The Rediscovery of Time and Alone-ness

A sudden thirst for watching blanket skies, shutting my eyes and feeling the changes in temperature, in shade, in sun, in wind direction, a sudden desire to watch an icicle melt, to overturn a snow globe and watch fake the flakes descend like stop-motion animation. To watch water boil to feel sound waves crashing over me to do something that will dig myself hollow and expose my bones to the light. What bones?

My thoughts are a mess.

I wanted to say

That I’m running out of things to say. I feel like I’ve SO MUCH that I want to spill out onto this page, so much brimming with messy thoughts and emotions…that I can’t put precisely anything down.

This week onwards begins our Hell Week – yes, Delhi University has NUS-like Hell Weeks too. A collage of tests and assignment deadlines pasted back to back on my calendar, screaming silently at me to take a look TAKE A LOOK TAKE A LOOK!!!! – but… sigh. Procrastination holds out.

It’s almost been four months here, and we’re going home in less than two. It may seem pretty far away but when I think about it… college ends in two weeks, and then begins the money/time-warping mind-fucking traveling. God, I love the feeling of getting onto a train or a bus or a plane; of boarding a journey to who-knows-where, to do god-knows-what, the breathlessness of the unknown, a rush of fresh air (or in India’s case, dust) into your pounding lungs as you take that first step out. A smile spreading on your face.

Lately, I’ve been feeling… would I say lonely? Lonely is not the right word. I’ve been… I would say longing, but it is more than longing or pining (Please Let Me Never Pine) but much quieter… like a soft scratching at my heart, slowly but surely and painfully peeling away any toughness. anyway. I have been _____ for my other half. I’m wondering how I even managed to leave her behind for close to four months now, how I managed to carry my heavy feet through the Entry Gates and immigration, while I knew she had her eyes on my back. How I remember laughing and telling her that “there’s always Skype!” and brushing away our anxieties carelessly and thoughtlessly. The truth is, Skype is shit. Though I suppose if there wasn’t any Skype/distance-reducing technology I wouldn’t have been able to leave, or she would have come to stay with me. Is this the Unbearable Lightness of Being? Because I sure as hell can’t bear it for very much longer.

So I’m constantly torn between staying here and going home. Of seeing the world and being with what I’m increasingly starting to define as my world.

Pigeons are shitting on my balcony again. Apt for this shit I’m typing here.

On other things, who knew that Delhi could be cool and pleasant? The city is changing, the rickshaw wallas are wearing scarves, the ladies are wrapped up in shawls, the leaves are falling. Such an odd, humbling experience, when a leaf falls right onto your nose (I SWEAR this happened, when I was walking out the college gates one day – a yellow crinkled thing poked me squarely on my button nose) – and you get a shock, and then you laugh to yourself (because you are alone, and then people look over and think that you’re crazy) because you suddenly remember that Nature has such a hold on you. Nothing we can do to change the weather, to keep temperatures constant, to keep the mist from rising, to prevent the descent into indescribable cold. Just take it and deal with it.

Which is pretty much the main lesson that India has been teaching us, or at least, me. Stop complaining about what you can’t do or change or is so much bigger than you are… and deal with it. My new pet phrase, shut-up-and-deal-with-it. Catchy eh?

On (a?) break

Writing, where am I? Where do I stand? In this instant, on a break from studying for my Public Economics test set out to slaughter my lazy ass on Tuesday. On a break from my real life at home – then again what is my real life, and where is it that I call home? On a break from the responsibilities that home entails, that personal relationships at home require, on a 6 month excuse to be impersonal? Writing alone in the sanctuary of solitude that this little box of a room has grown to become… on a break from the intense social interactions that being a stranger in a foreign land demands.

