Past, present, and future are all parts of the present

When I woke up in the morning, it was the day before Thanksgiving. I was sprawled on the big brown bed in the guest room at my brother’s house; the day before I’d flown from Hong Kong to Tokyo to Los Angeles to Dallas. I’d been greeted at the airport by my sister Carla and my step-dad Sidney, and after sleeping deeply for one night I drove my still-unsold car to my mom’s house; yellow leaves swirled behind me in the wind and the air was warm.

Because I planned to spend time with my family, and because more and more family members arrived every few hours as Thanksgiving approached, I was unable to attend an informal “young alumni” reunion that my high school was hosting that night at a fancy boutique hotel in downtown Dallas called The Stoneleigh. (I’d looked forward to reconnecting with friends from school, but The Stoneleigh was where my ex-girlfriend Anne and I had spent a week together in a room with long striped curtains along the walls and redbacked flower patterns on the carpet and long decorative pillows on the bed and a television set that spun a full circle to face either side of the room, so I felt a wounded relief – a coward’s relief – as I realized that I could justifiably avoid the reunion.)

In other words, instead of the emotional rise-and-fall of my revisited past, – of reinvented schoolmates and a girlfriend’s ghost – I chose the emotional rise-and-fall of family.

Following my Mom and Sidney’s wedding in June, Thanksgiving was our newly combined family’s first holiday together. And after snacking on hard cheeses and translucently thin crackers, we sat at two tables in the dining room, one of which was decorated with living leaves and red berries and candles and one of which was decorated with green gourds and living leaves and red berries and candles and white star-shaped flowers. We ate sweet or crumbly or moist or leafy or crunchy or spicy foods, and I sat with my sisters and my brother and with three of my four step-brothers and my mom and my step-dad and my grandparents and my uncle and my aunt and my cousin who is moving from Phoenix to Austin and who brought his daughter who he hadn’t seen for eighteen months before that week.

The mosaic of our faces and personalities was different, but the meal and the silver-helmet football game on television and the nap that followed were all familiar. I enjoyed myself and enjoyed the food, although I wished – as I almost always do when I’m with my family – that I was more able to be patient and magnanimous. (Then and afterward I thought of Pierre in War and Peace who honors his friend and wins his “undying devotion simply by drawing out the best aspects of his soul and admiring them,” and wished that I might become more like that: observant and kind and socially nurturing.)

…The day after Thanksgiving, I went to a party. It was in a neighborhood called Highland Park and at the house where my friends Colin and Nicole grew up. I saw classmates from high school there and saw some of their parents; I ate vegan pizza and chocolate-rolled pecans and stood next to a big untouched pile of chopped fruit with a beer in my hand; I saw a painting by Salvador Dalí inconspicuously hung in the living room; and before the night ended my friends’ teeth were wine-stained a funny impermanent purple-grey and we all sunk on soft couches and laughed.

In the days that followed, I watched pink and orange sunsets sprawl across the leafy suburban sky under a high and perfect crescent moon; I went to a movie at the Northpark Mall and before leaving I stood next to a valet parking attendant in a blue jacket with a long silver bar double-piercing the top of her ear and saw that on the stand where she organized keys there was a big curling paperback book titled Oil and Gas Law; I saw birdflocks rise in hundred-edged silhouettes from overhead wires and saw the slow fading glow of autumnal sunlight; I bought cereal and soymilk; I finished reading War and Peace and read Bright Lights, Big City and started reading Blood Meridian; I ate dinner at my grandparents’ house and had white and brown and orange carrot cake for dessert and my grandmother told me that after earning her master’s degree in psychology she had only one official client – a young autistic girl – but that she believes she uses her degree every day; I acknowledged that it feels good to be alone, but that prolonged solitude makes me feel less centered and more psychologically skittish; I drank spiced beers at a holiday beer tasting party; I thought about a girl I used to love; I drove and looked up at leafless trees skittering their black outlines in the air and watched clean white and yellow trains pass beyond the blinking lights and long painted moving beams that blocked the road; I cried three times into my hands; I woke up late in the day and watched the twinkle of light and shadow through drawn curtains as leaves fluttered in the outside breeze and then drew the curtains in the afternoon so the sun could pierce the window’s squares and blind me with golden-moted rays of light; I jogged; I ate Ethiopian food; I sat with a brilliant and inspiring woman named Ashley and drank hot mint tea while she ate oatmeal and I saw an old cowboy with dark brown skin wearing a tan flat-brimmed hat and a black vest and a purple shirt; and at night I looked up from my brother’s front yard in the darkness at the eggish gibbous moon and imagined that it – the moon and my relationship to it – was nothing at all, and had become only a remnant in memory of an otherwise forgotten and now alien fiction.

