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.

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