Return

I am wearing India like a heavy backpack.

It pulls at my shoulders at the most inopportune moments of my day, dragging me into a slow torpor of sensory memory. At my desk, walking down the hall, standing behind the rail at morning assembly, I will suddenly feel on the back of my neck the hot aromatic breath of Paharganj’s narrow streets, fly-spotted fruit stalls, and putrid gray puddles. I hear the dogs of Himachal’s mountain villages, barks and yelps echoing across the pine forested valleys in the deep black Himalayan night. I feel the sticky clutch of little Ngawang Youdon’s five year-old hand, a mango lollipop bulging her smooth cheek under wild strands of long black hair. “Tu je che” she whispers, “Thank you, uncle.”

What does it mean to return? To turn away? To turn back around? Where do I turn now?

I have not returned, not fully.

Delhi is the heaviest, a huge shadow of an indecipherable beast, like an eclipse that breathes fire. I can smell Delhi burning. The smoke blackens the back of my nostrils. Delhi moves around me, encircles me with huge ashen arms, and like cells the glaring eyes of sixteen million pedestrians follow my every movement, distantly aware, neither curious nor threatening. The black kites circle over mountain ranges of refuse, and sewage seeps through my soles. The taxi driver stares blankly and charges me double, and then inside the station the smiling agent declares, “It is impossible. There are no more trains.”

Dharamsala rides on my shoulder, whispers in my ear, a subtle breeze across a mountain road, the swish of brown steppe eagle wings, the hiss of momos steaming in a streetside kettle. I want to hike the Dheodars, under oaks and pines and red rhododendrons, among little bands of sandy brown macaques. I want to walk the winding road to Bhagsu, to climb the steep stone path to Dharmkot, I want Ngawang Youdon to hold my hand, to count in English with me as we walk, to recite the Tibetan alphabet.

How useful am I here? What good comes from my desk, from wide-eyed hours before this screen, from driving back and forth? From words? How could I ever use all the clean water, the electricity, the bright, packaged food just waiting on well-lit shelves? I won’t, ever.

And tomorrow Rinchen Tsomo will knead tsampa into dough and call it a meal.

I carry India everywhere, everywhere I turn.