India: an exercise of certainties
/Chapter 1: Admitted ignorance is still ignorance
It’s 4:43 a.m. At least that’s what my watch says. I’m not sure what time zone it’s set to at this point but I lay, as reclined as my coach seat will allow, wide awake. Counting my blinks as I gaze up at the artificial stars twinkling white and blue across the ceiling of Emirates flight 203. In spite of my eye cover and neck pillow, I was stirred moments earlier as we started to cross the Baltic Sea. The flight attendant offered me a late-night snack. It was pizza tonight, but the droning dull tone she took with her description led me to believe it was probably pizza every night. With each bite, I reevaluated — what just happened?
The last 15 days shook every certainty I’d had about myself, my career path, and travel at large. I had been wrong about so much. Up to this moment, five inflight movies had done nothing to muffle the orchestra in my head. This microwaved, soap bar-sized cheese pizza was the best band-aid available to dampen the symphony behind my sleepless eyes during the 18-hour haul from Delhi to JFK.
Weeks prior on December 31st, I soberly and uncharacteristically ducked out of New Year’s celebrations to pack my bags and begin the staring contest with my alarm clock — set for 3 AM. With my duffel bag zipper closed and Ryan Seacrest hours away from ringing in 2019, I sprawled in bed mentally preparing for what lay ahead. I knew what a 26-hour travel day felt like and what two weeks overseas felt like. During my previous life as a wandering photographer situations akin to this had become commonplace.
Historically, as a part of smaller crews, I’d grown accustomed to fluid, untethered movement through the back alleys of markets and bazaars; but that efficiency would be in short supply with a crew this large. This trip I would be traveling with a group of 17: a collection of professors and classmates I’d been in school with for the last year as part of Monmouth University’s master’s level counseling program. Collectively we would be venturing to India as part of a class entitled “Transformational Travel,” where we would be working with an orphanage, called One Life to Love, just outside of Delhi; the only orphanage in the region catering to children with mental health needs.
The crew I would be venturing there with ranged in age from 20 to 60+ and had a breadth of travel experience that spanned from Diamond Elite Global Entry member to the crisp new passport types. This go-round the unfortunate truth was that my desire to meander through questionable neighborhoods and back alleys would most likely be met with a chaperone-assisted look at the university code of conduct.
Quite tenaciously, I also had no interest in treating the mental health needs of anyone under 20. My short tenure in graduate school for counseling did not, by design, include kids. I had nothing against youngsters, but I wanted to work with people who inspired me. Kids seemed — too playful. Plus, the kids I knew back home didn’t seem particularly fond of me. I was vaguely offended by that. But to be provided an opportunity to travel and hone my newfound craft?
This, I thought, as the 2018 class list scrolled across my laptop screen, was too perfect. Curmudgeonly specific group size preferences and career ideals aside, I had gotten into the counseling field to explore the use of travel as a therapeutic modality. If I couldn’t curb my ego for 15 days, and read the India shaped writing on the wall I had much bigger concerns.
From the outset, however, I unfairly placed myself in a more worldly and disillusioned camp than the rest of the class. Being a bit older than my peers I didn’t have a family back home in the sense that the other students did, and I had traveled enough to approach the physically demanding aspects of this venture with ease. The world has already transformed me, I thought, and I touted that self-appointed badge pompously.
In hindsight, it’s pretty damn clear that that front was a thinly vailed defense. At my core, I was worried — operating from a place of self-preservation more than anything. As much as I thought I knew, there was a lot about this trip that was completely and utterly foreign. I had never been to India, a country that is often preceded by its patriarchal dominance and poverty, I had never traveled with a group of counselors, and above all, I had never worked with kids — and not just any kids, orphans.
After losing both parents to cancer within a 20-year span, the term “orphan” became much more onerous. It was a word that quickly shifted from being some nondescript red-headed girl tap-dancing on stage to a grace-less label for my own existence — one that admittedly included much less tap-dancing. What started off as an opportunity to work with kids who lived in a world completely dissimilar to my own suddenly felt much more menacing and forcefully reflective.
