Thaw safely before consumption

The immediate days after I land in India present themselves as days of rapid turmoil and gradual re-adjustment. It begins as soon as the plane lands when for some reason every Indian on the plane is very excited to get off the plane. So much so that they are repeatedly told by exasperated flight attendants to stay in their seats until the plane reaches the gate.

The hurry to get off the plane is well justified, however. In a country of many, being late will always result in getting in back of the line. First, immigration and then comes they baggage claim, each needing you to be first in line, to enable an easier execution.

Since I wasn’t running over people to get to the baggage claim, I ended up getting mine quite late and with fair amounts of struggle. My super low expectations had managed to keep my stress well in check. I always lower them far below normal before I jump on that plane home.

Exiting the Mumbai airport, I inhaled immediately the salty tinsel tasting air of a city that hasn’t slept for a long time. The hired cab driver managed to spot me in time. I followed him through a maze of people to the car and began my 4 hour journey home. I had transitioned quickly from a country of unmatched personal transportation to a country where public transportation is best approached gingerly.

When I was slowly absorbing all the chaos around me as we drove away from madness called Mumbai, I found myself in a twilight zone of weirdness. I was seeing everything and understanding very little. I had no reasons to not process the density of people, the noisiness of the car horns or the incessant swerving on a highway since I had lived through all of this a fair while ago. But in this transition period of just landing I found it all discomforting. This fact was further highlighted when the cab driver stopped at the two hour mark for a tea break at a desolate excuse for a restaurant. The lack of a rest room or for that matter a clean horizontal surface forced me into a hard reset. There, under a starry sky, sharing a cup of tea with a driver who was fascinated by how much money a driver in the United States made, I ended my turmoil and started my gradual re-adjustment in a land that I call home.

Slowly though, the people that I came to see and the food they make me eat comes around to finish that transformation. I am still very much an outsider here but not many would know that from first sight. I understand and speak all the languages required. I nod my head in a very Indian fashion. I maintain a slightly rude tone when talking to strangers and drop all my ‘hi’ and ‘thank you’ unless absolutely required.

Yet, once every so often, I find myself internally flummoxed. I am such an outsider that I find it staggering to see how quickly I take to driving the streets with reckless abandon, until of course, I have to wait endlessly because someone else has the right of way. I eat spicy delicious food without any hesitation from my taste buds only to find that my stomach wasn’t entirely on board with the idea. I venture out in the gorgeous December Indian warmth completely underestimating the Indian sun. I drink endless cups of tea not realizing that my intestines were only used to fat free milk.

My three week jaunts every once a year or so has kept me in touch just enough to understand the score but I fear I don’t understand the intricacies of the game. I am strangely comfortable and comfortably strange at the same time. I am Schrodinger’s cat that is half dead and half alive at the same time. Even when I write this, I am second questioning the point of it. Much like, each time I come back home I wonder what would have happened if I never left in the first place.

Perhaps if I ever come back for longer, I might get over some of this weirdness. It is clear that genealogy of me being Indian and the social economic factors that shaped my early adulthood were honed later in a far different country that I made home. There is distinct of juxtaposition of my new found value system and my old installed Indian-isms. These juxtapositions are fairly distinct in the coldness of the western old/new world but in the warmth of my homeland they only need but a few days to thaw out.

And a thaw in the Nashik Sun during the Michigan winter before the German adventure is exactly what the turmoil doctor ordered.