Being A Tourist Again

The other day my dear friend N visited us in QuaintTown. She still lives in QuaintCountry and I have known her since childhood. It has been a few years since she made her first journey to India: she visited Rajasthan and fell in love with India. So when she finally had the opportunity to return to India she was really excited, even though it was a very short trip.

She stayed over at our place. It was lovely to have someone from back home. I always love to welcome people from back home into my Indian life and I get super excited about showing them around. I love to introduce them to our every day life. It is the simple things that matter most: where I go for a walk with Baby QuaintHeart. Where I buy my breakfast eggs. Where we pick our veggies. All the tiny little details.

I am not sure why this means so much to me, but I think I re-evalue my own adjustments when I see them through someone else's eyes.
In addition, I do not want to lose touch with my roots. It has happened once before that I had so completely immersed myself in Indian culture that my family was shocked when I visited them in QuaintCountry. This is not about dress or other such obvious signs, but rather that I had become completely detached from my roots and was a very different persons. This was painful: this look of disbelief in my family's eyes. I would not want this to happen again.

But my most favorite reason for having friends and family over in India is that I get to be a tourist again. I let N choose some spots she wanted to see in Mumbai and then I planned an itinerary for her, which was so much fun! We travelled in the local train to watch down from the bridge in Mahalaxmi and observe the Dhobi Wallahs. I have done this dozens of times and I have also gone inside the Dhobi Ghat (of course Mr. QuaintHeart took care of me). Then we continued our journey, standing at the gate of the train and letting the hot breeze ruffle our hair. It felt beautiful. It felt like a holiday. It felt as if I was in India for the very first time.

Then we continued further South to walk along Marine Drive. It has been many years since I walked there for the first time. That was in 2002 before they revamped it and created this beautiful sidewalk which is there today. We took a cab to Colaba and I did not bother haggling about the fare, I just sat there, pretended not to know that he took us for an entire tour of South Mumbai before finally entering Colaba Causeway. We got a bit lost there looking for a chocolate shop which is somewhere hidden near the Post Office, but when we could not locate it, we simply dashed off to the Taj and further to the Gateway of India.

Usually, I am so stuck in everyday life that there is no time for such frivolous adventures. I am too focused, too, not allowing myself to waste five minutes here and there. That is why it was so amazing to have N over.

Moving to India

Moving to India was not very difficult to me. I never thought much of it. If Mr. QuaintHeart had lived in Ireland, Iceland or Italy, I'd have moved there instead. But since he lived in India, that's where I went, too.
Not once did I question myself whether I could live here or not. It seems preposterous to ask such a question. Over a billion people manage, so it seems absurd that I should not be able to manage just as well.

Naturally some major adjustments had to be done, and maybe it was of a great advantage not to have read a single travel guide book. Such fear mongering as the rubbish they publish (such as about food and water in India being unfit for consumption) is not my cup of tea. Instead, I had read a lot about Indian religion, geography, history and politics and culture, and that is the knowledge I came here with. It was all theory, but it helped me to explain to myself the quirkiness of this patch of Earth.

That does not mean I came here and fit in immediately. I came here when I was very young and I had a whole suitcase full of ideals which I considered really important to my identity and my sense of self. It was painful to learn some of the lessons. For example, I have never before been much interested in conforming to every minute rule  in order to earn my place in a community. In QuaintCountry, I was a member no matter what I did. In India, I belonged to the out-group. I thought: well, if they don't love me, that is of no consequence to me. I shall remain true to myself. However, I did realize soon that relations here are so much more close-knit and it is more important to be a socially accepted member in order to integrate oneself.

It was hard. Hard to learn that women have a different status here. Hard to learn that one is judged so harshly based on flimsy grounds such as dress or the food I chose to eat. Hard to understand the difference between a value I can cherish in my heart and one that I can put on display outside.

I scoffed at Mr. QuaintHeart when he refused to take me out in a sleeveless top. I thought it was ludicrous to impose such rules on me. That was because I did not understand that our neighbourhood was extremely conservative and there were some not-so-nice shops around. In addition, I was quite unable to understand the gestures and tiny signals Indians give which would help me to judge a situation to be either harmless or tense.

I learn such things over time.

When I look back at my first months, I am sometimes appalled by my lack of understanding. Most of us consider ourselves to be open-minded and tolerant and culturally sensitive, but we not. I judged things I observed through my QuaintCountry spectacles, and it took a long time and an inner struggle to discard them in order to judge Indian realities through Indian eyes.

That does not mean I accept things without questioning them. It also does not mean that I am unable to decide between right and wrong. Or that I would put the stamp of approval on just about anything just because this is India and They Are Like That Only. No way. But it does mean that I have learnt the subtle difference between the things I have a right to change and can change, and the things that don't fall into this category.

I am sure that ten years down the line I shall look at my self of 2011 and laugh out loud at some of the ideas I hold today, but that does not scare me. I just goes to show that we all grow.