As the months leading up to our departure ticked away, I thought about my intentions going into this class and the concerns I would be forced to confront. If travel was a transformational and therapeutic modality, like I seemed so sure of, what about it made that true? And what did I have to gain by going on this trip? Perhaps, like Camus described, travel was given inherent value because of fear: the fear we overcome while leaving the security blanket of home, sure, but also the fear we confront once out there.
As our crew of 15 students and 2 professors boarded the plane on New Year’s Day, our sleep-deprived and over-caffeinated nerves rattled as we collectively braced for the weeks ahead. Brushing over our schedules on the flight east, it became abundantly clear that this trip was designed to push us, break us even. Sleep would be a valued commodity, and our psychological fortitude would be tested given the emotional weight of almost every item on the itinerary. The idea was that, with our days packed full of near-constant travel, work, and exploration, we would eventually snap, providing each of us with an opportunity to rebuild — an opportunity to transform.
Ideally, we would rebuild in a more positive, empathic way; but this approach ran the inherent risk of flying home as shattered spitefull shades of our former selves. I reminded myself over a 4th and 5th cup of burnt airplane coffee that if that scenario were to happen, it would have value. I knew that transformation often necessitates travail and if nothing else, suffering leads to great stories.
As our wheels touched down at Indira Gandhi International Airport, we boarded a bus and embarked through what would become our temporary hometown. Delhi passed in a blur through the dusty travel-worn bus windows. Seeing a city for the first time at night — especially when in the perfect travel-weary drunk of cheap coffee and sleeplessness — it’s painted in a dream-like romance that can’t be adequately expressed in Youtube travel videos or wanderlust blogs. It’s like discovering a new color. You find yourself experiencing the smells of cardamom and masala in ways you never had before. The colors and sounds of humanity only amplify your overstimulated, travel-weary senses. As you rest your head on the bus window, your brain surrenders to the newness of it all and you’re left in a slack-jawed stupor, almost drooling on the cold plexiglas pane that separates you from the symphonic sensory dance of it all.
It’s been said time and again that as one embraces travel as a fixture in their lives their gaze eventually shifts inward. The waterfalls, temples, and street-food become a bit less bewildering — notable brush strokes on a rotating canvas — while the human experiences and interactions inevitably lead to an exploration of self. This patina of self-regard becomes addictive, ostensibly serving as an opportunity to strip away the bullshit and tedium of daily scheduled life leaving only the core of who we are. All the while the stagnation of home becomes mind-numbing once we return and the allure of the next trip rings on ad infinitum. These are the thoughts at the tail end of a 30 hour travel day.
As we shuffled to the bus the next morning, hungover on jet lag and smelling of hotel shampoo, I found myself consumed with that self-regard. We were driving to One Life to Love for the first time, and as we rolled forward through the dense early fog and confusion of Delhi’s morning commute, I listened to the bleeding-hearted counseling students, my cohort, play the Delhi street version of farm animal “I spy” through the bus windows. The essays, presentations, and group discussions of this past semester that led up to this moment played on in my head.
I thought about the fundraising and the tens of thousands of dollars we collectively raised for kids by selling art, leading goat yoga classes, and hosting dinners. What had that effort done to all of us? We worked overtime as already full-time employed grad students all for kids who could potentially have no interest in interacting with us. Awkwardly staring across a cold playroom as we fumbled through overcomplicated lesson plans that were prepared months earlier. After all, we were just a blip in their already over-complicated lives. Transient Americans attempting to make ourselves sleep a little more soundly at the end of the day. It seemed presumptuous of us to assume that our welcome would be anything other than forced.
My thoughts were cut short, not by my peers’ collective upset over the nearby cow chomping away on a plastic bag, but by the high-pitched scratching of a low-hanging tree dragging along the rooftop of our bus. We had arrived at the neighborhood closest to the orphanage but were told the bus couldn’t get any closer. We’d have to walk the remaining 50-yard stretch to the front gate.
