Nihal In India: Part I of a Series

Initial Reaction

My flight from Mumbai touched down at Newark Airport before sunrise this past Thursday morning. Bags collected and customs fooled into thinking that I was the only Indian not returning with kilos of food products stashed between saris, the terminal doors whisked open, and I stepped out into the darkness of a January morning. The temperature was balmy for the time of year—right around freezing—but other than exactly two taxi drivers, no one else was about. The only sound I could clearly hear were my heels, clacking their way toward a clearly marked, well lit sign: “Passenger Pick-Up Area 2.”

The contrast from my arrival in Mumbai exactly one month earlier couldn’t be more striking. My loyalty to Delta is fiercer than a dog to its master, so the airline tagged my bags to be the first ones off the plane. So I was the first one out of the terminal and into a sea of five thousand people, each anxiously making direct eye contact to see if I was a friend, relative, or potential taxi fare. I felt like Barack Obama in front of his adoring public, but instead of a message of change, I was carrying bags of used clothing. I wasn’t Barack, I realized with a shudder. I was John McCain.

Over the next month, I would dodge traffic in Mumbai, ponder the timelessness of medieval Rajasthani forts, and drink from the same Konkan village wells that quenched the thirst of my grandparents nearly a century ago. I’d buy a cup of tea for $0.06 on the platform at Pune, and the same night be treated to a cup of coffee in Mumbai that was nearly as good, but 15 times the price. The richness and frustrations of India’s linguistic diversity would be on display in nightly family conversations that would bounce between three languages with ease. Even I would try to parlay this chaos to my advantage by speaking Marathi to my Hindi-speaking Mumbai cab driver, hoping to fool him into thinking I was only a simple kid from the interior, not someone who converts every expense back into dollars.

I was ready for another tour through India’s gut-wrenching poverty, which was most notably on display in Rajasthan, where legions of men idled their time away waiting to be interviewed by Tom Friedman. But even though I grew up in an Indian family, my Anglo-American sensibilities were completely unprepared for the enveloping warmth of my aunt’s extended family, who welcomed our visit to their Konkan home as if a world war had ended, and we’d returned home.

Words can’t fully express the dichotomy between two places separated by only 16 hours of flight. I’ll do my best in the essays to come, but the contrast was illustrated to be most sharply on the morning I landed. I was walking to work through midtown Manhattan, where I was struck by the cleanliness, the orderly way cars, trucks and people interfaced with each other, but most of all the silence. Was I in New York, or was this Geneva? For a split second, I missed the chaos of the Maximum City, Aamchi Mumbai, India Rising, and all the other references to an ancient civilization that sees itself poised to take its rightful place amongst the world’s powers. That is, until I came to an intersection, and a taxi politely came to a halt to let me cross.

Nope, I was glad to be home. More to come.