Going home

I'm sitting in a dark taxi at half-past midnight, paying to be bumped and jarred over Mumbai's broken streets in the dead of night on my way to the airport. I'm going home and a line from the song 'Thank You' by Alanis Morissette flits across my mind: 'Thank you India, thank you providence, thank you disillusionment'. It feels unbearably, heart-achingly poignant, so obvious but so apt, and not just for the first phrase. As the melody plays in my mind, I feel a lump in my throat and tears blurring my vision. Mumbai's lights twinkle and glow with a quiet, watchful, motherly serenity while the city sleeps. Suddenly, having ached to go home on so many occasions, I don't want to leave. India has welcomed me and cared for me and and now here I am leaving her like a thief in the night, slipping out of her dark embrace like a restless lover.

'Thank you India, thank you providence, thank you disillusionment.'

After this journey I have, of course, a lot to thank India for and, if you believe in such things, providence or some guiding hand, so gentle I could not feel its touch and so credit myself with the decision, may have brought me here. And it's true that I was certainly soaked in a sour, dark disillusionment about my worklife that prompted me to decide to do what this blog's strapline states:  'I've quit work and I'm heading to India to discover who knows what? Maybe myself, maybe not...'

The line and the sentiment is vague, deliberately so. Deliberately because, when I wrote it in a hurry the night before I left, I didn't know what I was going to discover and I really, truly didn't know why I was going, so I didn't know what to write, how to sum up the compulsion I felt embark on a journey that had no apparent meaning or purpose. And as for discovering myself or not; well, that was more vaguery to cover my back. I have never really seen India as a place of the bright, primary-coloured spirituality that so many travellers before me have enthused over, pasted on top of its daily humdrum life like a child's collage. I think you can find spirituality in anything if you are seeking it. You see it where others don't because it your mind is tuned to search for it. As I am not seeking, I have never related to India in this way and as such, I didn't expect or intend to discover myself in any sense that could be called spiritual. But, should I return from India enlightened and up to my newly beaded, hennaed neck in mysticism, then people would have been warned of this possible self-discovery and no ridicule could follow; and should I return as Me as I'd been when I left, coloured by the sun but not the eastern spirit, then I'd covered that possibility too. Non-existent expectations had been managed, I thought, through that cunningly meaningless sentence.

And have I discovered myself or not? Well, I don't know whether to be pleased or disappointed in myself but in a word, yes, I have. Pleased because any form of self-awareness cannot be but a good thing, and disappointed because this means I may grudgingly have to trudge to the bottom of the list of the New Enlightened of India and accept my position as One Of Them. But I still don't see this discovery in a spiritual, mystical sense, a sense I scathingly like to call 'airy-fairy, hippy-drippy'. I've always been suspicious of what I saw as the slightly suspect sudden 'awakening' many claim to have experienced post-India. It's as if they know a precedent has been set for this kind of obligatory spiritual metamorphosis in-country and that if they don't return touched and permanently altered by some form of enlightenment, then their trip has not been a success, valuable or somehow right.

What I have discovered, or rather uncovered, in India is the Me I always was, who was always there, but who I didn't have the time or - more likely - the inclination to analyse in either a critical or an appraising way. Going to India, and not India itself - I use this form of words deliberately - has taught me how to read myself, to know myself, to learn from myself. The different perspective I've been granted by travelling a misty distance away from myself as located in my everyday life has made me see Me and myself in relation to that life with a clarity I didn't expect. I would describe it in this way: It's like looking at a glass of water in a glass with a pattern on one side. The pattern is facing away from you and, although you can see it, it is distorted by the water in front of it. If you travel round to the other side of the glass it, and everything contained within it, remains the same but you can see the pattern differently, clearly and perfectly. It may be a clumsy metaphor for what I'm trying to say but it works for me. My life and I have not changed, but the way I see them has.

