"This is not like any other place. This is India. Everyone who comes here falls in love – most of us fall in love many times over. And the Indians, they love most of all... There is nothing strange about this... It happens often, and easily, for the Indians. That is how they manage to live together, a billion of them, in reasonable peace. They are not perfect, of course. They know how to fight and lie and cheat each other, and all the things that all of us do. But more than any other people in the world, the Indians know how to love one another."
Very often while reading Shantaram, I found myself nodding in agreement and fighting to bite down on a bubbling burst of laughter. Where words sometimes failed me, Gregory David Roberts captured so eloquently the eccentric beauty of a country and its people, and the above paragraph jumped at me from the page, so much so I found myself scrambling to copy it down in my battered notebook between forkfuls of omelette on the beach.
A week before I embarked on my trip, I jolted awake from an evening nap with a familiar trepidation coursing through my veins. What was I thinking when I decided to spend five days "finding myself" in India, on my own? It was one of those decisions, not unlike the one I made four years ago, where faith superseded the head. My heart had made the choice before I could even think. I didn't know why exactly I was going back – I just knew I had to.
So I did, and in the very short time that I was there, I fell in love, many times over, in a freewheeling way I never did, or could, four years ago. I might have been fascinated, floored and infatuated, but I don't think I loved India when I was 21. I loved her colours but I hated the chaos; I loved her streets but I hated the traffic; I loved her buzz but I hated the silence... I'd thrown myself into trying to love her and my new life in limbo, but I wasn't quite ready to love without condition and exchange. That's what I know now that I didn't know then.
I arrived in India this time around braced for the onslaught – the mess, the sounds, the riot that I knew would unabashedly dance in welcome before my face. It did come, all of it, but my heart was light and my jaws remained unclenched. The potholes, the jostling, the lack of personal space, the smog, the incessant honking, even the bizarre social rule that sees crowds and traffic piling up to stare at a pile of fallen logs although there's enough space on the road for most cars to pass through (of course, nobody's in a rush to go anywhere at 1am)... What would normally frustrate washed over me in waves of comfort, and the tides of acceptance came easy.
And once I'd surrendered myself to her wills, once I stood in the middle of my Keralan jungle garden not choked with fear of the mysterious rustling in the grass but instead with an open heart, I began to love. The land, the pockets of serenity that exist in tandem with day-to-day mayhem, the intriguing and often impenetrable culture, the people, their inherent loveliness and unquestioning communion with fate.
And when I sat in a rickety auto, inexplicably happy to be sandwiched between two friends in Mumbai's unmoving traffic, when my surroundings erupted in a deafening symphony of impatient, pointless honking, my heart took the final tumble into a senseless love affair with a city that I hated so much on my last visit. I loved, if nothing but for the sheer absurdity of the moment Mumbai gifted me, and the realisation of the infinite, contradicting possibilities that the jumbled metropolis can bring. I loved all the ugly beauty that I laid eyes upon, eyes that were once veiled by youth and ethnocentrism, and it was all my scrambling heart could do to keep up.
I think I'm in trouble.