As we began to walk, a palpable tension hung in the air. Dust was kicked up as some hurried along in anticipation, while others, like myself, pensively hung back. Navigating through the shroud of soot, awash with meditative apprehension. What if the kids were shy? What if we could only provide for them financially? Were we trained for this? As we turned the corner and entered the open gate the neurotic introspection settled with the dust of the city streets. The children, with glowing smiles and matching tracksuits, handed out their gifts of hand-drawn signs and flower necklaces.
We were led inside to introduce ourselves and as most of us were still wiping tears from our eyes, the house mothers paired each of us with one of the children. I introduced myself to Mohini, a six-year-old girl in the home’s daycare program.
Mohini and I spent the next few hours coloring and playing with my camera. Being coy about my standing with the 15 and under crowd I found myself doing whatever I could to make a connection. Fumbling with colors and overcomplicating the simplicity of the situation, all the while Mohini seemed perfectly content. Exploring her box of crayons thoughtfully.
She would apply just the right shade of blue to the birds in her drawing while laughing at my inability to stay inside the lines or choose the right skin tone for the characters in her masterpiece. Just as I was beginning to hit my stride one of the house moms began to play some Bollywood music, much to Mohini’s delight. As she cheerfully jumped up to dance with the other children, I suddenly and without explanation felt… like a dad. I was proud of the way she danced with such poise — hell, I was inspired.
I couldn’t help but think about the life Mohini had ahead of her, the challenges she would inevitably face, and the uphill, seemingly Sisyphean, task of growing up in a world that doesn’t entirely support or appreciate her. This is India after all. A place that only recently closed the constitutional loophole that lowered the age of consent to 15 if the girl was married. I thought about who she would become in this age of fighting tooth and nail for inches on the battlefield of women’s rights and how I, who only knew her for a few hours, had no control over how she would fair on that field. But after all, she’d endured already, she danced. She laughed, learned new dance moves, and soaked up every drop of fun his moment had in it.
She wasn’t lost with concern for the future — or feelings toward the past. She was here, in this room with American strangers and a group of her friends and care-takers, laughing.
So I danced. I took this six-year-old girl’s lead and stepped out of my own head, if only for a moment. Looking around the room, everyone was howling in laughter with unapologetic disregard for the circumstances that brought us all together. The lesson plans we typed leading to this day, the diagnostics we mesmerized, the lectures and presentations — none of it made it out onto that dance floor that day. The only thing that mattered was the smile on Mohini’s face as she put my toe shuffling to shame in her blue and grey tracksuit.
I may not, in the grand scheme, be able to contribute to who she’ll inevitably become or even who she was in that moment but I could make her smile, and that left me fulfilled. laying to rest any existential malaise for the simple exchange of knowing a child was momentarily okay.
On the bus ride back to our hotel I couldn’t help but wrestle with a new definition of what “helping” looked like. Maybe it’s all circumstantial in the grand scheme but what does healing then look like? Is the return of a long lost smile a step in the right direction if the weight of it can’t be captured in a counselors session notes? In her life up until her days at the orphanage, did Mohini really have many opportunities to simply be a child? Like so many children, emerging adults or adult children of alcoholics — what if play and compassion were all that was needed to open much bigger therapeutic doors? Are diagnostic codes really important if a client just needs to color and dance for a few worry-free hours a week?
That orphanage, One life to Love, specifically picks up where more clinical approaches would fall flat. They provide safety, meals, and activities to a collection of individuals who couldn’t possibly hope for any of those things in a not so distant past. A population who could now not only rejoice in the comfort of a roof over their heads and an occasional dance or meal — but depend on it.
Chapter 2: Trust falling
We had just begun to wrap our heads around the goings-on of the orphanage while our itinerary beckoned us to explore more of this staggeringly elaborate country. In the days that followed, we drove to the Wagah border of Pakistan to witness a flag-lowering ceremony.
