Wellness Through Wisdom

My Story - Part 2

(For Part 1, look on the sidebar under Recent Posts. Please note that quotations that are dated and bold are excerpts from my journals.)

“He who mounts a wild elephant goes where the wild elephant goes.” - Randolph Bourne

My wild elephant was India. It led me into a world I didn’t understand and a time I didn’t know existed. I was culture shocked and overwhelmed, but fascinated. We spent the first few days in Delhi. We had eggs and chai and porridge for breakfast and went out into the humid, sticky air. We got a cab to Old Delhi, “the old city”, to meet with a brass dealer my boyfriend had business with. I held a handkerchief over my mouth to keep the black smoke out of my lungs while I watched from the open window as we sped past the Red Fort, the women street sweepers, the beggars, the school kids in a cart. A hundred different horns honked continuously as we wound down roads jammed with rickshaws, cars, scooters, and cows into the heart of the stinky dirty old city. People walked and sat on mats selling vegetables or beetlenut or trail mix under broken neon signs. Outside the half fallen apart industrial buildings, the flower bearers were stringing roses for puja. We continued into the markets past all the saris flowing and women washing clothes in copper pots and men bathing and samosas frying. It was hot and chaotic, but thriving and overflowing with life.

“But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.” - E.M. Forster from A Passage To India

After only a few days, it became apparent to me that any logical, linear thinking I may had developed in western society was completely useless in India. Things operated from a different perspective that didn’t make sense to me. Everything worked in what appeared to be a haphazard, accidental, mysterious fashion. You could easily be frustrated by things you expected to be a certain way that were not. India does not apologize for this. So, frustration is pointless. You are forced to adapt. You are forced to let go of control and just deal with whatever happens. And this process was part of what unravelled me, the other part was the intensely transformational power that India innately holds.

“Well, India is a country of nonsense.” - Mahatma Gandhi

Simultaneously, I was also being led on another journey into my self. Daily I dealt with being touched and grabbed by Hindu men whenever I went out, even in the temples. I was told that they were repressed because they are not allowed to touch the Hindu women unless they are married to them. I saw men holding hands and walking with their arms around each other in the streets. I was told they were starved for physical touch so they got it from each other. I was not sure if this was the case or if they were just more comfortable with being affectionate with each one another than American men are. Either way, I was obviously not Hindu and therefore I was not protected by the rules of the faith.

“Burn all the maps to your body.” - Richard Brautigan

Finding myself in these situations in India with men brought up a lot of experiences from my past that I listed, at the time, in my journal under the title: Invasions Of Space. I thought of Anne Sexton’s poem, “Music Swims Back To Me”, as the memories swam back to me. I wrote in my journal, “Abuse is: creating a dangerous space.”

My boyfriend, who had been to India many times, did not understand what I was going through and I could not express myself very well. Even when I tried it angered him. By mid September, we were in Jodphur, a city in the desert of Rajasthan. He left me to stay with a couple that he knew while he flew to Madras to buy statues of deities. While he was gone, they took me to Luni for a night. We stayed at Fort Chanwa, a breathtaking Maharaj palace carved out of red sandstone in the middle of a small village in the desert.

September 17, 1999: “Past the woman herding water buffalo, past the millet fields and Acacia trees, we found a peaceful paradise.”

I felt spoiled and excited to be given the Maharaj’s bedroom for my room. I laid down on the window bed with red curtains blowing through the room. Outside a true black night began to form and I listened as traditional Rajasthani music rose up into the air. From the window I could see a woman dancing with bracelets up one arm in a blue sari and bare feet. The pool sparkled behind some Bougainvillea vines and above it all small green parrots perched, observing, like I was.

The next day we ate and drank and had massages by the pool with mustard seed oil and water. On the ride back from Luni, we saw a hundred newborn lambs sleeping under a tree. Men in Rajasthani turbans with shepherds’ staffs watched us and came over. They let us touch their wool and told us about the salwas (rugs) they wanted us to buy in the village.

September 18, 1999:

a bowl of water

a fan that blows the surface

and flicks the leaves nearby

she talks about mint jelly

we dream Nepal

and sweets melt back into sugar

women with bricks on their heads in flip flops

cover their faces and walk on

here in the hot dry hands of India

love and business took away kindness

we were not deliberate with each other

and i covered my shoulders

against that cold

Under the added pressure of traveling together, the things that eventually come out in a relationship, such as the truth and expectations, came out sooner than perhaps would have. We began to say things to each other “as a joke” - things that were not funny. He told me that though I was gentle and sweet, I was also an oversensitive baby with a snotty mean streak. The truth hurts. And at the time something made me realize or remember - being an object of someone’s affection still makes you an object.

to be continued…