So this is real life...

I swear I will never want to eat another banana after I leave India. Bananas: the pealable, oh-so-safe, local fruit staple. I hated them as a child. My father and brother used to gross me out by chewing bananas with their mouths open at the dinner table. I wouldn’t even eat banana-flavoured yogurt or drink fruit smoothies that listed bananas as one of the ingredients. But then, while in Nepal, I discovered that my love of fruit paired with my desire to be kind to my intestines meant that I had to embrace my old nemesis. And so I tolerated bananas – even started buying them in Portland during the weeks when I was particularly broke. Here in India, I will admit that when you’re doing martial arts and yoga and riding around on a bad bicycle, the potassium helps to placate sore muscles. But I’m still banana’d out, and it is only November.

The honeymoon is over – that is to say, my travel high has ended. And in many ways, I’m actually relieved. A state of awe and euphoria can only be sustained for so long. Now there are days when gratitude comes slowly, if at all. I must work harder to love this place, although I still do (and with all my heart). I must work harder to thank Hashem for the world and the people around me. As in all too many relationships, I am beginning to find my lover’s flaws difficult to endure. My Chennai is an incredibly polluted place, and I’m now stuck with a cough that sounds as if I’m a heavy smoker. I no longer find the auto rickshaws fun, but rather see them as an expensive frustration. Working full-time at Tara means that I do not have the time to travel and see India for weeks on end, as do many of the foreigners who are here to study or do research. I’m also coming to terms with the fact that I really did not bring enough money, and am learning to live on quite the shoestring (many of the westerners I encounter still convert rupees to dollars and justify a Rs.500 brunch as “only $12!” But Rs.500 is one-tenth of my monthly salary. Ari is helping me, through well-meaning if poorly timed criticism, with the embarrassing state of my finances).

But I’ve started to take Bharatanatyam classes with a woman I met in my martial arts class. And I could not be happier with my job and the people I work with. And I buy fresh papaya and lime from the street and make the most delicious salads. And I’m learning to be alone again, something I had forgotten how to do between my time in Montreal and Portland. And I’m quietly in love, “without complexities or pride,” and so that always helps.

I’m reading Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer. I believe this will be one of those books, like Gatsby or Breakfast of Champions or Love in the Time of Cholera, that will stay with me for my entire life. At first I was completely put off by Miller’s violent fear of the feminine, of his inability to see female sexuality as anything but an emptiness, a vacuum, a zero-sum prize. It is as if, in one book, he gives enough linguistic and theoretical fodder to last generations of feminists. However, I choose to love him in spite of these flaws (let us be honest: it is not the first time I have fallen for an antifeminist). Miller’s Paris is, in many ways, today’s India. I refer not to the rampant sexuality, but to the poverty and stress of a rapidly developing area. Paris, like India, also attracts the wild, mad ones – the North Americans and Europeans looking for that which they can not find at home: companionship, God, validity, cheap thrills, art, spirituality, nihilism, adventure, silence, meaning. But, as a friend and I discussed this weekend, you bring your baggage with you, whether it be to Paris or to India. Wherever you go, you cannot hide from yourself forever. India, Paris, California, Tokyo, New Jersey, Portland – in their differences and their similarities, these places will always reflect the same image of ourselves back upon us. It is then up to us to decide whether or not we must change, and whether or not we can muster the strength to do so.

Some Recent Photos:

Tied up in the shopping district...

Running from the monsoons' return...

Our front entrance, now with tile and some plants I resurrected