A wise man and well-travelled friend of a friend, speaking from honest experience, once said to me, 'You can't escape yourself by travelling, after all it's always You who you take with you.' At the time I found it profound, wise and enlightening but its wisdom is obvious really, when you think about it. And besides, wisdom is a fantasy. You only see advice or information as such because, at the time you receive it, it furnishes you with a knowledge that you didn't have, a missing piece that you lacked. And it stays with you because it answers a need, a questioning in you that you probably hadn't known you had. Everybody is wise who has the answer you seek to the question you pose yourself. And you are wise to someone who doesn't possess the knowledge you have already learned. But to me this pronouncement was wise because I had not thought about it and because it struck a chord with me on some level. The person who I was, who worried endlessly about things including - whenever this rare moment stuck - not having anything to worry about; that person was still coming along with me, packed as neatly inside me, as my backpack was outside of me.

When you travel of course it is You who you take with you - along with your worries, prejudices, opinions, behaviours and attitudes. You still carry that essence of You with you whichever country you happen to be in. Through travelling I have not substantially changed who or what that essence is, I have just come to a better understanding of it and a way of managing, altering or accepting those bits I was never happy with. Travelling gave me the time and space to notice myself.

If this is beginning to sound suspiciously 'airy-fairy, hippy drippy', then I'm sorry, it isn't meant to. But if it is, you have my permission to smirk as scathingly as I once did. What I'm trying to say is that without the constant scratch of the stresses and strains of everyday life, I have had time to think.
In these many and varied moments of introspection I have looked at myself and seen myself properly. And the mirror has not always been kind. I have seen and often been appalled, but sometimes pleased, at how I react in a variety of familiar and unfamiliar situations, but crucially, I have had the time to analyse my own behaviour and decide why I do the things I do. Why I speak, act, feel, think the way I do.

So this is why I say that going to India and not India itself has helped me discover myself. Before I travelled I knew myself, now I know why I am myself and how to deal with that. It is travelling itself, and its blessed shift in perspective that has given me this knowledge, that has made me see the pattern properly. It could have been any country in the world, but it was India - for which, again, 'thank you India'.

Another wise person, this time from from 60kph, told me (actually it was several of them on different occasions, they all loved this) that 'to move you need speed, to travel you need stillness'. And it is right. They are right to love this neat little epigram. Travelling involves long periods of inactivity; queueing, waiting, sitting, moving from place to place. It is precisely during these periods that your mind can find that stillness and so be freed to think more clearly. You are at liberty, if you choose it, to meander the lanes of your own consciousness: how you behave, how you react, how you judge, how you think, how you act. In the physical act of travelling - a long bus trip, a tedious train journey, a sleek flight - for the duration of that passage you abdicate responsibilities for all practical matters to your driver, leaving you with unaccustomed hours to spend in reflection and appreciation of the situations you've encountered, the people you've met, the things you've seen. And your own reactions towards them. The many hours of enforced inactivity I spent while journeying from place to place allowed me the time to let my mind to fall open like a bursting, overstuffed cupboard, leaving me at leisure to pick over its contents, polish the things I like and put them back and turn over and over the things I don't like and decide how best to deal with them.

But, of course it was not all about me. I didn't journey miles and miles and spend months and months in a foreign country just to think about myself. I went to India to discover the country too. All the things I experienced leave me frustrated that the superlatives available to me are just tired, dried-out old husks that cannot flavour my writing with enough intensity to describe what I saw and heard and tasted and touched and smelled and felt. The following line sounds like it comes from the Indian Tourist Board but I assure you it comes from me: India is a world within one country. And it is and one that I feel unable to capture adequately. It is noisy and silent; aggressive and serene; age-old and modern; caring and uncaring; careless and careful; bold and meek. India has brightness and equal darkness; it is straightforward, yet incomprehensible; lovable yet infuriating; rude yet charming. Contrasts seem such a cheap way of encompassing its seething, inseparable, ever-changing mixture because it is not simply one or the other, it is both and all these things and everything in between, and all at the same time. It breathes contradiction and confusion, a mercurial nature that changes as you travel through it, never letting you grasp it fully. But the little I have grasped is this:

India is a land where anything can and does happen. I may have tried to make plans but India frequently had other plans for my plans. At the time I didn't appreciate this but, but with the benefit of hindsight, I always found the justification for India's apparent betrayal of my organisation. Once, in Pondicherry, I went to visit a museum. It was closed, as the guidebook I'd neglected to read properly said it would be on that day. Outside it I talked to a local man who'd also been caught out. Knowing I was at an unplanned loose end, as was he, he offered to take me out for a ride on his scooter to see the local villages and surrounding countryside I would never have made the effort to see otherwise. As we flitted between sun-drenched jade fields flecked with serene white egrets, he answered for me  many of the niggling questions I'd had about little quirks and customs I'd seen in daily Indian life but never understood. Wind-blown and tired, I returned with a new richness of understanding, given of sheer generosity, that I would not have found in a dusty museum.

