Traveling with Books hurt my Head

Photo: Taj Mahal at Sunset, Agra

I become absurdly attached to the characters in the books that I read. Even if it’s not meant to be a sad or emotional book, I have a hard time keeping my eyes dry as I close the back cover and say goodbye to people I’ll never meet, people with whom I became intimate with over the course of reading the pages that brought them to life. Some people never re-read books. Call me overly nostalgic but I re-read books all the time in an attempt to meet up with old pals, remind myself of who I was at the time that I was first introduced to that person, a figment of someone else’s imagination, or a recreation of someone else’s friend/lover/enemy/parent.

On December 18^th in the amazingness that is Bombay, an AIF Fellow lent me a book - The Namesake - about a family, the Gangulis. For reasons that exist between the lines of my life, the Gangulis tugged at my heart throughout my time in Bombay, they appropriately accompanied me to the pink city of Jaipur where I attended an American-Indian wedding of an AIF fellow on the 21st, and joined me back at work in Ahmedabad. A week later I left Ahmedabad again on an overnight train to New Delhi, read the final word of The Namesake on the top bunk of a 3-tier AC cabin, wiped my eyes with my green hat purchased at Cliff’s Variety in SF, and fell asleep in the dark blue sleeping bag gifted to me by my parents before we hiked Mount Blanc together in the French Alps. 30 minutes earlier I had said goodnight to my bunkmates, with whom I had exchanged a few thoughts on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto - an event that chipped the spine of my perennial optimism. On December 30^th I paced around the Indira Gandhi International Airport waiting for a flight that carried my greatest friend from San Francisco, to London, to me. Feeling nauseated all morning, 15 minutes before her arrival I sprinted to a trashcan in the corner of the airport waiting room, in front of men who, finally, were not starring at me For No Apparent Reason: this time, at least, I had undigested food flying out of my mouth.

On the evening of December 31^st I was gifted What is the What, by Dave Eggers, a story about Valentino Achak Deng, one of Sudan’s Lost Boys. 5 hours later, the year 2008 was brought in on a New Delhi rooftop, and by 10am the next morning I stepped off the Taj Express in the tourism-destroyed city of Agra in order to see one of the world’s wonders. I left Agra wondering how much longer the Taj (which was certainly surreal) can withstand the city’s pollution, and where the $20 (US dollars) they charge per head goes if not to help preserve the place. The next 15 days were spent traveling around the magical cities of Rajasthan, but following me throughout my travels – in shadows cast by the Taj Mahal, in the reflection of India’s holiest lake in Pushkar, whispering through the wind in the Thar Desert, hiding behind the blue houses and magnificent fort walls in Jodhpur, peering down on me from the tiled rooms of Udaipur’s City Palace, and starring up at me through the carpet looms in a Kachchci craft village – were Valentino Achak Deng, his childhood friends (William K and Moses), his girlfriend (Tabitha), and his mother- whom even I began to long for. I’ve always loved Dave Eggers’ writings, fallen in love with his characters before, but this was different. I can’t yet tell if these people, not characters, were introduced to me at the perfect or least perfect time: I was traveling in some of India’s more touristy cities (where, for every warm heart you meet there are three more, calloused by Life, waiting to swindle you; where for every mind-blowing historical structure you see there are many more squatter settlements and pavement dwellers), I was still feeling great disappointment in the World over Bhutto’s assassination, and I was reading one man’s account of walking elsewhere to escape a civil war turned ongoing genocide, one day finding himself in the US only to experience more challenges, more pain. Overwhelmed is an insufficient word.

So why am I writing all this? I’m not really sure. My observations and experiences over the past month have given me new things to think about but simultaneously turned my brain to oatmeal. In Pushkar I knowingly got cheated out of 25 US dollars by a man claiming to be a Brahma Priest, but three minutes later I told a street child that I couldn’t give her 10 rupees (the equivalent of 25 cents), a pen, a biscuit, or shampoo. In Bombay my cabdriver happily told me he would kill a Muslim, no problem, because “they have dirty blood”; in Kachchh, a local friend was perversely asked how, as a lower caste, he had managed to court 5 American women; and all the while I was battling my own demons and simultaneously reading about the Gangoli’s struggling to mend generational gaps, and about Valentino’s real life, the horrors of which are repeated daily, as I type, in Sudan. Now don’t get me wrong: I had many positive experiences, I really did, in fact many more positive than negative, more beautiful than ugly. The traveler in me had an exhilarating, fulfilling, romantic time, but the intellectual in me had a sobering, confusing, aggravating one. Someday I’ll learn to merge (or better separate?) the two successfully, but right now, thinking of my travels in light of Bhutto and Pakistan, in light of Valentino and Sudan, in light of Gaza, in light of Kenya, in light of the fact that my homeland’s administration is still trying to find reasons to demonize my parents’ homeland, in light of the fact that the democratic candidates are acting like insecure high-school cheerleaders, and in light of other things, the emotions I’m feeling right now are much closer to anger than anything else.

The redeeming parts of all this, however, is that I was traveling with someone who makes me feel safe and calm deep down in the anxious darkness of my growing gut, and, after the storm within began to settle I returned to the Urban Resource Centers to continue working with hardworking, intelligent, committed slum residents who wake up in their respective homes each morning thinking about how to make their own communities a better, safer, more just place. So even though I’m angrier, even though my optimism is slightly numbed, I trust that the idealist in me will be just fine. I know that the Hindu cab driver who thinks his Muslim neighbor has dirty blood may never change, my conversation with him -- his irrational response when I calmly asked if he thinks a Muslim man feels any different about his family than a Hindu man -- made this much clear. But his two sons, the ones he works two jobs for in order to send to private school in Bombay, it’s the minds of his two sons that I’m concerned about. Will they grow up with the same prejudices as their father? It’s very likely. But maybe somewhere along the way, before it’s too late, they’ll meet someone who influences their outlook; that someone is out there, and s/he just needs to find those proverbial lost boys before another generation squanders its energy in unnecessary hatred. That someone needs to find those boys and talk to them. Right. Now.