As we walked hurriedly through the crowd toward the stadium, Yogesh, our fixer and guide for the trip from Indspire tours, warned us that there had been attacks recently. He uttered in stride, “If someone gives you orders, that is not a drill.” He paused and looked back to ensure he had our full attention before continuing. “Okay, grab your passports. Let’s go.”
The flag-lowering ceremony lived up to the description Yogesh gave as a “testosterone-fueled cock-fight,” but it instilled a sense of solidarity that I hadn’t really expected. I am not an Indian national, nor do I have any stake in the conflict the country continues to wage with Pakistan. The border dispute in Kashmir is not one I fully understand; and given everything I’d heard about India’s rape culture and caste system, I felt I still had a lot of questions that needed answers before I put my stock in their camp.
The one word labels of “poverty” and “patriarchy” I had distilled this country down to were crowded with dictionaries worth of other words. “You guys tend to think we’re just rape and temples,” Yogesh would later poke fun at my naivate, “there’s so much more to India than that.”
As the ceremony began, the gate to Pakistan opened and the drums unified our collective cheers. I found myself arm in arm with the crowd of thousands bracing for whatever the Pakistani side was about to let loose. Whatever comes through that gate, I thought in that moment, India…nay, we…have got this.
The depth and brilliance of India was becoming clear. The one word labels of “poverty” and “patriarchy” I had distilled this country down to were crowded with dictionaries worth of other words. “You guys tend to think we’re just rape and temples,” Yogesh would later poke fun at my naivate, “there’s so much more to India than that.”
What you read in the news and what makes it to your watercooler banter is often much more intricate of a problem than originally perceived. The staggering poor population and mistreatment of women were certainly relevant topics, now more than ever, but it seemed with each hour in this stunningly complex place, another label was tacked on, another stamp was added. Stepping foot in that place may not always provide you with answers but it will certainly complicate the preconceived notions you boarded the plane with. At this point, I stopped being so sure that everyone around me was a rapist fulfilling karmic dogma, I was just sure that they were passionately in support of their home country.
As I began to relinquish so many premeditated perceptions I began to lay-down the control I thought I had over this journey. I found myself surrendering ignorance in open-hearted acceptance of the chaotic transformative itinerary that lie ahead. As my emotional walls began to crack our bus rolled through an entanglement of dirt roads leading to Amity University.
Chapter 3: Be Like Rogers
We were invited to Amity University to contribute to some research their counseling program was conducting in the field of optimism. After completing the provided surveys and questions we introduced ourselves, learned more about their research, and facilitated a discussion based on our hopes and aspirations for the counseling field. Enjoyable, I thought, but a far cry from transformational.
We were then escorted to the University grounds where we were motioned to walk a meditation labyrinth. This show of partnership lent, somehow, to the field of optimism. Standard procedure it seemed for all visiting scholars. I positioned myself last in line and prepared for what I expected to be a seemingly mundane 15-minute walk in a circle. As the line shortened and I watched my fellow classmates walk lazily in line, one of the Amity psychology professors approached me.
“You seem very observant,” she remarked as I furtively attempted to navigate her tone. “I can tell by the way you carry yourself that you’ve survived some great pain but continue to carry a light inside you that the world needs to see.” I had no idea I wore my photography profession or orphan status that overtly, though somehow she had me figured out.
I looked to my professors, then back to the woman. “Have you talked with anyone about each of us?” I asked, hoping she’d done some research or facebook stalking before we arrived. Quietly shaking her head no I felt her gaze effortlessly peel back my emotional walls like a wilted discount onion.
Admittedly, as much as I wanted to take stock in her warmth, I remained suspicious — as any New Jersey native would. With each layer pulled away, I fought to fortify my walls further. She had me cornered and she knew it. I was next in line for the labyrinth when she setup for her knockout, “In fact, when you entered the room earlier today I thought to myself, ‘Oh, how nice, Carl Rogers is back.’” My nerves turned to putty and the walls crumbled. She delivered her Coup De Grâce, “you’ll do great things in this field, my friend” before giving me a hug and wishing me luck on my walk through the labyrinth.
