Day 25

It's day twenty five...

… We are half way through our journey.

Half way from where we left, and half way to where we are going to be…

Allie and I caught a public rickshaw today from Bedlah, the neighborhood where we live, to Hathipole. I was squeezed in between the window and an old Indian woman who was holding another woman's kid in her lap so that there would be room for the old man who got on at stop two. Allie was seated across from me, similarly squished. Staring out the window as India passed me by, I started to notice how little I noticed anymore. The colors, the smells… the stares that seemed so foreign to me that first night in Delhi… now so familiar, so natural and expected.

In Hathipole, a celebration was being held and Jagdesh Temple. Floats baring idols crowded the streets with loud music with large groups of dancers following close behind. Camels, with their usual annoyed glare, carried banners and men in decorative robes. Flowers were being shot out of cannons. Sinchronized gun shots were echoing off the tiny shops… And then, in the middle of the street that is barely big enough to fit a car through, an elephant walked. I swear the music seemed to get louder in that instant I noticed it wasn't a figment of my imagination. She was painted in purples and greens and walking through the parade just as easily as any human would. I grabbed Allies arm, "Elephant.. Elephant", racing to get my camera out before it passed. I went to click the picture and on the screen pops a little message…. "No Memory Card".

Of course.

My memory card WOULD not be in my camera when an elephant, the one thing I have been dying to see since I got to India, walked two feet in front of us. I was so angry with myself that I was almost on the verge of tears. I couldn't even enjoy the parade going on around us without finding something I wished I could take a picture of. Then we arrived at the hub of the parade, Jagdesh Temple. I had never seen so many white people in one area of India before. Every one of them was huddled next to another white person on the outskirts of this Holy celebration and every hand held a camera. In that moment, I was actually glad I wasn't one of those funky hat wearing people clicking away at their camera from a distance. I was right at the center, as any other Indian would be, enjoying the parade through the lens of my own eyes. As Allie and I weaved our way through the crowd, an Indian school boy dipped his finger in a red flower petal paste and dotted our foreheads. I was witnessing the parade as it happened. I was listening to the actual music, feeling the atmosphere, and as angry as I was, i had seen the elephant, painted up and beautiful. Those things would forever be captured in the snapshots of my memory.

This is just another day, another incredibly colorful, day in India and I have come to find that India is now just as much a part of me as I am part of it.

There is no meat, and it takes half an hour to get anywhere. I can't understand half the things people say and they can't understand me. The water is bad. The heat is exhausting. There are flies EVERYWHERE. The electricity goes out on a daily basis. Our beds are a hard word plank. There is a cest pool outside our house… horns and donkeys and howling dogs waking us up all night … and this is what it is like every day for everyone… little kids wave from twenty feet away… mothers and grandmothers smile at you… old men laugh at you…Everyone wants to talk to you. Shopkeepers offer you tea…..people respect their bodies enough to cover it up and strangers look out for each other. By our standards, this is a difficult way to live, but lose the standards, and it is just a way to live.

It's day twenty five…

and this is where I live…

In India

With Allie and Ariana….and 1.18 Billion other people.

I guess that's the thing about being homesick.

Once you get over the sick, all that is left is the home.