And I started thinking seriously and practically about the future.

…Planning the few months that will immediately follow the end of this year is at once stressful and soothing. And it sometimes feels like a denial of the present moment; although my conversations about continued charity work and international travel and about writing and publishing are meaningful and exciting and necessary, I also feel compelled to understand – or at least ponder – the things that have just happened, and that continue to happen now.

In a small and immediate context, I feel compelled to process the impact of leaving India and the ennui that has predictably followed. And in a larger and more general context, I feel compelled to consider my attitude toward the changes in my life and understand the way the past informs the present, and the way my memories seem to appear and disappear, and how forgotten or suppressed truths become accessible only as I become ready.

But that readiness is nothing I can consciously control. Instead I just try to relax; I try to meet change with receptivity, and revisit the past with care.

For instance: Last week I went to the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University. Since I’d been there once or twice as a teenager, I’d intended to return many times – but perhaps because I wasn’t ready – I’d never actually gone back.

And when I walked up the museum’s clopping wooden stairs and passed Murillo’s Immaculate Conception, I was dumbstruck and moved by the stars above Mary’s head and the putti at her feet and the corners of the crescent moon curving beneath her like a holy animal’s horns. And after I passed the nude metal statues of The Three Graces, I approached the painted images that had been so-long stored in my unconscious memory: a dwarf standing among pomegranates and lapdogs and birds, an enigmatic lonely woman on a Parisian balcony, a dead green Christ, a barely recognizable abstract black figure floating against a bright orange background, and all the saints. (One was kneeling and one was looking up and one was martyred with arrows and one was sprawled angular white and bearded and his naked body was covered with only a skirt of woven straw and he lay with rosary beads and a skull.)

And I saw Goya’s small black haunting Yard with Madmen which I’d unconsciously remembered many times in the last year when I stood in the stinking shadow of a high terrible wall in Prem Dan where men would piss and scream and writhe and smear their ugly food against their lips.

The paintings showed me some part of the mysterious visual vocabulary of my spiritual and creative subconscious, and showed me some part of what lingers in my memory and what fades away. And I started to understand that I am slowly allowing myself to remember and feel what has happened in both the distant and recent past; I am slowly reconnecting to the images and sensations from which I have felt so strangely disconnected.

…But as I explored my psyche and the many mirrors of my nightmares and dreams, I knew I had to temper my introspection with social action. I knew I couldn’t study my soul forever.

So I volunteered to distribute toys.

For five days I reported to a warehouse in West Dallas with high ceilings and giant orange shelves. The warehouse – the Salvation Army Christmas and Disaster Relief Center – is filled with donated toys every year, and every year thousands of impoverished Dallas families come to the center to receive gifts.

One day I sorted toys into carts and taped little tears in flimsy plastic gift-bags; the work felt mundane and overwhelming at times, but I easily returned in thought to familiar reflections on purpose and devotion, and rediscovered the joy of simple occupation, and remembered Mother Teresa’s mantra of “small things with great love”.

In the days that followed, I shifted to troubleshooting and to checking in “clients” and to actually handing over big bags of toys. And although I found value in all the things I did, it was meeting the people I was serving and giving them their gifts that moved me most. (When one woman saw a big stuffed yellow bee in her toy bag, she exclaimed that her infant son had asked for exactly that; then she smiled with deep sincerity and infectious delight and said her son – his name was Alvin – was going to be very happy.)