I wish I could say that I was on a break from myself. I wish I had the guts to abandon all and become a different person in a place where people don’t know me… I wish I had the courage to experiment with personalities, people, emotions, crazy stunts, et cetera. I wish that I could live outside my head for once, to surrender with all abandon to the nothingness and complexity that is this world brimming with things for me to absorb like an eager slobbering new-born sponge. Slowly, I think, I’m learning to let things go here. I realise… that so few things are important in my world, in this world, in our world. Life goes on in spite of its shitty circumstances, whether you are sleeping homeless in the New Delhi railway station or a cushy apartment with a six-figure rent tagged in South Extension. Are our developed world’s lofty ideals really so pertinent in this point? Do we always have to wander about the world attending conferences and creating trade embargoes or grouping countries based on geographical preferences and political power? Do we always have to wonder about the individual – our preferences, our goals, our rules, our enjoyment, our personal time, our own thoughts, our own selfish dissatisfaction? How do we live, I don’t know. I’m getting more confused by the day, an assault on my senses and my mind here in Delhi, amazed at the myriad of different ways of life presenting itself before my wide eyes every. Single. Day – when all I knew at home was one way. Nothing about traveling resembles what they show you on Discovery Travel and Living or the National Geographic. Nothing that the media or opinions or words of mouth does justice to this physical mental and metaphysical voyage into new worlds and new minds.

This is probably why I haven’t been updating this place as often as I would like to… it’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to pin my thoughts down into words and to justify these experiences with insight. Some day it will all come out of me like word and verbal diarrhoea, my words and thoughts spilled out in a liquidy jumble like alphabet pasta soup and completely up to you to arrange it the way you want to see it. Some day.

September, September.

Everything so fleeting, the only permanence in memory, in knowing that the brown angular jagged majesty rising sharply out of this earth almost two-dimensional against an expanse of blue sky… so close to the sun that the beautiful barrenness is burned onto our mind space. Can we forget those rocks, the blue of the lake, the crispy night air, the tent conversations, the wriggling of our toes in the icy saline of Panggong? In time we will have nothing but these memories to share and relive over and over.

Lizzie asked, why do we travel? Why are we drawn to traveling? Why is it that everything strange and new and foreign is exciting and thrilling? Why are we so attracted to the sublimity of what nature has to offer, why do we travel to the edges of the earth to FEEL and EXPERIENCE… what is this experience? The same wonder that Vasco de Gama felt when he set foot in India? The same awe with which Columbus discovered the New World?

I don’t know if I will ever have an answer to that question, except perhaps most simply – that I like it and that I enjoy it and that it is such a personal experience yet such a public one as well that I can’t quite explain it. Like a mutated gene that skips many generations… maybe we all used to be part of traveling nomadic gypsies, and we’re now, as a result, dotted all over the world… and then meeting each other in Leh. Ha. “See you in Leh.”

“And I swear, in that moment, we felt infinite.”

Four of us, squeezed comfortably in the backseat; I’m sandwiched in between a person I love and a person I’m growing to love, with Lizzie’s arm draping over our shoulders in a casual symbol of sisterly solidarity. To my right N is shrieking over the music and sticking her head and arms out the window. I can see S holding the beer bottle in her lap and tapping the glass in time to the beat and, next to her, the boy who in love with her – regardless of her indifference – looks at her and smiles.

Delhi looks like movie set at 1am in the morning, the shophouses have a peeling cardboard appeal, the monumental works of architecture tourist traps take on a strange 2D effect. I wonder vaguely what it would be like to climb into Humayun’s Tomb at the break of dawn, have breakfast in the gardens and ask Humayun’s ghost to join us for chai. We’re on the highway, and the streetlights line up to throw our surroundings into flying shades of tawny black and grey and call us towards that vanishing point on the horizon. The roads are ours, this highway is ours… the city belongs only to the six of us, three of whom were to me complete strangers until a few hours ago, crammed into a car vibrating from the sound waves crashing out of the stereo system.  More often than not there aren’t any lights and it’s amazing that Delhites can drive so fully aware of each junction, tree, divider, resting auto-rickshaw. Sometimes I see oncoming headlights and I feel a pang of that familiar panic before the driver calmly swerves out of the way. Out of nowhere, men are selling ice-cream, peeing against the flyover, walking, leaning, sleeping, watching, stoning, staring. I feel Lizzie slump against me gently as she nods to sleep. N and S are laughing about something in Hindi and I decided I couldn’t care less what it was about because I sat in the middle seat, with a view of the exciting darkness that lay ahead, the barely-illuminated pot-holed tarmac that somehow held a promise of reckless youth and adventure. This high that should never end, this night that should go on forever; my first never-ending drive to nowhere.