This man was the perfect example of another joy I grasped: that in India the places are made special by the people in them. A town, village, beach, island, desert is just a place - beautiful in its own right, but just a place nonetheless - without the warmth and friendliness of its people that will tie my heart forever to it. In Hyderabad, in my hotel room the satellite TV was on the blink, so the manager swapped my faulty system for his own, private set-top box and let me use it for the duration of my stay, leaving him with nothing to watch. I loved that city of glittering palaces for this episode of kindness alone. If I ever left a place without experiencing that warmth of human contact, I left as much a stranger as when I arrived, but if I moved on, having been moved by the people I'd met, I always kept a fond memory of that place.

But to allow a bond to form you need to trust in people and putting your trust in India can make or break your day. I was a newbie, pale and definitely interesting to the shark-eyed Delhi travel agent who skillfully bullied me into buying a sheaf of train tickets and hotel rooms for a sickeningly over-the-odds price. When I asked if the hotels he'd hand-picked for me were used by travellers, he assured me sternly that I would meet lots of travellers in them. All I encountered in these cold, upmarket rooms - which I don't think had ever hosted a single traveller like me before - was dreadful loneliness, homesickness and a sharp, sudden acquaintance with my own gullibility and excessive trust.

Then, in Hampi, on invitation from an Indian biker called CP, I made the decision to spend a whole week on the back of a motorbike with a group of 20-odd hairy bikers I didn't know, going to places I couldn't even find on my map. That was taking a chance, trusting in the extreme. But my investment of trust paid out a huge dividend. It gave me the best week with the best people I ever met in India. We rode together, ate, drank, laughed, sang, danced, took strange drugs together. I loved it, I loved them, I loved myself for trusting. Trust in India taught me to look for the good in people and when I looked, I usually found it.

Good things, of course, come to those who wait and in India waiting with patience and tolerance becomes a form of art. If you are prepared to wait a while for something you want or need, in India be prepared to wait twice as long. Or three times. Or 10 times. In fact, when waiting becomes so extended as to provoke existential questioning in a 'What are we really waiting for?' kind of way, then you know what patience is. The injustice of ticket queues - never a queue but a bunched-up brawl, a battle of attrition, a test of willpower - were always a drain on my patience. It would sweat from me drop by irritated drop until I snapped and raged or until its well-spring simply ran dry and in its place seeped in a weary, empty acceptance. I always knew I would get served in the end, by fair means or - more usually - foul, but I never knew when that 'end' was going to be. Like the good, all bad things come to an end too, and so I learned to accept that waiting would have its conclusion eventually, rather than to demand the precise time at which I could expect it.

And then there is tolerance. In this regard India is a demanding mistress. There is noise, dirt, poverty, pestering, over-charging, haggling, poor service. Like a kid in a candy shop, you have a bewildering array of things you can choose from at which to aim your tolerance. And an aim is mostly what it is, because hitting the target of being totally tolerant involves advanced level emotional control.

I aimed not to be bothered by the single stray dog who woofed softly at 2am, just because he heard me turn over in my thin-walled palm-leaf hut. I aimed not to mind when his sound set off a small, sharp bark from another stray dog next door; and I aimed not to scream in sleep-fuddled frustration as that bark set off a canine chain reaction of barks and howls from all the strays all over the serenity of Havelock Island that lasted a good half-hour.

And similarly Indians themselves don't seem to have a volume control that selects 'daytime' or nighttime': it has one setting, 'louder than necessary'. So another guest in your hotel, leaving at 5am to catch a bus, thinks nothing of hacking up the morning's crop of phlegm elaborately and expressively into the sink in the room next door to yours and carrying on a loud conversation with his wife between coughs.

