I Heart India

There comes a time, in each girl's blog, when she writes about leaving something behind. Relationships, houses, jobs, useless cars, old habits....countries. I've been reading the most incredible book ever, Shantaram, recounting the true story of an Australian criminal who escapes from a high-security prison and ends up living in the Bombay slums and joining the mafia. He says that India may not be the country where love was created, but it is the country where love was perfected. ...

There is something disarmingly innocent and playful about this great country's people. It seems that anytime someone looks at you, they are sifting through all that is malice, guilt, fear and hate, to uncover, probe, tease and expand that shining lotus of a heart that they know you have. In India, your heart is poked, ripped, and smashed. It is resurrected with the food of smiles, it is sculpted with the sweet trills of Tamil. But then sometimes it grows as heavy and as unwieldy as a boulder and there you are, bending over, struggling to wrap your arms around it, lift with your legs not your back until you are again standing straight, pressing that bulk of stone back into the appropriate place in your chest. It is then polished over and over with every sight of a child carrying his baby sibling, a puppy following your footsteps in complete trust of the direction you've chosen, the almond shaped and deep eyes of a plodding cow, the gentle gait of a group of women heading to the village well. Sometimes you feel that you are slapping your heart, trying to revive it from a stupor, and then sometimes you want to wrestle it to its rightful place, so often it seems to have appropriated the position of CEO in your life. And then, maybe it's just the sight of a man standing so perfectly straight, staring into the endless dust and thorns of the Tiruchuli fallow lands, that makes your heart break into pieces so small you think you can't ever find them, that they will be blown away by the one tree that holds station by your cement room. You walk down the trash filled roads, and find in your short trek all those torn heart pieces being glued back together with the stick of sugar rich teas and the calm of incense smoke, pressed and shaped by the hands of the hundreds of people who only just met you but see that heart as you and you as the heart that needs mending. India is a country where you will never lose your heart, but where it will never know such turmoil and transformation, where everyday you walk forward with the full weight and meaning of its pulse, where you can never forget that you have one and where, besides, no one around would give you the breathing room to forget it. Where some mornings you wake up and it seems that the heart is a river that has captured your entire body in its rush to the ocean and you step out onto your porch as the sun pours onto the world and you can't believe you ever thought to leave.