I returned to India at the end of April to start a year-long subcontinental odyssey, focused mainly on a ten-month stint at a tiny town in Southern India known as Wellington. (I lived in Chennai and Ooty in Southern India for five years in the mid-1990s. Until last month, it had been probably ten years since I had stepped foot in India.) Upon arrival in Delhi, my first impressions were that India has indeed transformed - an ultra-modern (अधुनिकतम) airport, orderly, clean streets, Indian women wearing shorts, no cows on the roadside...? What a contrast to that hot humid night in October 1993 when my parents and I arrived at the Chennai airport, attracting a crowd of interested onlookers, and then we saw our first roadside cows on that death-defying drive to our hotel! In fact, I had to fly to Kathmandu a week later just to get my first glimpse of any animals, let alone cows! Indeed, Delhi has its modern parts, and I spent my first week in India in the diplomatic enclave with its wide boulevards and roundabouts, visiting markets where I could literally get anything I forgot to bring from home and where I found prices to be on par with (and occasionally higher than) US prices. This was not the India I remembered!
Fast-forward three weeks and I have now arrived in Wellington. I am pleased to report that this corner of India has retained much of its idyllic charm. Cows aplenty (my first clue!), greenery everywhere, and the more familiar narrow, curving roads which encourage drivers to honk as they advance so as to avoid an accident. Ahhh...I've arrived!
I don't see this experience as purely an exercise in nostalgia, but it is nice to know that there is something of the familiar in my surroundings. This morning, I had a flashback to high school, where monkeys routinely camped out on the rooftops of our school buildings and occasionally chased students around. This time around, a family of monkeys had busted open my trash can in the front yard and found six-month-old tortilla chips that they were then feasting on. My driver kindly chased them away after warning me never to leave the screen doors unlocked as monkeys would take it as an invitation to stop by for tea.
