Welcome to the Land of Enlightenment

With my head hanging out the side of the rickshaw, I saw a wide, tree-lined road, acres and acres of rice paddies, and no one coming the opposite direction. I breathed. It smelled like green plants and rain. Hello, Bodh Gaya. No wonder Buddha attained enlightenment here.

I've just finished a week in Varanasi, possibly one of the darker sides of my experience so far, and am enjoying the serenity of the country setting and sacred space here. Varanasi, with its tangled alleys, filthy river, and aggressive touts, was difficult to appreciate. I chanced to find a friend in a clothing shop who liked discussing politics and another at the city's main ghat who used a very powerful Shiva mantra to bless my family and told me to come sit at his step anytime, but aside from that it was difficult to connect with people. (A ghat is a spot on the Ganges River with steps down to the water.) The smell of smoke from the cremation ghat next to our hotel still clings to my clothes, but that and a few bead necklaces are the only physical reminders left of that rather haunting venture.

In contrast, in Bodh Gaya Liann, Jill, and I walked to the Bodhi tree and had a long conversation with a brown-robed monk from Cambodia and his mother. The principles of Buddhism I am learning here have a beautiful simplicity, and the peace I feel around people who live lives of devotion and sacrifice fills me with optimism. There is something to be said for physical control, mental concentration, quiet speaking, and gentleness.

Isn't It Romantic?

I've left. Anchor up, ship at sea, it's the end of my time in Tamil Nadu. I'm feeling simultaneously free from and nostalgic over the past two and a half months, but that's probably because I just bolted off a 42-hour train ride from the south to the north. Free because the 2nd Class/No AC sleeper compartment had ten years of grit and sweat in its soft plastic seats; nostalgic because the period of time before a mind-numbing event always appears rosy. One thing is certain not to change, though: my illusions of traveling long distance by train. Ever since reading Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express and watching White Christmas, some kind of distorted, romanticized perception of sleeping and eating on trains has followed me. Not anymore! That's not to say I don't wish snowy-white dining cars, cushy personal compartments, and delicately-sliced ham and cheese sandwiches on sliver trays existed; it's just to say that they are impossibilities on 99.9% of all trains worldwide. The three-tiered sleeper compartment my friend Cathlin and I called home for two days held a nun, a pharmacist, his brother-in-law, another guy in greasy blue clothes, and a Muslim couple with two kids. No one spoke English but everyone enjoyed Louis Armstrong on my iPod. We ate, slept, argued, breathed, and stared off into each other's personal space together, and when we pulled into our final stop, we silently pulled out our luggage and dissolved into the flowing veins of the station. I wish I could go back to that moment to say goodbye to the couple's little daughter. She was two, with saucer eyes and skinny knees, and we shared a bunk one sweltering afternoon when her mom needed time to sleep.

The Small Life

I'm not afraid to live a small life anymore. Every morning and evening I watch hordes of people on their way to somewhere, human lives melting together and whirling away outside of railroad stations and bus stands and city streets and temple gates. Almost no one knows anyone else around them – there is so much disconnect between people that I can hardly stand it! The crushing weight of it all used to make me want to rush out and talk with everyone. Now the human masses and little me gazing out the bus window at them have a different interaction. Every day I pick one face and mentally follow them home. I try to imagine their lives, the people with whom they have relationships, what they say and how they feel. Then I wonder about my own life. What comes of its little relationships, activities, passions? Is a life lived always on the move, trying new places and interacting with new people necessarily what I want? What about having permanent neighbors? Life has been rich, but does it have to be “big” to be so? A small life can be deep, and all deep lives start small. I'm learning not to be afraid of doing what I know is the right next step: going home.

What are my needs, really? A room to pray in, a chair to read in, a friend to share thoughts with, a garden to dig in, a phone to call my family on, a job that needs me. And trees and mountains around would be a major plus. I'd like to think that I'm that simple.