It wasn’t until I saw more than one person shed tears of overwhelmed gratitude that I remembered why I’d been drawn to service then and in the past; it wasn’t until I witnessed the humanity of others – and honored their experience of pain and hope and redemption – that I witnessed the convergence of my own memories and moods: I felt connected to others and free to feel new doubts and old pains; I felt sadness and joy when I thought of the past, and felt fear and brave hope when I thought of the future. And I acknowledged the mysterious but knowable truth of what I had given, and what I had received.

Familiar Changes

On my way back to the States from India, I stopped for five days in Hong Kong. I hadn’t been there since I’d left almost two years ago, and because I sensed I might not be in Asia again any time soon, I decided to visit. I’d lived and worked in Hong Kong for four years and in many ways, going back felt like going home.

I’d flown to Hong Kong overnight, and when I arrived the sky was hazy and bright. I was exhausted. I heard surreal familiar clicks and beeps and electronic voices in the airport and on the train into town; as I passed the big rectangular stacks of yellow, red, orange, brown, and blue shipping containers, I mentally compared Kolkata’s raw color to Hong Kong’s industrial order and commercial polish. And in my fatigued delirium – suspended in the half-consciousness between sleep and waking – I imagined that the time I’d recently spent in India and the States had been a fantasy, and that I’d never left Hong Kong.

But I had, and then I went back.

I arrived on a Friday and met my friend Joe in Tai Tam, a small neighborhood on the green and far-less-populated south side of Hong Kong Island; Tai Tam is home to hundreds of ex-patriates and to Hong Kong International School, where I’d worked as an English and Humanities teacher.

Within minutes of arriving at Joe’s house, I was eating a freshly made artichoke pesto pizza. (Joe had recently started running a small and increasingly popular pizza business from home; at his front door I saw trays of tomato sauce cans stacked next to piles of his children’s shoes, and in his kitchen I saw balls of dough and bags of flour and bowls of chopped vegetables on the counter.)

After eating and talking with Joe, I walked to my friend Janet’s flat and started to settle in. (Janet would be in New York at a creative writing conference until my last day in Hong Kong and had generously offered her spare bedroom to me; Janet is an English teacher at HKIS, my friend Norbyah’s mom, and Joe’s mother-in-law.)

That afternoon I talked with former students and colleagues in the times between their classes, and that night I ate dinner in Stanley – the beachfront neighborhood where I’d once lived – with my friends Joe and Jeremy and Rob. (Rob had recently visited me in India.) We ate at “Spiaggia”, an Italian restaurant run by an eccentric old Belgian chef named Rolf, who greeted me happily perhaps because he recognized my friends, or perhaps because he remembered me from any one of the innumerable nights in the years before when I’d eaten at his other waterfront restaurant, which was two doors down from the Italian place and named “Main Street USA.”

After dinner Jeremy went home, and in familiarly mischievous form, Joe and Rob and I left the brightly-lit and semi-crowded Stanley restaurant strip, approached the undeveloped hills nearby, vaulted a short fence, and walked the dark jungle path to a little bouldery temple overlooking Stanley Bay. The place was deeply nostalgic to me, not because I’d visited that particular temple more than once or twice, but because – from my rooftop and from the waterfront and from the mountains above – I’d many times stood and watched that particular body of water hush and glitter and spray.

That night Joe and Rob and I smoked cigars and drank whiskey; we sat on the big half-submerged rocks beneath the temple; we talked. And although we said a lot of things – serious, hilarious, sincere, and obscene – something Joe said stuck in my mind and has stuck there since: “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, “and I’m glad you’re happy.”

Starting with that night, my visit indeed proved to be a source of deep happiness and also of sustained emotional tilt. I was moved by the convergence of momentous changes: leaving Kolkata and its problematic but meaningful comforts, returning to Hong Kong and the community I’d once sincerely called “my family”, and starting a mysterious next phase of life.

