Life in Far Away Places: India
After college I spent four years traveling and living in the developing world. A few months ago I returned to Long Island and started working for the Smithtown Messenger. This is the fifth installment of an occasional column about those four years abroad.
After returning from Ecuador I spent a summer in my parent’s home in Kings Park, growing a garden, canvassing for an environmental group and contemplating my life. When I had left Ecuador I felt defeated, but after only a few months I felt ready to go out and conquer the world once more; so I bought a plane ticket to India. I had some vague notion that it was unlike any place I had ever been to before and was drawn to that. I somewhat purposely avoid certain knowledge before I go to new places, preferring to find it on my own while there. A good map and an open mind are the only things I try and carry with me to distant places.
India blew me away almost as soon as I landed in Chennai, a large city in the south that I knew nothing about. If my intention was to try and understand the place in the six weeks I would spend on the sub-continent, I soon realized that I had greatly underestimated my task. Within the world of India there exist a thousand different worlds. I tried to get a glimpse into as many as I could.
A week after I landed I found myself in Nagapatinum, a small city whose coastal areas were destroyed by the Indian Ocean Tsunami in late 2004 – three years before I arrived. I was still struggling to adjust to the time zone – which had nearly exactly flipped night and day for me – and woke up while it was still dark out most mornings. My second day in Nagapatinum, I walked down to the beach to watch the sun rise over the water, and stumbled onto a small fishing village. The village was little more than a collection of small, thatched roof huts built at the high end of the beach with long wooden boats lined up between the water and the simple houses that the people slept in. There was no running water, no electricity, not even motors on any of the boats. I sat down on the sand close by and watched the village wake up. Men and women began cooking fish over wood fires. Others walked past me to the waters edge, and defecated in the water a few hundred yards to the side of their homes. The men and women looked old beyond their years. I had passed by some concrete foundations washed away by the tsunami on my way to the beach and it was obvious that this entire area had been destroyed just three years before; and you could still see the devastation in everyone’s face. There was a depressing feeling in the air and I wondered if I should be there, but then quickly became distracted by some children who had begun playing a game of cricket – which is a very popular sport in India. I took out my camera to snap a couple of shots of the kids playing and a few of them noticed me and came over. They were all very young and most were half naked, only wearing a pair of ill fitting shorts. The local language there was Tamil, so communication was an issue but it was clear that they were interested in the camera. I showed them the pictures I had taken and they were amazed to see themselves on the screen. As they competed for my attention, I took new pictures and each time the sight of themselves on the small display screen made them giggle and smile as only children can. Between pictures the children drew their names in the sand and helped me pronounce each one, laughing at my poor attempts. There was a certain energy in those kids that I will never forget, like the first shoots of green emerging from the ashes of a devastating forest fire. There was a suffocating type of desperation I felt everywhere I went in Nagapatinum, and it was all that much heavier around this village, but not with the children. I had originally thought I could stay and volunteer in the area but I quickly grew to hate how the place made me feel. All the aid organizations that poured into the area three years before had given away a lot of money but left without building anything sustaining. All the new boats and fishing nets that were handed out were so successful in getting people to repopulate the area that even more people came to live on the oceans edge than there had been before the tsunami had made the sea a graveyard for 300,000 innocent souls. The area quickly became over-fished and with no waste management system or plumping the garbage piled up and floated away into the dying sea, and it seemed a second disaster had come – but not one that was strong enough to defeat the hope of a new generation. I’ll never forget the smiles the children had in the fishing village that morning before being called back to eat their breakfast; it was one of the most inspiring things I have ever seen.
India had a strange way of making me feel contrary emotions at once. Someone told me before I left; “If you don’t hate it, and love it, then you weren’t really there.” I can not think of any truer statement about the place. I spent the rest of my time exploring the rest of south India. I made some new friends, briefly joined a religious pilgrimage, worked briefly in a school teaching, and very nearly drown in the Arabian Sea. I walked through Hindu temples and Muslim mosques. I had incredible conversations, and also felt utterly alone in a nation of billion people. I sat on the back of motorcycles that weaved through hectic traffic and spent a night on the floor of a crowded train.
The nation is incredibly diverse, with so many different cultures, religions, histories and languages all existing side by side. It’s amazing there isn’t more conflict between the different groups, there is of course, but overwhelmingly everything seems to peacefully co-exist with each other. Gandhi’s face is on all the currency, and he really does seem to be the father of modern India.
After forty days and forty nights I was back where I began: Chennai International airport. The trip did have some considerable low points, but more than anything else it helped me decide that I wanted to move out of the United States once more. On the long flight back I decided that there are too many beautiful things in the world to stay in any one place for too long.