Culture Shock

The moment I step on an Indian bus, especially one with arms and shoulders bulging out the windows, I know I'm not paying 5 Rupees for a ride to my destination. I'm paying the equivalent of 15 U.S. cents in order to pass through the entire spectrum of human emotion. My first Indian bus ride was naive euphoria: “I'm really sitting here on this contraption of rusted scrap metal held together by grass-green paint that miraculously moves people from Point A to Point B by guzzling government-subsidized gas – cool!” I still like boarding the bus; there's a touch of suspense as to whether you'll successfully out-elbow the thirteen 4'9” women vying for two available seats. I usually lose. Then I settle into the swaying pose of the standing women: right hand above the head holding the bar, feet firmly planted, eyes glazed over but facing forward. When one is unfortunate enough to be pushed towards the middle of the bus, the appearance of cold alertness aimed at the mass of men smashed up behind you is necessary.

The miracle of Indian buses, aside from the fact that they run, is the bus conductor. Somehow one man manages to worm his way through spaces of maximum human density and know which 3 people out of 100 need to pay. The bus is his domain – the men back off and the women change seats at his command, he balances without support in front of the open door, and your exact change bounces out of his leather bag even when the bus hits potholes. But most importantly he governs who gets off, when, and how.

I experienced a new extreme on the spectrum of human emotion last week. Anger. Passionate anger. But I don't want this word to limit the emotion, because it was a reaction to a violation of the social system of justice as I understood it to exist on the Indian bus. My friend Heidi and I were on a familiar route to Nirmala College, where I do research, when the bus stopped two stops from our destination and everyone got off. Why I do still do not know – the driver probably needed a cup of chai tea. We had already ridden buses for two hours that morning, checked into a roach-infested hotel room, and caught this bus in an attempt to arrive on time to my appointment with a testy nun who does not tolerate tardiness. We were already late. I was not feeling chipper as we began walking. Suddenly our bus conductor was running up behind us and shouting. He had flagged down a passing bus and we boarded while he spoke with the new conductor in Tamil. This had happened to me before – he was telling the new guy, “They've already paid.” The bus pulled out. The new conductor turned to me.
“Two rupees.”
I pointed at my old bus conductor still standing in the dust on the side of the road.
“He told you we already paid. No.”
“Two rupees!”
“I saw you talk to the other bus conductor. We've already paid!”
He smirked and shrugged his shoulders. “Two rupees.” He pushed two wadded up tickets into my fist.
Silence and aversion of the eyes. My stop was twenty seconds away.
“Two rupees!”
Thicker silence. All of the women on the bus were now staring at Heidi and me.
The bus slowed. I was going to get off this bus without being ripped off if only as an act of defiance against everything already going wrong.
“Two rupees!” He grabbed the bars on either side of the steps and placed his body in front of the door.
Was he seriously going to physically retain us?
“You know we already paid! Let me off this bus!” I tried pushing past one clenched arm. It reached out and thrust me up the aisle.
You dirty man, you did not just touch me. The leering advances of every drunk on the night bus could not disgust me as much as that one push. The bus rattled to a stop; I attacked. Two blazing eyes of hatred, two hands on his arm and shoulder, one swift push and...I was stumbling backward as his hands on my shoulders shoved me into the console. Assault! In my mind I had already pushed back; he was sailing down the steps and tumbling into the dirt.

Heidi touched my arm. “Let's go.”
O horrors. What was I doing? What was I about to do?

I unzipped my plastic coin purse. I stood through the humiliation of waiting for change. The doorway was clear and I climbed down the steps. No presence of mind, no fire left in me; to all of this loss, I could only say, “You are a liar!” which he couldn't even understand.

We walked away from the bus stop. We walked through the college gates. Heidi was patting my shoulder and telling me how surprised but proud she was that I had stood up to him. My hands were shaking. All I wanted to do was retreat from the angry nun waiting for me and cry.

No one had said anything on the bus – the driver, the men in the back, the wide-eyed women. I was only a girl and it was only two rupees. But more shameful than that was my complete loss of control. Can I honestly blame culture shock? I've been laughing over this story for over a week now, but yesterday when I boarded a bus and discovered that my arch nemesis was collecting my fare, I shrunk inside. He took my change, I took my ticket, and nothing happened.