Ode to the commute

It's hard to believe, but I've got less than two weeks left in Pune. Next Wednesday I fly out to Delhi for a few days in a cheap hotel in Paharganj, to be spent visiting a couple of NGOs and writing essays that will somehow convince my college to give me a whole lot of money so that I can spend the summer in Jerusalem, learning Hebrew and studying Torah, even though such subjects have nothing to do with my academic career thus far. All this while recovering from ayurvedic panchakarma, which starts in earnest on Sunday. (You don't want to know the gory details. Trust me.)

I'll be back in Pune during the coming months, that's for sure -- all the company in Delhi, where I expect to be working for at least February/March/April, won't compare to my beautiful friends and teachers here -- but in the past week I've been thinking about just what it is I've learned and loved in the past three months.

I turn to little things. The daily wait at the corner of Karve Road, a gringa amidst groggy science-and-technology-college students, all of us standing around aimlessly in the early morning smoke and fog. The (now chilly) ride to school, discussing little things with J in the rickshaw, sometimes accompanied by various members of our rickshaw driver's family. We drive through this great slum area: just full of kids running around, bathing, eating, chasing after the goats. At the end of it await M and M, my teachers, full of eager "suprabhatam"-s ("good morning") and winking complaints about what lousy students we are. Ten minutes behind schedule we start class, and from then on, it's four hours of intensive Sanskrit. But all this I've said before, so I'll move on to anothe great moment in the day, which is when I walk home from school, picking my way through the crowds of elementary school kids on the street where I live. Three schools, one lane, and a whole lot of hectic recess. It's great. They all wear elaborate uniforms and sport colorful backpacks, jaunty hairstyles. They run around chasing after each other and waking up rickshaw drivers from their early afternoon naps in the backs of their three-wheelers.

And I love the evenings, too, which find M, G, S, and me all at home in one overlapping moment, preparing a bazillion things in the kitchen at once and engaging in impromptu Hindi lessons. We smile, sigh, get frustrated together: all over "India" (spoken with eyes wide and exaggerated vowels), this mythical and mysterious place that we spend all our energy trying to dissect and figure out, for ourselves and for each other. "That's India," we advise, knowing that none of us really knows, or will ever know, India. Whatever that is.

We trade "sweetie"-s and sympathetic "oh no!"-s, responding to each other's war stories in a continuous flow of sharing the miracle that we're all here, now, in India. Each of us came here for truly different reasons, and we're sheltered here (we help shelter each other) from what's Out There. But in the end I believe that no matter how much we exoticize, criticize, [insert verb] it -- Eddy hisses a sigh somewhere -- there are moments in every day when we are truly here and unseparated from India. Whatever that is. Those moments turn into stories funny and sad and objective, but once they were flesh-and-blood stories; once we were really out there in India, living our lives.

I guess that's why, at the end of these few months in Pune, it's the daily trips to and from school that stick with me. I feel a lightness in my step when I walk those walks, some sloka or stotra or other undoubtedly playing on repeat in my head, forgetting for several moments at a time that I'm not actually from around these parts. And when I remember what I've forgotten, I feel proud, because for less than a minute, India was as good as home for me.