…The following day, Rob picked me up in front of the HKIS high school gate (he is one of the few people I know in Hong Kong who both owns a car and regularly drives it), with his sons Caleb and Eli in the back seat. Caleb, now six years old, greeted me wearing a white Kung Fu uniform and holding a bent black Spiderman figurine in his hands, and was very much as I remembered him: his hair was bright blond, and he was brightly grinning and eager to talk and laugh and squirm; but Eli, now four, had changed tremendously. In the almost two years I’d been gone, he’d transformed from a moderately communicative infant to a sensitive and kind young boy; when we stopped to buy groceries before leaving for Rob’s house, Eli held my hand, chose for himself a fresh cut flower and a fresh baked pretzel, and – for no apparent reason – called to Rob and said “I love you Daddy.”

With groceries in tow, we drove the winding green and not-very-long distance to Big Wave Bay, the small beachside fishing and surfing community where Rob and his family have found the balance between Hong Kong’s infamous fast pace and their own more mellow approach to domestic life.

We walked between little houses and through invisible clouds of incense smoke to get to Rob’s two-story home; Rob’s wife Meg and Rob’s youngest son Bodhi greeted us within. It was the first time I’d seen Bodhi, and I was thrilled to meet him; his eyes were big and blue and shy; he crawled; he laughed; I liked him immediately.

In the late afternoon, I walked to the beach with Rob, Caleb, and Eli. Rob and I carried surfboards in our arms and Eli tottered under the yellow foam “boogie board” he balanced on his head. Caleb and Rob sped ahead while Eli and I meandered; Eli snacked on sui mai – pork dumplings on a bamboo skewer – given to him by one of the local restaurant owners (later that night Eli started his pre-bed prayers with an expression of gratitude for food), and he showed me secret trails to the beach. And although Rob, Caleb, and I were planning to swim, Eli chose to remain on the sandy shore in the company of family friends and a little crowd of doting giggling girls.

Rob and I ventured into the cold waves with Caleb close behind, and we paddled to the buoy-lines that marked the shark nets below the surface of the water; then Rob – more tolerant of the frigid tide – surfed on his big board while Caleb and I hustled back to land. And after drying off, warming up, and walking home, the boys opened a huge tub of Legos and a chest full of board games, and were joined by two other boys who lived nearby. But soon the little tribe abandoned the indoors and were kicking a ball in the house-front courtyard, and laughing and crashing and crying and yelling and laughing again.

Then and throughout the day, I was impressed by Meg’s unflagging attention to her sons; she was never overbearing but always vigilant; she set boundaries and enforced them, but also let the boys be free. And even though I’d been gone, and even though Meg was preparing experimental tofu lasagna, and even though we were in a house on the quiet corner of a southeast Asian island, the scene – the boys playing outside, the baby crawling in the living room, Rob and Meg standing in the kitchen, and the yellow-then-orange-then-blue light of the sunset – felt perfectly familiar. It felt like a family.

Once we’d eaten dinner and played chess and read books and said prayers, the boys went to bed. Rob and I moved upstairs and soon we were drinking Weissbier and singing; Rob played guitar and we sang songs we’d sung together before – like “Murder in the City” by the Avett Brothers and “Whole Wide World” by Wreckless Eric and “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas – and songs we’d not yet sung – like “Beat It” by Michael Jackson and “Pretty Voice” by Cloud Cult.

I left Big Wave Bay the next morning and went to Mass at St. Anne’s Church in Stanley; I lingered at the baptismal font next to which Rob had four years before served as stand-in Godfather for my baptism before I could be confirmed as a Catholic, and I remembered how invariably churches seem larger to me in memory.

In the afternoon, I rode the yellow double-decker 260 bus downtown for a massage. The massage was disappointing but the steam and dry sauna that preceded it were much needed; I’d been enjoying myself in the past three days, but I’d been rushing from reunion to reunion, and I was getting tired. That evening I joined my friends Kathryn and Chris for a relaxed dinner – after meeting their seven-month old baby Iris – during which we ate vegan “meatloaf”, drank wine, and discussed classism, religion, and our generation’s compulsion to mask sincerity with sarcasm.

