Is it God, or is it a rock?

“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…

A conversation about mangoes (or, letting go of my linguistic process)

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…