Her comments raced through my brain as I attempted to pace the 30-foot circle at a socially acceptable pace. In a few short seconds, she had shown me more sincerity, more heart, more affection than I ever thought I deserved from any stranger. I attempted to gather my thoughts and reflect as my pace slowed.
I thought back on my years of therapy coping with loss; talking with counselors about how my self-esteem is constantly conflicting with the fact that the child in me believes I was left behind. Rationally, I know that my mom, my caregiver, had no control over the cancer that crippled her body. But the seven-year-old inside of me is still at odds with the feeling that mom simply left, as if it was a choice. The person I depended on to protect me couldn’t protect herself.
Further still, my father, my personal homefront superhero, was inevitably taken as well. Not by choice or for lack of fighting his disease, but taken nonetheless by cancer, by the world — by fate. I walked the labyrinth and reflected on those years caught in a feedback loop of questioning my self-worth and love-ability, a history of anguish that this woman felt the urge to tell me she saw clear as day and knew I was strong enough to overcome. When I reached the end of the walk, I paused, trying to make sense of everything that had just flowed through me. An all-consuming thought took hold.
I’m enough.
Tears soon followed in no short supply. A simple two-word revelation. I’m enough. The thought expanded as the day carried on: I’m enough to stand alone. I’m enough to deserve a seat at the table. I’m enough to change the world. I’m not tricking anyone into thinking I belong here — I deserve to be here. All of it, in varying degrees of urgency, felt both beautifully empowering and paralyzing in scope.
There I was, a 30-year-old who, frankly, thought he was living on borrowed time, looking at my own existence through a new lens, as something other than a countdown. In that moment, life was no longer carrying some enigmatic expiration date; it was presenting infinite opportunity. You’re still here, I thought, so what are you going to do with that?
I no longer felt a need to force concern with the present, but rather a drive to become a presence in the moments I existed. I realized then that being a vessel for other’s stories and telling them as I had for years before as a travel journalist, was not the same as genuinely hearing those stories. I wanted to experience the world around me through those stories and sit in their emotive resonance.
The trip broke me, and at the least likely of locations. The most seemingly innocuous bullet point on our itinerary — a university visit. The focus then turned to transformation. How would I rebuild? With days ahead and thousands of miles still to travel, where would I end up? I realized that an opportunity to process was intentionally left out of the itinerary.
Emotional wounds were expectedly torn open for each of us at our own place and time, but they were insistently kept raw. Our freshly ruptured psyches provided an opportunity to part with long-held baggage. But as we attempted to part with that baggage in sincere fashion, potentially keeping a vestige of it for ourselves, the group of traveling classmates and professors always sat idly by. Encouraging and enticing us to continue growing into the new, rather then festering in what we knew then didn’t serve us.
Chapter 4: Certainty, a growth suppressant
Early the next morning, we found ourselves on a plane headed to Varanasi, a place famed for its conflicting dualities. On one hand, past travelers rave about its history and deep-seated religious significance, on the other, stories of rotting human flesh in the river next to children splashing away a summer’s afternoon were not uncommon.
According to Yogesh, this was all changing. The ex-tea seller turned Prime Minister has placed Varanasi on his list of priorities along with the River Ganges. Cleaning up this town and the river that flowed through it was a running point he got elected on and once in office, the man reportedly took up a broom himself to actively clean a set of steps and alleyways lining the banks of the river.
Unbeknownst to us, we would be partaking in the Aarti Ceremony, a nightly religious celebration in which the River Ganges is put to sleep. A river whose cleanliness was a surprise to us all. As we gathered our bags at the hotel, Yogesh instructed us to meet him at the shores of the river where a boat would be waiting.