That night I slept hard.

On Monday morning, I visited classes; the first was a senior-level course called “Service, Society, and the Sacred”, and was taught by my mentor Marty. I spoke briefly and then answered a number of students’ questions, which – perhaps as an indication of generational shift – were truly thoughtful and sincere. And following that class, I visited two ninth-grade Humanities classes and continued to be struck by the students’ expression of their earnest moral and philosophical struggles.

As I spoke, I heard myself sounding surprisingly bleak and hopeless; I believed the things I was saying, but nonetheless felt guilty with the knowledge that I was addressing idealistic young people – i.e. people in the increasingly broad group between childhood and adulthood – and not softening my accounts of jarring revelation or sad disillusionment. Granted, I believed my message was ultimately a call to authentic personal interaction and dedicated human compassion, and indeed my intended message was a hopeful one, but it was framed – and maybe blackened – by my indication of the gross dichotomy between humanity and individual human beings: I claimed that humanity fails more than it succeeds, that humanity allows indifference and greed to overwhelm intuition and charity, and that because our most coordinated historical movements have been imperial, martial, and commercial, that humanity is a disaster; but I also claimed that individuals continue to succeed in meaningful ways – at the smallest but most important times – and that despite the paradox of an ugly sum being made of beautiful parts, human beings are genuinely good-natured and infinitely interesting.

I’d already met with most of the students I’d hoped to see, but on that day I stole opportunities to talk with a few more, and found myself especially drawn to and able to connect with those students who’d traveled with HKIS to Kolkata the year before, and with whom I’d talked on the rooftop of the Dee Empresa Hotel during one of their evening meetings. Those students had seen some part of what I’d seen; they understood the context for many of my conclusions; they seemed able to share my anguish and understand my joy, even as I struggled to articulate exactly what I’d learned about myself and what I was starting to believe about the world around me.

That night I reconnected with Joe, Norbyah, and Janet for one last dinner in Hong Kong. Adding to her already generous provision of a place to stay, Janet splurged on a meal at “Lucy’s”, a small and elegant bistro with orange walls and warm light and perfect food and a tree in the middle of the dining room. On the way to the restaurant, which is coyly tucked into a Stanley market alleyway, I finally realized that Hong Kong – and especially my former neighborhood – had remained deeply familiar to me despite my extended absence; it sounds strange and impossible as I admit it now, but I recognized even the edge-lines of flaking paint on buildings, the colors of closed and open gates, and the broken swells of the street; I realized that there may actually be no other place in the world with which I am so consciously well-acquainted.

And likewise at the restaurant I remembered the times I’d been there before, with friends and family and with a girl named Ingrid (she was Chinese) who I dated during my first summer in Hong Kong. But nostalgia wasn’t unique to me that night; between dinner and dessert, Norbyah said – in what I believe was a compliment – “You’re just as I remembered you.” Despite the outward changes in me that she’d rightly expected, she affirmed a belief I was just then starting to grasp: that home is the place – and a place can be in many different places – where certain known and tangible details linger like moods, and where the essential unchanging self continues to be recognized and celebrated, even as the outwardly changing self shifts.

I left Hong Kong early the next day. On the way to the airport, rounding the northeast corner of the island in a taxi, I saw the big crowded buildings on either side of Victoria Harbor obscured by white pollution and the morning’s rising mist, and I remembered a moment some years before: I was being driven the other direction, away from the city’s urban center and toward my home in Stanley; I was wearing a clean grey tailor-made suit, alternately looking down at my fingernails and out at the harbor, and thinking that one day I might remember the life I was then living and be envious or proud or ashamed or pleased or… simply… that one day I might be different.

One of them

My mother’s first visit to India coincided with my last week; she arrived in Kolkata after midnight on November 9^th, and would stay until after midnight on November 18^th.

Our first full day together started late. We’d slept comfortably the night before in our beds at the Peerless Inn, one of the fine hotels that edges and overlooks the sprawling grassy middle-Kolkata expanse of the Maidan park.

