To Survive and Savor

“Travelers tend to regard time spent here as a right of passage to be survived rather than savored.” I’ve been trying to plan my after-program travels and this quote from my Rough Guide describing Mumbai made me laugh at first and then made me think about my own experiences. The difficult transition into my internship knocked the wind out of me a bit, a blow I’ve now fully recovered from. At the point I read this quote I was still trying to pull myself out of one of those infamous lows on the study abroad culture shock graph. “I don’t want to just survive, but lately that’s all I’ve been struggling to do,” I thought and said aloud to Caroline. She of course reminded me of all the savoring we’d been doing as well.

I met a woman from Hungary last week that had come to the country for a month before and had “fallen in love with India.” Now she’s back for longer. I’ve already been asked here “So how do you like India so far?” and I have no idea how to answer such a seemingly simple question. Usually whoever asks is someone who only speaks Hindi, so I just leave it at “Achchha laga,” and call it a day. But I come up stumped when I try to figure out how I’m going to answer that same question when I return home. I find myself jealous of the Hungarian woman, who could state so easily that India has claimed her heart. I too came to India heart open, ready to, even expecting to fall in love. But India has proven to be a tricky lover. What a naïve, selfish girl I was! Expecting India to fill up all of my empty spaces, without taking any of my blood, sweat, or tears in return.

So as all the wonder and excitement of India’s newness wears off, I’m starting to map out a different kind of love, one strengthened by an interwoven blanket of both survival stories and savory moments. I can see now how the surviving reinforces the savoring, just like Caroline assured me. It’s a kind of love that will still be impossible to explain in passing conversation, but hey, that’s the best kind of love anyways. Now, in order to survive the lows that have grown increasingly shorter in length, intensity, and frequency, I go back to one lazy, hot Friday afternoon spent with Surjan Ramji last week. I sat in his office, while the rest of Phalodi was so quiet it seemed the entire town was taking its after-lunch nap at once. The only noise was the fan above us as we ate apples and grapes in smile-filled silence. I finally stopped wishing my Hindi was better and just accepted the silence, and watched a trail of tiny ants doggedly climb the wall next to me, and felt the kind of understanding that can only pass between two people without a common language.