I am home, I am home, I am home!
India. How to explain India? Colorful and alive, bustling and loud, overwhelming and breathtaking, heartbreaking and beautiful.
Bangalore is a heart, beating to the rhythm of auto rickshaw horns, marketplace haggling, sizzling dosas and the tantalizing aroma of Indian filter coffee decoction, kept alive by a constant blood flow through the arteries: the hum of people bustling through the city.
India is like home in many ways, and I am told that the more you travel the more you see how alike we all are. People commute to work, go to parks and concerts when they have time, listen to music, play sports, think about graduation and the future. They talk bills, politics, to-do lists, weddings, babies, coffee dates with old friends, literature, philosophy, and the best way to get home through afternoon traffic.
I often sat back at a cafe, thumb and forefinger on the rim of my steaming metal coffee cup to watch it all. With the thought: “this is just like home” came the whisper: “but wait, and look a little closer…” It is there that I realized that the familiarity I felt made differences between Bangalore and home, myself and those I encountered, all the more beautiful, for it is the differences that make us unique.
For me, it was the vibrancy of life that set India apart. India’s color breathed color into my veins that I wasn’t aware I had been missing. The women’s saris, skirts and salwars, the marketplace fruits and vegetables, the murals and fabrics that decorated each corner of my vision painted a landscape that hummed. Everywhere I turned there was more color, more sights, more sounds and smells to immerse myself in, and I felt I could dance as the colors wrapped around my body, worked their way into my laughter like silk.
Kolams decorate doorsteps of nearly every house, incense perfumes the air, jasmine flowers are delicately woven into women’s beautiful black hair. Temples thousands of years old adorned daily, gods and deities worshiped with song, dance, celebration. On every block a new fruit or flower vendor sits by their goods, haggling and bartering with customers. Neighbors chat, smile, wave in passing. Young couples huddle on park benches away from prying eyes, whispering and laughing between large leafed tropical plants.
Yet India is a place of many contrasts.
Homeless men, women, children, whole families, entire communities are seen on the outskirts of Bangalore, wandering through the city, on the streets begging. No shoes, dirty and ragged clothes, nothing to eat, a coin or two in their palms. Makeshift shelters for sleeping, dirty drinking water. A new tragedy at every corner, every stop sign, every standing cafe where children tug at your blouse with bare feet and wide eyes, reading foreignness and wealth on your face, in your clothes, in your language like a book. Are these tragedies victims of the caste system? Or simply a broken social system where they are forgotten and tossed aside, too slow for the bustling city around them? Perhaps both?
In India, for every up there is a down, for every forwards a backwards. I often felt on the edge of a terribly deep well, a pit of sadness from which I would never resurface as I witnessed hardship after hardship. The world seemed so filled with pain, so unfair. In contrast, though, I often felt as though I could soar. Kindness and generosity shone abundantly as phenomenal, life-changing individuals shared parts of their worlds with us: a group of foreigners, wide-eyed wondering. The gifts, the treasures we were given were, and still are, precious. I am greatly humbled by these gifts, and am so grateful for the opportunity to meet such beautiful people.
It is not enough to say that we are all the same, but certainly something essential is lacking by saying that we are all different. There seems to be a sweet spot in between where we truly reside, for it is the similarity between us that ties us into a certain unified whole, a sort of holistic humanity, but it is our differences that make us unique.
Chloe Sismour will be starting her third year at UW and is pursuing a BFA in 3D4M. She studied abroad in Bangalore, India during the summer of 2015.
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