i think i mentioned this back when i'd first arrived in india, but over the course of time i've been here, i think the only reliable way to describe my collective experience of india is the feeling of "who-are-these-people-and-what-am-i-doing-here?"...including the most awful and the most wonderful. i feel perpetually under-prepared for the experiences that i have here. i have no adequate frame of reference to gauge my experiences.
some of this creates some stress... sometimes it's hard for me to get a sense for how safe my surroundings are, how safe the food and water is. so many experiences that are totally unlike anywhere else i've ever been that it's hard to know where to draw a line. (for example, sometimes there are actual macroscopic animals alive in the tap water in my house (which i don't drink of course)... like little fish-like things... i have no perspective to judge this from... is this bad? is this normal? i have no clue.) here, these experiences are a perpetual state of being. in the end, you have to get used to them in order to have any kind of productivity here (otherwise you'd never be able to even cross the street haha). but sometimes i wonder what risks i'm getting used to here that i should be more careful of...? i would say i could try to be less careful, but that already got me dysentery once. the rational part of my brain really wants to try to calculate risk here, but it's just not possible.
but these are also some of the most wonderful experiences i've had here. this morning i went to the first hour of a pooja in a lord ayyappan temple (a hindu god worshipped in south india, the son of shiva and vishnu...). there is a 41-day fast called vratham that some men (only men) undertake this time of year as followers of ayyappan. as pilgrims, the men are not allowed to wear shoes and wear a rosary-like string of beads around their necks and orange cloth (a color that often indicates a pilgrim). a pooja is a kind of daily prayer. in this case, the men, wearing white and orange dhotis with their sacred threads across their chests, sat clustered on either side of a shrine covered with small burning votive lamps (string wicks burning in pools of oil), pictures and statues of ayyappan draped in thick garlands of chrysanthemums and roses, lead in chanting prayer, throwing, with every verse, yellow chrysanthemums, white flowers, pink rose petals, and green leaves onto the shrine, amid clouds of smoke drifting from a smoldering incense box. the temple itself was nothing particularly special, and i've found that to be true of a lot of temples here... the buildings and shrines, which you see all over... on streetsides, tucked into alcoves on the walls of buildings, small shrines hanging on tree trunks... are themselves often not so impressive, but the spiritual awe they convey is incredible.
india throws everything at you constantly, the wonderful and the horrible. i've realized my memory here is terrible... i find it so hard to remember things that happened even a few weeks ago... i think because my brain is just under constant bombardment with things that are new and confusing. this is definitely a feeling i was searching for in wanting to live abroad, but the extent of it here has taken me a little off guard.
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