Chapter 2
Our trip began in Mumbai on the seventh story of an old hotel. This would be the most modern place we would stay throughout our journey. It came complete with an English toilet, a luxury compared to a hole in the ground, and a shower with running water. (The rest of our baths were simply buckets filled with hot water.) One wall was a solid window that looked out onto the busy world below. The buildings that could be viewed outside appeared to be worn by time and pollution. There was so much life below. More life than I had ever seen before. So much noise. The honking of cars was incessant. Our teacher told us that every time we heard a honk, that was how much God loved us. God must have loved us a whole lot.
Before sunrise, Mumbai awakens quietly. The market vendors roll out their mats while the chai maker waits to make his tea until he has performed puja (an act of worship) to the altar at his small stand.
India is beautiful like that. Someone might say India is filled with rituals. Another might say it’s filled with devotion. I say that it was remarkably refreshing to see all of society taking time to give appreciation and gratitude for something beyond themselves. As an American, if I may be so brazen as to make a vast generalization (however correct), we are perpetually thinking about being more productive, more efficient, and more consuming. We are consumed by the practical and yet here, time is taken for the mystical. At least, in the old India. The India that the Western mind has not yet touched.
If America were a straight line, a box filled with hard edges and efficiency, India is its sister land where femininity reigns. Circular, dynamic, completely on its own time. A mandala.
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