I leave India in less than a month and the realization hasn't seemed to hit me yet. Several fellows in the program have already left yet the reality that I soon will be back home seems just as foreign now as India once was to me. Sometimes I just want time to speed up, but more often than not, I'm wishing it would slow down. It's always funny how quickly time passes, to the extent that I remember saying goodbye to my parents in the airport like it was yesterday. And it is just now that I am really starting to feel the effect India has had on me.
Perhaps the biggest change I have noticed is that to me, India is no longer the foreign or the strange. Sure, we like to make an occasional "oh India" joke but this is out of a fondest for the hectic, pulsating life we lead here. Instead India feels, oddly, like a second home. I say this is odd because India is so different from any place I have known or probably will ever experience again. I have ceased to have those moments where I stand in awe of the fact I am in India because eight months of adjusting have meant everything here now is normal. In fact, I know the bigger adjustment will be going home and not quite being able to articulate this experience to anyone who hasn't lived it.
The funny thing is, if someone asked me if I recommend living in India, I would heistate. I think that no matter where we end up living, even if it is paradise, we never truly value it until we've left. I remember Spain and Mexico with a nostalgia sometimes that I almost feel physically, as if I've lost something. But I also know that while I was there I had plenty of moments where all I wanted to be was back home. And India, for all its intensity and craziness is a place where sometimes one must compartamentalize. I think that I will only really begin to value the experience here in hindsight.
Don't get me wrong, I know this has been the most profound year of my life. But being here, living the day-in and day-out often distracts one from self-reflection. I recently read an article in the New York Times which speaks about "Thin Places," or places where our norm and our equilibrium is shaken to a point where we experience something deeply new and moving. I realize now that Hyderabad and snippets of my experience in India have been exactly that. But I can't appreciate them completely except in retrospect.
But perhaps that's what makes travel and living abroad so powerful. You don't know the effect of it until it's already passed. It's something you want so much to hold on to while you're in the moment but its true value is in what it brings to you after the fact. And this is why once you start, you can't stop. Being abroad is exhausting. It challenges you mentally and physically like little else can and it can test your limits. In the moment, you are so concerned with surviving, with taking it all in, with getting the most of your experience, that you don't realize the most important moment is the one when you get home. The one where you sense a change in perception, in your way of thinking, maybe even in your independence and self-confidence. Yet at the same time, it's addicting.
So this homecoming will most definitely be bittersweet. Full of nostalgia for my two homes. I don't know if I'll return to Hyderabad, but I do know that I will take the relationships, the knowledge, the world view with me wherever I go. It will always be one of my "thin places."
PS- the article link is http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/travel/thin-places-where-we-are-jolted-out-of-old-ways-of-seeing-the-world.html?pagewanted=all%3Fsrc%3Dtp&smid=fb-share
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