VirgIndia

12 hours after arriving home from India, I was up and on my way to the airport for a flight to Charlottesville, Virginia. Each afternoon, come 4 p.m., my body is tricked into thinking we’ve just pulled an all nighter. 

It feels like we have the same storm here every day. The sky turns purple and swollen like a bruise and then the rain beats down so hard it hurts when it hits bare forearms. And after the clouds have finished and the freshwater drains into the James, the air becomes heavy with the memory of a new beginning until I start to sweat. I can remember that same sweat in Hyderabad, in Agra, in Jaipur. Most notably the dripping heat at the Taj Mahal. I thought, more than a couple times, that I would meet my end in front of the most beautiful building in the world. I was dehydrated, delusional, and, worst of all, distracted. It was until our lunch that day in an air conditioned building that I saw what a grave mistake I had made, but my body wouldn’t have had it any other way. What’s worse is I spent much of my trip this same way: worried about the last meal I ate, how much water I had had, what bug had just bitten me, and how I could catch up on sleep. I’ve been back stateside for four days now, and life has since slowed way down. I have come to easygoing Virginia to write for three weeks. What better place to relive a trip that felt so much like a wet blur? As I sit alone on a wide expanse of lawn shadowed by the Blue Ridge mountains and today’s great clouds, I recall the cut grass of Delhi’s Mahatma Gandhi memorial also shaded in a dense heat. In the shower this morning, as my eyes began to burn, I could taste the shower water of Khammam, tinged metallic. And I expect life will continue on this way, as normal, with my trip having a continual impact in the most quotidian but fundamental ways.

I traveled to India to, among other things, build a wall around a girl’s home in accordance with a recent government ordinance. I couldn’t help but see the irony of traveling 30 hours around the world to wall in a group of girls in the name of their safety while doing little to nothing about the barrier denying asylum no more than a 2 hour drive from home. Addressing an issue in a community so far removed, so unknown to my own was much more easily confronted than a crisis just down the road with reverberations in my immediate community. While I am thankful for the time spent in Andhra Pradesh, wondering at its historical sites and reckoning with pain in its populations, my willingness to feel dirty, to eat savory vegetable soup for breakfast, to have the occasional stomach ache means nothing if I am not willing to sacrifice in the same ways every day. If my global citizenship is limited to planned trips, summer experiences, international travel, I am not a global citizen. 

As the rain continues to hurl down here in Virginia, I will continue to be reminded of the lightning that flashed on either side of our bus on its way from Agra to Jaipur. I will be vigilant to each anecdote and to its larger significance as any effective writer would. And I will commit to meditate on what India taught me about politics, social narrative, female identity, journalism, religion, and to report back here as any diligent global scholar would.