Although I knew that the best introduction to genuine Indian food would be a gradual one, my mom and I started our tour of Kolkata – and our trip at large – with brave culinary abandon: we ate hot kati rolls and drank fresh coconut water on the street. With bellies full, and after referring to two different guidebooks, we decided to explore the highly recommended Indian Museum and Victoria Memorial; I’d been in Kolkata for nearly a year, but I’d never visited either.

At the Indian Museum – seemingly unchanged since its 19^th century opening – we saw giant skeletons of elephants and whales, fossilized leaves, an Egyptian mummy, and thousands of gemstones. (My mother once owned a gem business in Brazil, so it was a special and unexpected pleasure to wander into one of the museum’s many high-ceilinged halls and browse the dusty but nonetheless stunning collection of gems and minerals in glass cases.) We saw old Indian statues and new Indian paintings; we stood mesmerized before a miniature painting of a blue man approaching a house – and presumably courting the woman shown within – but unaware of another man in the tree above him holding a drawn bow and arrow.

…After leaving the museum and walking a short and dirty distance along Jawaharlal Nehru Road, we entered the manicured grounds of the Victoria Memorial and strolled alongside gardens and fountains and lawns. We approached the elevated and patina-streaked green statue of an aged Queen Victoria slumped on her throne, and regarded at a distance an arch-top equestrian statue of the Rex Imperator Edward VII.

Once we entered the domed and palatial interior we saw yet another striking statue, a marble representation of a much younger Victoria holding the royal scepter and globus cruciger; the statue was beautiful, but both my mother and I could not help but feel a sense of pretense, absurdity, arrogance, and waste as we circled the monument’s centerpoint; and as we read excerpts of Queen Victoria’s 1858 “Proclamation Concerning India” – which were chiseled into the stone walls – we both admitted that the monarch’s appeals to God and the claim that “it is our earnest desire to stimulate the peaceful industry of India, to promote works of public utility and improvement, and to administer its government for the benefit of all our subjects resident therein” could be read only with a bitter sort of post-colonial irony.

In the end, I was impressed by the monument’s artistry and moved by its magnificence, but in a word, I was shocked to see it all. It was a part of Kolkata that had not been typical of my experience; truly is was opposite to my experience, and in so many months of living in the city, I had never really believed or expected that any such place did – or could – exist there.

…The next day, after visiting Mother Teresa’s tomb, and after praying and singing with the other volunteers, and after meeting Sister Mercy Maria, my mom traveled with me to Prem Dan. As we rode the crowded bright blue 202 bus from Mother House to Prem Dan, and as we walked through the little slum nearby, I had the distinct sense – as I had a few times since my mom’s arrival – that I was seeing things with new eyes.

That morning my mom washed sheets and clothes, talked with patients, and served lunch. Like most new volunteers, she saw flaws in the Prem Dan protocols, and like most new volunteers, she discussed ways to fix them. And that afternoon (and in the afternoons to come), my mom articulated her thoughts about what she felt called to do, and about how she felt her gifts should be employed; in so many words, she said it felt like a waste for her to spend time scrubbing laundry. Her honest exploration of these thoughts touched upon a concern or insecurity or quandary of my own, and challenged the way I’d decided to spend my time in the last year, and challenged my assumption that – for now at least – it is more important for me to cultivate and use my heart’s gifts rather than my mind’s.

The following day we left for Delhi; the Indira Gandhi International Airport was as close as we could get to our next destination: Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal.

Just before my mother arrived in India – but long after we’d booked our domestic flights – I’d learned an important fact about the Taj: it’s closed every Friday. And predictably, the day we’d planned to spend touring the iconic Mughal mausoleum – after staying one night at a fancy Agra hotel – was Friday. It was a disappointing realization, but when we arrived in Delhi on Thursday morning, we decided we could rush to Agra for a half-day visit at least; unfortunately we were told that the 204 kilometer drive – which I had assumed would take little more than two hours – would actually take closer to five hours, and that we would need to be at the world famous monument not before a specified time, but before sunset. So we hired a taxi – doubtful but not discouraged – and we rushed.