18 days

I’ve spent 18 days in Delhi. For some reason it still feels like my fifth day, yes everything is getting gradually more familiar, yes I have wandered alone, but I’m still not living here. 18 days is an extended holiday, the length of a summer trip to Europe. I’m waiting for the point where I feel as if I belong-here-but-not-really way, sticking out as a foreign face in the crowds but able to navigate the streetname-less roads, hold a 15 minute conversation in Hindi, getting genuinely mistaken for a North-eastern Indian (close to the Myanmar/Thailand area).

Not gonna happen. But you’ll never know, one can hope. Why is there the always the inherent desire to feel accepted?

None of the excitement has died down. The four of us, here happily in a foreign land, planning places to go people to meet shopping to do food to eat… sometimes we get so tired (and the most tired of all, FIONA! because naturally she is the most Popz)

We’re wondering what to have for breakfast at this point, because we woke up late and they aren’t serving breakfast where we live anymore. What I would give for kaya toast and soft-boiled eggs…

School has been fun, classmates have been more or less friendly. If any of my teachers came to NUS they would be nominated for a Teaching Excellence Award because to be honest I’ve had some of the best economics lessons here. Ironically, such quality education taking place in a less than half the size of the ones I had in primary school, pigeon shit on the floor (they like to come in when no one’s around to sit on the ceiling fan. The year 2 classroom has 3 nests) and chalkboards. On the ground floor in the foyer, there are strikes held by the school staff. 2 out of my 4 teachers have yet to return to school from leave, my classmates are still streaming into class and each day I meet someone new. Classes get cancelled on the day itself, any news spreads through mobile sms. There is no IVLE or GAPS or library website. “Last year’s mark sheet is out”, “game theory at 1135 tomorrow”, “what time is class?” et cetera. Sometimes how long it takes for any administrative task to come through gets us so frustrated, but we keep it in and tell ourselves repeatedly that it is a cultural immersion programme, cultural immersion programme, cultural immersion programme… and this is university culture here.

Perhaps the feeling of not being settled here stems from how we’re still putting up in our temporary accomodation. Anything temporary feels displaced, anything displaced is unsettled, and that’s us. We’re still living out of a suitcase, doing our laundry in the sink and hanging it on the chairs in the room. We’re still waiting on news for permanent accomodation despite being told that we would only have to stay in the guest house for 4 days and it has been 18.

This morning we went with some friends to India Gate at the crack of dawn, or what we thought was the crack of dawn. After waking up at 5.15 to leave the guest house at 5.45, we realised that THE SUN HAD ALREADY RISEN! This sunrise-India-gate plan would probably repeat itself in winter when the days are shorter and we can rise later haha. Despite our failed plan, it was a wonderful morning walking down this never-ending avenue from the President’s house to India Gate.

After that we went to Paratha Wali Gali for parathas, which are no where in the world similar to a roti prata in Singapore. I prefer the pratas at home of course, but I’m biased. This is our second time in Old Delhi, and everywhere you look everything just constantly screams at you, PURANA DILLI PURANA DILLI OLD DELHI OLD DELHI OLD DELHI. The unpaved roads, bamboo scaffolding, the homeless tugging on your clothes or poking your legs as your rickshaw stops at a junction… seeing a naked child pee freely as her mother was carrying it by the arm like a rag doll and walking. I always thought that I would be immune, not really immune wrong word, but sort of OKAY seeing this intense poverty in front of me, seeing underdevelopment, seeing a way of life that is so vastly different from mine or from my friends’. I thought that I would just be like, okay, I know that India is not a developed country, I am aware of Delhi’s pockets of poverty… but today, even though I’ve been in Old Delhi before, for some reason I feel like I saw it for the first time and for the first time really saw how much it differs from the rest of Delhi. I think its because I went to Chandhi Chowk on my first weekend in Delhi and wasn’t really… AWAKE yet., yknow? Hadn’t yet been to the rest of Delhi.

Anyway I think I’m not making really very much rambly sense and this post was written over the course of two seperate days (“this morning” being Sunday, today, and the rest being yesterday). I’ll keep you updated 😉 India is our classroom and everyone we meet is a teacher/classmate.