As we walked we passed small religious ceremonies and children playing badminton before reaching the river. As we found Yogesh standing on the solid earth banks of the ancestral water a warm breeze blew through the city behind us carried on the rays of a tangerine orange sun as it sat nestled on the horizon. One by one we were instructed to board a wooden vessel beside him as our 17 year old boat captain, named Sky — “like up there,” he would later tell us as he pointed up— and his first-mate pushed us off of the river’s shore.
The two steered on as our engine chugged away softly in a hypnotizing sputter. While we all acclimated to our new surroundings with admirational tranquility, Sky pointed out the nightly goings-on of the city and nearby funeral pyres that had been burning for thousands of years. Perhaps it was our communal exhaustion returning, but it seemed to me that the river commanded the revenant stillness that fell over our boat.
It demanded silence from a group who up until hours before we’re still in the grips of a heated farm animal “eye-spy” free for all. Only a handful of words were spoken by any of us over the next few hours.
As our boat neared the ceremony site, the chill of the night swept in as the last rays of the day disappeared beyond the horizon. Other boats soon began gathering around us to face the shore. Time slowed. I can’t begin to guess how long we were there or how long the ceremony went on for; in fact, looking back it was almost psychedelic in that way. A deep hum of the holy men’s chanting rose from the commotion of the city surrounding it. The ethereal croon echoed out over the water occasionally ignited by high pitched chimes from distant bells. We sat, entranced. One by one we seemed to allow the radiant tones to flow through every cell of our being.
As the chanting and chiming washed over us, it felt as though our emotions were tethered to nothing. I felt free, as if for the first time in years. That lightness of being seemed to collectively permeate through the crowd of thousands. Dancing from boat to boat until finally reaching shore and spreading through the cities streets. Grievances were let go and concerns with the future laid to rest. Presence no longer seemed like a labored task, but an accepted and non-negotiable state of existence. Maybe we were tripping; or perhaps it was a cocktail of exhaustion, emotional elegance, and revitalized splendor.
I found myself captivated by a candle floating towards me, one of hundreds that people had set adrift as part of the ceremony. My fixation was interrupted by a quiet sniffle in the seat next to me, as I turned to survey the boat I saw most of our group of 17; sobbing. Some, like me, were mesmerized by the scene around them, while others sat with closed eyes. Their faces looked at peace for what seemed like the first time in decades.
I glanced through the window at the first rays of the early morning glow as it filtered through the clouds hovering above the Atlantic — the flight attendants were making their rounds with breakfast. The soap bar-sized pizza was long gone, and it seemed that my empty plastic tray had been unobtrusively collected at some point during the night while I was lost in thought. As the sun inched slowly above the horizon; I couldn’t help but think back to the sunrise over the River Ganges the day after the Aarti Ceremony and our last afternoon at the orphanage in Delhi.
Images of the vibrant green grass in the labyrinth and the painted faces in the crowd of the flag lowering ceremony splashed across my travel-weary mind. Airplane pizza be damned, I could still taste the complexity and brightness of each dish of golgappa and smell the vitality and calm of each temple we visited now enmeshed in the fiber of my clothes.
Camus may have been right when he said that travel is valuable because of fear, but there is much more to that thought. As he would later go on to describe, the fear that travel evolks also forces us to return to ourselves, and that commands us to surrender who we think we are.
To stay at home, is to perpetuate complacency with what we’ve found to be agreeable. While to walk into the unknown we strip away the concerns that typically consume our day-to-day, the comfort in anguish that we find — after telling ourselves for years that we are simply being productive.
But that productivity comes at a cost, our day to day requires routine and that routine necessitates certainty. The miles we venture forces that certainty under the microscope. Looking back, as I sat transfixed on the pyres dancing alluringly over the celestial blanket of floating candles drifting along the Ganges, I was certain of nothing — and for the first time, that thought didn’t scare me.
I was left reveling in the endless possibilities of who I could become with the understanding that I’m still here and that I am enough. I left a large part of myself behind in India over the course of the past 15 days; I just never imagined that shedding those well-worn layers could make me feel more whole than ever before.
