India in Your Face

This is what I love about India: everything is always in your face. People have always been asking me why I wanted to come to India, and I have never really had a good answer. But now I realize that I love traveling to foreign countries where I am surrounded and immersed in everything different from what I am used to and what I know. I love being overwhelmed by the foreignness of the sounds and smells and being baffled by the way life chugs along so differently from the way it does in the United States. Before I left home, someone told me India was an absolute "invasion of the senses," and that is precisely why I wanted to come.

The intensity of India is also the biggest challenge for me. Sometimes I think it's odd that the same things that I love about India are also the things I will be glad to escape when I return home next month. Perhaps my favorite description of India in this way is by Diana Eck, Graham's favorite Hindu scholar. In her book Darshan, which explores the importance of seeing in Hinduism, she writes:

India presents to the visitor an overwhelmingly visual impression. It is beautiful, colorful, sensuous. It is captivating and intriguing, repugnant and puzzling. It combines the intimacy and familiarity of English four o'clock tea with the dazzling foreignness of carpisoned elephants or vast crowds bathing in the Ganga during an eclipse. India's display of multi-armed images, its processions and pilgrimages, its beggars and kings, its street life and markets, its diversity of peoples - all appear to the eye in a kaleidoscope of images. Much that is removed from public view in the modern West and taken into the privacy of rest homes, asylums, and institutions is open and visible in the life of an Indian city or village. The elderly, the infirm, the dead awaiting cremation - these sights, while they may have been expunged from the childhood palace of the Buddha, are not isolated from the public eye in India. Rather, they are present daily in the visible world in which Hindus, and those who visit India, move in the course of ordinary activities. In India, one sees everything. One sees people at work and at prayer; one sees plump, well-endowed merchants, simple renouncers, fraudulent "holy" men, frail widows, and emaciated lepers; one sees the festival procession, the marriage procession, and the funeral procession. Whatever Hindus affirm of the meaning of life, death, and suffering, they affirm with their eyes wide open.

Maybe it is for this reason that I have been craving mountains since my last week in Udaipur. It's an odd but very very strong craving. I've never craved any natural environment ever like this before, but now my whole body and soul is absolutely aching for cool mountain air and the desert, snowy, jagged landscape of the north. Granted it is still India, but in my mind it is completely removed from the intensity of Indian life in my face as it has been in Rajasthan. Yesterday my friend told me that my craving makes sense, because with the high Himalayan mountains come isolation, silence, and solitude, all of which have been lacking thus far in my life in India.

Nepal did not quite satisfy my craving for mountains, only because it was still hot (I was counting on sweater-weather) and because the monsoon clouds were covering a lot of the good mountain views. But it's not just views that I want. I want to be in the mountains. So that is why I am heading north tomorrow, where I will spend the last few weeks of my trip holed up in the Himalayas and soaking up its own, different kind of intensity. From Dharamsala, where I am now, I am going to Ladakh - the most northern part of India - to the charming mountain town called Leh, which sits at 3505 meters above sea level. It will take me the next three days to reach Leh, traveling by bus over the second highest motorable road in the world. (The highest runs north of Leh, where I won't be going.) From Leh, I will go down (as in south, not down in altitude) to Spitti Valley, which is full of amazing Buddhist gompas and stupas and farming villages and, of course, Himalayan wonderfulness.

From here on out I will have little access to internet and may not update this blog much. But if you do read this, say your prayers for me while I ride on the high mountain roads over the next two weeks. Even though I'm not Catholic or Buddhist, I may have to buy my own set of rosary beads to finger during the hair-raising bumps and turns.

I've spent a wonderful week in Dharamsala with my aunt Valle's Tibetan monk friend Jamyang. I've been dying to meet him, mostly because he took such good care of my little brother last summer when he was in India and is a very dear family friend to both Valle and Graham. Two of my other intern friends are in Dharamsala also this week, so I have been splitting my time between drinking chai and going on walks with them, and hanging out at Jamyang's apartment. It's become my habit to throw on some sweats and wander to his apartment early every morning for Tibetan breakfast, and then to visit again in the afternoons before or during dinner. Jamyang is such a sweetie and so hospitable. He speaks almost no English, so we get by using Hindi and pantomime. After I finish exploring the north of India, I will return to Dharamsala to spend my last few days in India chillin' with Jamyang and drinking chai in cafes with good views of the green mountains.