It was not the only time my lackadaisical planning became a source of stress during my mom’s visit, but it was surely the most intense. My mom was still adjusting to Indian social and transportational norms, so while I gazed sleepily out the window of our speeding car, my mother tensed at every honked horn, hollered curse, or near collision. And there were a lot of near collisions.

We did arrive at the Taj with time enough to scamper from our car, buy tickets, and shove through the entrance. As the sun turned a hazy orange and lingered at the horizon, we were predictably but genuinely awestruck by the white dome and perfected spires that have become the international symbol of India; and of course we intended to take pictures – but I had left my camera in the car. (We’d hired the car for that day and the next, so the camera was not gone forever, but we did have to buy a seventeen dollar disposable camera – which used film­ ­– in order to take silly snapshots at what may actually be the most photogenic place in Asia.)

After taking a few pictures of the Taj from a distance, we approached the building’s first terrace; a helpful and dubiously ethical guide whisked us to the front of the very long lower-level queue and up a flight of stairs, but this only placed us on the level of the Taj, in other words at the end of another equally long line of people that wound once around the enormous building. We’d only half-circled by the time the sun had definitively set, and could see that the interior of the building had turned completely dark. Following the example of hundreds of other tourists, we left our place in line to swarm the building’s middle; I peeked inside, but my mother’s face and my own sense of mob folly convinced me to leave the place without having had a proper look. When I said we now had a reason to come back again, my mother – without anger or sarcasm, both of which might’ve been justified – said, “I don’t think I’m coming back.”

That night I thought about my mother’s response and about my own shifting point of view. I realized in a clear way what had been obvious all along: she and I were approaching our week together from very different perspectives. She wasn’t used to the crowded chaos of the country, and I wasn’t used to luxuries, itineraries, or worry. So as she sought refuge in the amenities of our hotel, I resisted the artifice of fancy tourist life; as she found comfort in soft beds and hot showers, I felt awkward and out of place; and although we were both amused by the complimentary chocolates, fruits, and American aloe vera shampoos, I think I was alone in feeling a confused but compelling sense of hypocrisy, and alone in hearing other people’s voices in my head – both Indian and foreign; both persuasive and absurd – saying that I wasn’t experiencing “real” India.

The next day, after scrutinizing the lapis-and-carnelian-and-malachite-inlaid walls and contemplating the storybook balconies of the Agra Fort, and after another unglamorous five-hour roadtrip, we flew up through and away from Delhi’s murky air to the “Pink City” in the desert – Jaipur.

During our time in Jaipur, we saw the places our guidebooks recommended: Hawa Mahal, the five-story-high and one-room-deep ornamental façade that once allowed women observing the city’s then-strict purdah to watch the street’s goings-on without themselves being seen; and Jantar Mantar, the compound in which giant astronomical tools are displayed in a surreal combination of amusement park and modern art museum aesthetics, and outside of which painted elephants can be procured for rides and tourists can pose for pictures with basketed cobras and men with flutes. (My mom did this.)

After Jaipur we traveled to nearby Pushkar, where we accidentally arrived in time for the small city’s largest event: the annual camel fair. Although we’d seen camels on the roads of every city we’d traveled to so far, in Pushkar we were in close proximity with hundreds of camels and horses and long-eared cows; we watched the camels walk with bobbing heads and chew in funny lateral circles, and we watched them kneel or roll at the commands of their owners, all for the pleasure of the camera-squinting spectators.

My mom had booked our accommodations in Kolkata, Agra, and Jaipur, but Pushkar was up to me. So I reserved a tent. It was a luxury tent with a carpeted concrete floor and indoor plumbing, but it was a relief for me to be staying somewhere more third-world exotic and less first-world conventional; and although my mom seemed anxious about our drawstring-and-canvas-flap front door and unimpressed by the bucket-and-bar-soap shower, I believe she and I both appreciated the marigold bushes that lined the sandy path to our tent, and the complimentary camel ride to the fairgrounds, and the after-dark music of drums and whining horns that not-quite-lullabied us to sleep.