Bits and Pieces

I feel like I have yet to be very coherent when speaking of India. Looking at the past two posts I’m hardly making sense to myself, much less to others. I get my alone time each morning, at least two hours of peaceful nothingness except the music from my laptop (it’s country music day) and distant honks from the street and occasional pigeons in the room balcony.

Speaking of pigeons, there is pigeon shit all over my classroom floor because one of the windows are broken. The pigeons enjoy sitting on the ceiling fan.

I don’t know how to put this, I’m not exactly settled down, not exactly entirely comfortable being here. When I walk to school on my own I’m thinking either “let me please not get molested” or “let the heat PLEASE go away”. I’m thinking about how to speak up in class, already very quiet in class back home and now even quieter in an unfamiliar place. Wondering how to make good friends on my own, how to not feel awkward or out of place after being chucked into a class full of people who have known each other for the past two years. I hope this feeling goes away and when I walk to school I’ll be thinking about my classes, people I enjoyed meeting and am anxious to meet again… I’m not feeling dread now, just discomfort. Mild discomfort, like the physical discomfort of indigestion (which is apparently experienced by most foreigners unless you have the gut of a horse), waiting to feel something of my routine here, waiting to feel like I’m living here like it says on my Facebook profile. Waiting to feel like I can proudly say I Lived in Delhi, India.

But that takes time, yeah, so I will wait for time.

Before I blogged this post

I did my laundry, and then I sat here thinking. I was thinking and thinking and thinking of what to write, then I realised I had nothing to say. Difficult to form opinions of a place when I’ve hardly been here for a week, difficult to form opinions of the people and their culture. I’m stoning out the window through our mosquito screen listening to the honking from the road that runs adjacent to our guest house, staring at the mess that has overtaken our temporary lodging (permanent accommodation is still being arranged at this point… In India everything is very relaxed), listening to the Temper Trap and wondering. Just wondering in general, what will happen now or tomorrow or in five months. What it would feel like to return home and see my family, my dog, my house, my bed, my person… How much will Singapore have changed? And how much will I have changed? I’m not homesick per se, in fact I feel like I’m living in a really long dream that I will find myself waking up from in 5 months. It has been surprisingly easy to live away from home and the comforts of home, though it has only been the first week and maybe I am speaking too soon. Personal space and freedom comes sort of warped here in India, because even though we are away from the family and in a way by ourselves, India is still ranked one of the most dangerous countries for women, and we’re sticking in groups, coming home early, being good girls.

So I’m not being very coherent and I’m hoping hard it doesn’t rain today because I intend to wear my red leather sneakers.

Wake up and smell the coffee-

-the coffee that Fiona makes in our room each morning. One day she is going to run out of packets and then I’LL HAVE TO DEAL WITH A CRANKY FIONAAAAAAA.

So Fiona had her “Finally I am in India” moment while we were sitting at the back of a rickshaw, clutching onto the rusty metal handle bars in the middle of traffic chaos at a Chandni Chowk circle and surrounded by vehicles in all directions: richshaws, buses, autos, cars. In the midst of all that honking, all the pedastrians calmly navigating the traffic mass, she yells, “I’M IN INDIAAAAAAAA!!!!!!”

For me I just thought that the traffic was terrible. For me, my “I’m in India” moment happened during the first rains of the season, when a torrential downpour began just as we ended class and lasted two hours. We made it back to where we lived in one piece after running through the muddy murky waters on the school grounds (a good few inches above the ankle), taking a rickshaw in the rain, seeing the rickshaw driver pedal furiously through the water, watching people rolling up their pants and crossing the streets and haggling with rickshaw drivers over the jacked-up prices from the rain… constantly barraged by rain in our faces, Fiona screaming beside me as rainwater was splashed on us when vehicles raced by (insert newly-learnt Hindi vulgarities)…

I have a feeling that I’m going to like it here. Even if I have to wash my pants from all the times I get caught in the floods.

India, Delhi, Hindu College

Among the first questions of names and formalities, we always get this one: “Why Hindu College? Why India?”

Then I delve into a lame explanation about choosing modules and agreements between NUS and Hindu College, which almost immediately turns any Indian classmate (a.k.a. potential friend) interested in me off.
The truth is, I don’t know. And I’m scared to share this fear of uncertainty or risk with people of a different cultural background. I’m already socially awkward – and letting people who hardly know me into the inner workings of my mind might not be such a good idea after all. Either that or I am just a coward when it comes to knowing people. I don’t ask, I would rather not engage, I can’t come up with interesting questions…not yet anyway. I’m trying though, so haha give me some credit for that.

