich, the vulnerable in pain and the wealthy in fine robes. I didn’t know what was real and what my idea of India was, whether it was even bigger than the place, than the country.

If I could go there right now, I know I'd choose to get lost on purpose, to meander down streets and feel frightened and excited at every sound, every person walking past. I’d be a stranger walking in semi familiar territory, and I would eat good food and travel with good people, and see things I didn’t want to see and a lot of things I counted on seeing to make it all worthwhile In the back of my head I’d hear my mother, murmuring aloud about some song she heard one night played loud in Bombay (now Mumbai) and laughing hysterically at the time one man proposed to her because he wanted to go to England. Our relationship has not been easy, these things never are, but I think in that moment, standing at the Taj Mahal and seeing what she saw all those years ago, I’d feel connected to her somehow, and connected to my namesake.

Whether I have lived up to a country so imperfectly glorious and so beautifully flawed, I don’t know, but I would feel a sense of peace, I am sure. Calvo wrote ‘Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else’. The same is true for places, and the sense of displacement that I have felt my whole life brings this truth new meaning. My dream vacation would be this, because I think it would answer a lot of the questions I was always too afraid to ask, and fulfill a wish I had long sustained, as well as connecting me to a part of myself that I haven’t yet been able to name. To travel and to know a different culture is such a liberty it can barely be described, and for my parents who have left that behind, I know I must take every opportunity that can be afforded to me. India is far away from where I live, from who I am.

It will not be so for forever.