First Impressions, third visit

It’s day two in India and I already feel like I’ve experienced a million different feelings – had so many thoughts and gone from one extreme to another. The first day, the deep musky smells welcomed me back to this familiar landscape of traffic, bright colored saris and the dirty soles of feet hanging from windows, rickshaws, buses. It is hot here in Gujarat and the heat acts as a congealer of sorts melting together the scents of Inida. Insense, burning trash, slow cooking dal embrace each other and become a living, breathing entity.

Walking the streets I recognize that each scene my eyes happen to fall upon is in itself an entire anthropology. A man spits paan out of his rickshaw, a woman hugs her baby close against traffic, a family is pulled by an ox carrying an attached load of fruits and vegetables to be sold in the market. I stare at many strangers and they stare back, holding my gaze for much longer than necessary and I can’t help but feel that each stranger is trying to share with me a story. There are over 1 billion people living in India today, that’s quite a few stories.

Day two is somehow less magical. The streets are dirty and the only faces that catch my eye are blank, expressionless as they ride through traffic. Motorcycles avoid full on accidents by mere inches and the drivers are completely unphased. I smile at them, or try, in some way to make a connection and lean slightly out of the rickshaw, attempting to provoke a laugh. They turn their heads and drive on. I begin to think that because this is my third time, this country no longer has the same effect it has had on me in the past. Maybe I only liked this place while it was new and interesting – fresh and completely foreign and all the longing, the pull, the unexplained fascination was merely novelty, totally inauthentic.

But is it? Just the mere fact that this place has already taken me on such a rollercoaster of thoughts and ideas – the translation of observation into words, and words into meaning – proves that it is still more intense than ever. Does it not?