…Two days later, we were back in Kolkata. My mom was planning to leave less than twenty-four hours before I did, and because of the stress of travel and the stress of my impending and final departure, I started losing patience. And as my patience diminished, my selfishness grew.

In those last few shared hours in India, I felt pressured to do what my mom wanted, and I felt resentful and angry after realizing – in a hair salon – that I’d been spending my last full day in Kolkata shopping for skirts and scarves and silver earrings… But really my irritation wasn’t about my mom. And after she left, I had time – not much, but enough – to regain perspective and gather my thoughts.

I thought about my resistance to luxury. I considered for the first time that my desire to be around poor people could be the manifestation of a subconscious need to feel unquestionably superior, and that the proximity of wealth may be problematic for me because it spotlights my own lack of income. I admitted that my comfort with dirty puddles and dirty people had diminished after one luxurious week, and acknowledged that throughout the time I’d spent in India I might’ve changed my attitude and philosophy about “finer pleasures” as a way to cope with life in Kolkata; in other words, I might’ve rejected luxury not because of some innate evil, but simply because I could not keep seeing filth and chaos and wishing it were different, and I had to think of poverty and simplicity as normal, and wealth and luxury as aberrational.

I thought about my disdain of tourism. I considered that the grotesque and obvious presence of tourists reminded me that I too was a visitor in India, despite all my sincere or ridiculous attempts to commingle. I admitted that I would always be a stranger to native Indians, and that I felt like more of an alien in Kolkata after my mom’s arrival, which was difficult because I had truly started to believe that – in Kolkata at least – I was starting to blend in.

And I thought about saying goodbye. I thought about the fact that I was leaving behind a life that became familiar, but never became easy.

And I realized that as I’d traveled with my mom, I hadn’t allowed myself the space or time to feel the catharsis – the pleasure and pain – of saying goodbye to the places and people that mattered to me, and that I believed I would never see again.

But on my last day in India, I found that space and time.

I went to Prem Dan for the last time on a Thursday. I’d already been to the Modern Lodge to say goodbye to my good friend Sean, and I’d already been to Mother House to say goodbye to Sister Mercy Maria.

And because Missionaries of Charity volunteers don’t work on Thursdays, I was able to visit Prem Dan at my own pace and without distractions. I spent an hour or so sitting with various men; I explained with words and gestures and looks that I was leaving and that I wasn’t coming back; some of the men seemed to understand, some seemed pleased that I’d come to say goodbye, some seemed indifferent, some unaware, and some seemed genuinely sad.

It’s hard for me now to explain what I felt that day; it’s hard to know which things to include and which to omit; my memory has held onto some few details and let go of many others. My farewell at Prem Dan wasn’t perfect; I wasn’t able to say goodbye to any of the nuns, and I wasn’t able to say goodbye to all the men. But after saying goodbye far too many times in the last decade – to classmates and students and friends – I already knew that goodbyes are never perfect, and that they’re always hard.

Even as I write this, tears rise and I hesitate to try to explain everything – because I know I can’t.

I can just say that one of the last men I saw that day was one with whom I never really realized I’d bonded. I’d never asked him his name and never told him mine. Honestly I didn’t even know if he could talk, and I still don’t. But I know that half of his face is droopingly paralyzed and that his left eye is always reddish and wet and his right ear is always dripping pus; I know that he has grey hair and only one leg and that I’ve shaved his face many times, and many times hefted him into wheelchairs and onto toilets and into bed.

On the day I left, I approached him where he sat and knelt in front of him and – because we had never really spoken – I just looked into his eyes. I looked into his eyes and said nothing; I only felt a great sadness and joy and felt my eyes fill with tears, and saw his eyes fill with tears too. I reached to touch his foot with my hands and then touched my hands to my forehead – as far as I know, in India this is the greatest possible sign of respect – and he shifted in his wheelchair when he realized what I was doing and he leaned forward with awkward but practiced balance, and he reached down for my feet and touched his hands to his own forehead –

And that was all. That was all we could say, and all we needed to say.