I came back to Rishikesh to recover from Kashmir, to write, to bathe in the Ganga, to be left alone. The crowds for the Kumbh have long since departed; Rishikesh is easy now. It’s back to the way I remember it being when I first came five years ago–the heart of the “banana pancake trail.” Keep reading…
Late one night, in a rare moment when it was just the two of us, Sayma told me her story. I had only heard pieces of it before. She was the most modern in her family: she wore jeans, went out in public with her hair down, and talked on the phone with boys who were her friends. She’d even worked for a year in Delhi at a call center. At the time, she lived with her brother, who was then stationed in Delhi. When his transfer to Srinagar came in, she was called back home to Mussoorie. She pleaded to stay, but she was told Delhi was no place for a woman–a girl–on her own. Keep reading…
Srinagar is the Muslim-dominated capital of Kashmir, India’s northernmost state. Resting in a valley between snow-capped Himalayas whose peaks are visible even on cloudy days, local tourist paraphernalia boasts that the city is “Paradise on Earth.” Kashmir has been the center of periodic fighting between Pakistan and India since Partition as both countries claim ownership over the state. Beautiful as it is, it is thus also highly volatile, and prone to civil tensions that range from localized to crippling. Keep reading…
Over the last month, I’ve figured out two things about Mussoorie, the hill station in northern India where I’m currently staying. One: someone’s business is everybody’s business. The pastime of gossip here is as extensive and entrenched as the 94 viruses that were expelled from my laptop yesterday. Two: everyone has an opinion about everything. Keep reading…
1:30AM, Har-ki-Pauri Ghat, Haridwar
We set out from Rishikesh around 9pm carrying only shoulder bags with the essentials. Carrying no expectations. Keep reading…
“Don’t ask any more questions. Just decide that you’re going to go, and go,” our friend Yogi told us. We were trying to get to the same place as 15 million other people. We’d be able to get exactly as far as we truly, truly wanted to go. No further. Keep reading…
“I didn’t come to India to follow a bunch of rules. I came to experience the culture.” -Geoff, fed-up study abroad student
Jagdish and Naveen, locals we’d become friendly with, offered to take us to their favorite temple a short distance outside of town. Though the temple was only a thirty minute drive away and a few kilometer hike into the hills, that was just far enough, and the path just steep enough, for it to be considered remote. When we arrived, we discovered we had the temple to ourselves. The resident baba wasn’t home; only the groundskeeper was present, and he kept to his hut. Keep reading…
After four years away, I am back in India, exploring spaces known and new. Some of this process of reentry has been eased by a certain muscle memory—the moments when, without thought, my unsoiled left hand has reached for a second serving of daal, or when my knees have gone slack in preparation to reach for an elder’s feet. But when it came to the recovery of my Hindi, a language in which I had never been fluent, it was clear that my ears’ memory was far sharper than my tongue’s. For every word I could speak, I could understand twenty more. Keep reading…