God, I can’t believe that I’m actually here. I can’t believe that this morning I woke up and had eggs, banana, toast and chapati for breakfast. I can’t believe that the dining hall is constantly the assault of persistent houseflies. That the streets are lined with litter, banana peels, all kinds of shit (cow, monkey, bird, dog, and who knows? Maybe human). That there are open manholes that you should watch out for lest you fall into the drains and sewers. I have to pinch myself when I attend a university level class in a secondary school setting. I blink twice at the chalk and blackboard, the fact that sometimes the class size is too big even for sufficient elbow room, and you constantly bump into the neighbour next door.

So why India?

Some part of me still stereotypes this birthplace of Hinduism and Buddhism and the great Indus Civilisation, the Aryan Race (I could keep going on) as THE place to come to “pray” for my spirituality, “find my soul” and all that jazz. The stereotype of India as the home of truth and enlightenment. But most of me knows that spirituality is what you make of it, and can be found anywhere.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that… I’m looking to get lost, because for some reason I have this mad idea that it is only when I get lost and experience a full assault on my senses outside of home and my comfort zone that I can finally figure out how to define this comfort zone. How to find my way back home and finally conceptualize this meaning of home. How there is this instant broadening of the mind with every time we travel, how we look past culture clashes and differences; how everyone is different and yet everyone has the same human nature. How behind every person you meet is a story, and through each story you seem to get a better understanding of your own. And I’m hoping so hard that the widely accepted pluralism and myriad of different cultures or ways of life or perspectives here help me in this thirst for everything.

… Okay even I have lost myself there.

It seems self-centred even, that yeah even though I want to meet people to know people, it remains ultimately a journey for myself. But that is the way human nature works – self-interest and self-preservation remains #1. It is what you want. Even sacrifice is what you want, if you would gladly sacrifice your own life in order to save a lover in a street robbery – you will die knowing you saved her life, which makes you happy.

Speaking of love.

Love is what I want, in all the cliches that people write about in novels and dream about in movies. I want to experience the highest of highs and the lowest of all lows, the passion, boredom, acceptance, fights, concession, sacrifice, promise, uncertainty, security, faith. I want to feel like when I wake up tomorrow, I have not a mustard seed (hahaha inside joke) of doubt in my mind of the love that I feel. There is no faith without doubt, and no love without faith. I want to believe in it wholly and grab onto it like my life depends on it, because it does. I want to love like every breath I take in is one the one that I share with her, lie with my mind and body bare like an open book waiting with tingling anticipation to be read from cover to cover. I want to believe and hold this faith knowing that I cannot be broken by it, because love never fails and everything else that comes before it are only pale shadows of the real thing. Is that too much to ask?

Even though I created a travel blog I think I’m going to stick with Your Humble Narrator, because I’ve no idea how to divorce these personal thoughts and reflections from whatever I think about when I travel – they’re all connected. Lucky I neh divulge URL siah, so many half-baked thoughts.

Onto lighter things! In our first three days we have:

1. Met a variety of urban wildlife – cows on the pavement, dogs, monkeys, pigeons, crows.
2. Stepped in a lot of shit, and when I say shit, I mean shit literally and shit figuratively. I have officially stopped wearing my expensive red sneakers around Delhi because a) it is SNEAKERS and the weather here is simply too hot for any covered footwear and b) it is too pretty to be destroyed by shit. Fiona has, on the other hand, bought three pairs of shoes. We deal with shit in different ways haha.
3. Explored the university campus: Talked to our classmates, made some friends superficially, I verbal diarrhoea-ed a little. Getting to know what life is like for a kalej me chatra (student in college) and realizing it’s almost exactly the same as back home. Youth is universal 
4. Noticed the generosity of Indians. People who hardly know you, almost complete strangers, and who offer to pay for your lunch, bring you shopping, bring you eating, help you navigate the complicated paperwork and administration involved in the simple act of getting a prepaid SIM card et cetera. Amazing.
5. Living conditions are overrated. I could probably live here, in this constant barrage of dust and dirt and smells.