The time of your life

I wake up to the silence of an early Sunday morning. None of the usual hawking of wares or groans of pregnant milk cows fill the street below our balcony door - now permanently open to allow for as much air movement as possible in the growing heat. I use this blessed silence to my best advantage, going through a quick set of yoga poses before I even get out of bed.
I've learned to accept these small pockets of tranquility as a gift from the universe - just a little something to stave off the insanity of what has got to be the noisiest society I've ever lived in.
My apartment in the middle of downtown Seattle, near a busy fire and medic station, was dreamy compared to this place where the noise seems to start every day at sunup with the sound of laundry being done; a singular heavy smack of something wet attacking stone heralds a new day - smack, rinse, repeat. That smack gives rise to a honk as an autorickshaw comes to life and speeds off - startling a group of lumbering water buffalo, two large adults and two adolescents voice their grievances against the busy machine that sideswipes their casual lope down the road. And then the neighbors are playing Green Day as loud as they can possibly manage, followed by the perplexing choice of Bon Jovi circa 1985. It's as if someone somewhere had pushed a giant 'mute' button on the world around me for that blissful quarter of an hour.

As the city springs back to life I look out the window and stare at my favorite palm tree, the one just outside our house, the only one on our entire street. They've cut the rest down in the mad dash to build over what was probably once nothing more than a field with a little river through it. This is their version of progress. There is no such thing as conservation. I sit and love my little tree and thank it for doing double duty; being gorgeous and windblown while carrying the cable, internet, and electric wires into our house for us. It's stupid to fall in love with a tree, but I have anyway. The tree has it's own life, it's own drama - crashing the dead and falling-away branches through our neighbor's roof during each and every storm; throwing it's coconuts through windows and into the freshly gouged holes in the house next door.
It's silly, maybe, to fixate on a tree as something to be missed once we leave here but the truth is, that tree represents everything I loved about India in the first place.

When I returned to India three years ago after ditching my study abroad program, I was travelling alone. I was absolutely and completely free and unfetted by the rest of the world for the first time. I can still remember sitting in the veloured back seat of a huge white Ambassador (very quintessential to Southern India), with the windows open the breeze in my hair and a million possible experiences on the horizon. My thoughts nicely framed in the endless border of palm tree jungles along the roads. The knowledge that the small amount of money in my pocket at the time was enough to keep me moving, fed and comfortable for at least the next few months felt like all I'd ever needed. It was like medicine, that freedom; and yes, it was the best thing I've ever done for myself - leaving the world behind like that to marvel at palm trees.

I've lived here for quite a long time at this point and have mixed feelings about the leaving we are preparing to do. On the one hand India represents probably the most important era of my adult life thus far. The people, places, and things I've experienced here are absolutely unmatched by any other at any time in my life. But it no longer really feels like I'm even in India anymore. My life here has merged with or turned into something one can only classify as 'everyday'.

This place is such an interesting (sometimes maddening) mix of ancient culture crashing against and trying to mesh with whatever idea of the West has planted itself here. Even in the middle of the city there are women to be found walking down the street with bundles of firewood atop their heads, scavenged from city parks and sidestreets to be carried back home for the day's cooking. They stroll past McDonald's in bare mendhi'd feet, uninterested in the hoardes of India's generation-now gobbling down supersized Maharaja McChickens to the overused beat of Fifty Cent. While I've been here, India has not succeeded in reconciling itself to one direction or the other and seems doomed to continue on in this zig zag path toward the future; piling it's garbage and it's poor in broader and wider mounds than ever before.

In the end it doesn't matter what I think or feel about India. I was a guest, at best. At worst, an intruder; spying on a culture that kept me always on the outside simply for my own inability to find the balance in it's confounded reality.
It is what it is and it's time for us to go. With Nepal on the horizon I've got one foot out the door already anyway.