No country for old me

After the long flight home, my mind is unusually buzzing with thoughts. As soon as I step of the plane on to my homeland, my vision is overloaded with information. I observe the similarity and the irregularity of my surroundings. Throughout the small walk to the baggage claim, through immigrations and into the taxi waiting for to take me home, I am vulnerable to observations. As my taxi zips past through suburbs of Mumbai in search of the highway to Nashik, I start comparing notes to the last time. I am thirsty, but my mind is drowning.

In the last ten years, I have re-returned home nine times. Despite the joy, the returns have become routine. Except there is always a small delta between the feelings I gather in the first few hours that I am back in India. The first time I returned from the states, I smelled Mumbai when the plane was still in the air. Last time I came back, I hardly noticed it at all. And this time, I felt like I never left.

Suddenly, after ten years of leaving this land behind, I am facing myself in a weird neutrality zone when it comes to seeing it again. I drove past the crowds, smells, filth and stray dogs with hardly a reaction or acknowledgment. Cars on the road came terrifying close to our taxi and I did not flinch at all. My taxi driver juggled with two cell phones and a manual transmission while dealing with wayward oncoming traffic and I was least concerned for his safety or mine. At a time when I should be reacting to these differences I found myself desensitized. I wasn’t numb. I saw everything as normal. In fact, I even wondered why the cars weren’t honking as much!

Why am I desensitized? I postulate it could be the incessant travel spree that I have been on the last two years. Before I moved to Germany my comparison existed between the mid-west Michigan and Nashik. Ever since I have been Germany, I have been visiting countries like they are supermarket stores. Over last two years, I have collected an assortment of experiences in my shopping cart. This myriad of memories almost seems to soften the newer observations.    

There is filth at the Stuttgart Bahnhof on a Sunday morning after drunken revelries the night before. I saw stray dogs in Peru and perhaps possibly in Croatia. Traffic was not entirely regulated in deep reaches of Italy. Old men and women sit and chat on possibly every corner of every country. I can read text in most countries but can’t understand most of it. There are crowds in all big city centers and the lack of politeness that comes with it. The electrical fittings in Ireland seemed just as flimsy as the ones in India. And some of the finest foods in Japan and Italy are eaten with hands. The more I travel the more similarities I see amongst the differences. The scale is not comparable but the categories and the contents certainly are.

If you are looking to travel to India to be amazed I suggest you stop all your surrounding travel immediately. Don’t come to India until… you do. Only then will it smack you in the face like it used to the first few times I re-visited, despite the fact I grew up here.

Superficially, there is plenty different here but I can’t see it anymore. And perhaps, it isn’t a bad thing.

This level of neutrality is allowing me rediscover a country that I had for a long time only bothered to see the obvious. I am excited to dig deeper; rediscover its old secrets and emotions and to finally comprehend not a home that I left behind but rather a country that I return to.