Much harder to accept were the aspects of Indian life that dog you simply because you are a foreigner. I would bristle at the split-second pause of a rickshaw driver before he told me his price, in which I saw him mentally multiplying the truth by a factor of three or four because of the colour of my skin. I would feel the anger rise, then guiltily subside, at the sight of a lady beggar surreptitiously pinching her baby to make him cry before approaching me with her clawed hand and pleading eyes, gesturing with sickening desperation at the fat tears of 'hunger' squeezing from his crusty eyes. It was a trick but one borne of desperation. And if I gave her something, I had to squash the schoolma'am  indignation in me that wanted to berate her lack of manners for glancing with scorn at my offering, before turning on her heel without a word of thanks.

In India, tolerance was a vital but cruel skill to learn, as it made me accept both the irritations that didn't really matter, along with the ones I felt I shouldn't teach myself to ignore. In order to survive emotionally I had to learn to tolerate the poverty, hardship and filth, but sometimes I wished it was a lesson I could unlearn...

But one lesson I learned with pleasure was that India is where you are always welcome. If I could count my Indian riches in cups of chai offered, I would have more than enough to start up my own roadside stall. The tailor of Diglipur, the florist of Mysore, the shopkeepers of Udaipur, the tourists of Amritsar, the rickshaw driver of Agra and many more whose little kindness I have already forgotten, all extended the chai of friendship to me. We talked for minutes or for hours, our conversation somehow sanctioned as meaningful by the sharing of its fragrant accompaniment of a hot sweet cup, nursed then quickly drunk. If I had hours to spend, people would willingly pass them with me, or if it was minutes, they were just as happy to share what little of their life they could in this time. I was invited to dinners, weddings, people's homes and into their lives. When I unpacked my backpack for the last time, a confetti of scraps of paper and cards fluttered out, all covered with the names, numbers and emails of the people I'd met and promised - more in hope than expectation - to return to visit again.

And I pride myself that I was partly responsible for these encounters, because India is where, if you open wide the doors of yourself and show a little interest and curiosity, other curious and interested people will peep timidly round and want to come in and have a look around too. Whenever I went out in a bright and cheerful mood, open to whatever might happen, I found that the interesting interactions, the fascinating conversations, the memorable meetings came to find me. In my contentment I must have radiated some light of approachability and when I felt approachable, I was approached. While I wanted to know about them, people wanted to know about me too. They were fascinated as fascinated as I was. It was a thrill to see ordinary people as interested in my ordinary life as I was thrilled by theirs. My average existence was transformed to exotic for them by its unfamiliarity in the same way theirs was to me.

These encounters also made me realise that Indians are essentially the same as us. I tried to say more-or-less that when one of the 60kph bikers in Bangalore asked me what I now thought of Indians generally after completing most of my trip in India. But, put on the spot and unprepared, it came out in an embarrassed, fumbled, incoherent, messed-up way. To say that we're all the same may sound like a trite 'one world, one love' type of statement that didn't need me to take a four-month trip there to discover but, for me, it is true. This is how I would have liked to have said it:

Through talking and listening to Indians I came to realise that everyone's fears and our hopes are essentially the same. Different skin colour, culture, status or religion doesn't give you an immunity to fear or an assurance of happiness. If your skin is white or brown, you are still curious about others; if you worship in a church, a temple, a mosque or nowhere at all, you still want to be healthy and happy; if you eat curry every day or never in your life you still want to be loved; if you've travelled to a thousand countries or never left your town of birth you still want to be able to provide for your family. This is what makes us the same, not different.

I travel to experience the superficial differences, the dark or pale faces, the exploding colour of a festival, the beauty of the natural world, the bright city lights, the unfamiliar foods, the different lives, but above all I travel to meet people. Although they may do things differently, they may live in unfamiliar ways, they are still human beings and so I seek out what we share, what makes us the same, equal. If you look only for the differences that is all you'll see. But because I look, not even intentionally, for the similarities with the people - like the seeker of spiritual enlightenment - I find them.

Everyone comes back from a memorable trip with the same answer to the always-posed question,  'What was the best thing about your trip?': The people. And it's always the people because they are the common link through the physical, cultural, geographic and social differences. They are the hand that reaches out and guides us through the fog of bewildering unfamiliarity, the hand that says, 'Come, look, I'm just like you. Welcome.' And we recognise this hand through its welcoming touch, because its the same as ours and it has the same touch.