OUT OF EDEN WALK

Nothing moves me the way India does.

By all rights, she should not—she cannot—exist. She is too old, too tired, and too full. She is made from shards of ethnicities, languages, beliefs, and religions that were patched and glued together to make an unlikely whole. She was founded as a secular republic even as tens of millions of her residents split off to form a religious state. She has stubbornly remained democratic through a balloting process that lasts five weeks and involves 900 million voters. And among those crowds, in those wrinkles, under that dust, and in those fissures, she still retains a profound beauty. So there is a way in which my faith in humanity is inextricably wound up in India’s subsistence. As long as she lives—and in the way that she lives—there is still magic in the world.

But my admiration for this irrepressible subcontinent is, I think, more academic than experiential—though no less fervent for it. I grew up in Mumbai, and I ventured only occasionally out of my privileged city bubble. I regret that. And it was in pursuit of more that, in August of 2018, I joined my former journalism college professor, Paul Salopek, and his walking partner, Priyanka Borpujari, for a few days in rural Madhya Pradesh.

I have always been in relatively equal parts amused, inspired, and exasperated by India’s functional chaos. I graduated from a law school that maintained to my second-to-last day that I was not “eligible” for the course that I had in fact been enrolled in for three years and successfully completed. And a part of me felt as though I ought to give thanks after every journey through Mumbai’s traffic that I survived unscathed. We all routinely confront the same fork in the road, over and over again, everyday: fight the bedlam, make sense of the disorder—or surrender to it. For this trip, at least, I was determined to surrender wholeheartedly.

In some ways, it was easy. I was blissfully unconcerned with our directions, our route, or where we would be sleeping at night. (Fortunately, I was in the capable hands of both Paul and Priyanka, an Indian journalist.) I had more pressing matters on my mind. After borderline lying in response to Paul’s thoughtful questions about my stamina, I had spent the last month frantically trying to get my body in shape, haunted by thoughts of my knees suddenly giving out in the middle of nowhere and the consequent humiliation of having singlehandedly diverted and utterly ruined the walk. (There is nothing wrong with either of my knees.) But the pace—for the few days that I was swinging along—was manageable.

So instead I had the luxury of just watching.

Some of what I saw would have been fascinating to anyone. I visited the Chaturburj Temple in the Gwalior Fort, which houses one of the earliest written instances of the numeral 0. I met and drank chai with Balwant Singh Tomar, a onetime dacoit, or bandit, from the Chambal region, who at the time of his negotiated surrender to the government in 1982 had 150 charges filed against him, including 50 for murder. Two hours later, I met with Ashok Bhadoriya, a police agent who had spent a career trying to bring the next generation of Chambal dacoits to heel. I visited the Tomb of Tansen, a classical musician from the time of the Mughal empire, and wandered through its latticed halls while listening to group of nine men sitting in a semi-circle outside avidly watching a video on a single cell phone.

Other parts were likely fascinating only to me. It was strange, at first, to be walking for so many hours with no specific goal in mind, often in silence. But the wind, the rustling leaves, the birds, the cow bells, and my own footsteps slowly coalesced into their own rhythm.

Everything was so green. The sky, in India’s monsoon season, kept shifting. Clouds gathered and dispersed. Sunlight shone and then winked out, leaving a wet, laden grey. We passed fields and flooded rice paddies, some tended by farmers. We walked alongside train tracks and through villages and over makeshift bridges. We adopted the occasional would-be guide or curious tagger-on or stray dog. We walked on highways, dirt roads, and mud. We picked our way through small herds of cows, brazen and unconcerned in the way only Indians cows can be.

Quite apart from the fact that Indians are perennially interested in their fellow human beings and unabashed about showing that interest, we made for an unusual sight, and we drew a crowd every time we stopped to rest in a village. More often than not, someone would quietly pay for our bottles of water or soda. Another would invite us to his home for chai. A third would ask if we needed directions. A fourth would offer a ride on a bullock cart, or a motorcycle. A fifth would ask again, with some incredulity, if we were sure that we didn’t need directions. The third and fifth would then argue about the directions, and a sixth, seventh, and eighth would join in to take sides or present further alternatives for consideration. Indian hospitality is famous, and I was touched but unsurprised by the frequent offers of help.

But there were times when the generosity surprised even me. On the night that we slept outside in a small temple, one man rode his motorcycle through pouring rain and returned with rotis (flatbread), vegetables, and achaar (Indian pickles), made by his wife. He cheerfully but firmly refused payment, accepting the money we offered only when Paul suggested that it be used for the temple’s upkeep. An old farmer Priyanka stopped to ask for directions said that the route would be too complicated. He insisted on leading us, barefoot, through two miles of muddy rivulets until he was satisfied that we could carry on safely.

I have hesitated in the past to wear shorts or sleeveless shirts when walking through parts of my patriarchal country, but I found myself bathing at night with a bucket of water under an overcast sky between the same temple and a rice field with little concern. I didn’t have to tamp down fear or uneasiness. I waited for it, but in my gut I felt none.

In my surrender to India, however, I remained acutely aware that I had the luxury of choosing it. Most do not. I passed by streams that had turned a milky green, dogs and children playing in scattered trash, villages without electricity. I met a 12-year old boy who told me he wanted to be a doctor and in the same breath added cheerfully that of course that was not possible. India’s poverty is so abject and so pervasive that it has been twisted into a kind of normal. The surrender that allows us to share our home in relative peace is the same resignation that inhibits so many from demanding more. That I, with my hiking boots and harem pants and broken Hindi, was met with warmth rather than contempt both filled and broke my heart.

And so I tried to throw off the perspective of a foreigner. I stopped trying to imbue every interaction and every landscape with meaning and significance. I tried to just—walk. To feel the heat and the heavy, wet air, to surrender to the mass of flesh, fervor, belief, pain, and hope that is this miraculous and impossible country. To succumb to its people. To my people.

I was rewarded for it. One hot afternoon, we decided to stop and rest in the shade of a small shrine that lay off the main dirt road. Its caretaker came out to greet us. He had a pale blue cloth wrapped around his waist and another white cloth wrapped around his head, and he wore two wooden necklaces. He had a magnificent, greying beard, and his small eyes vanished into wrinkles when he smiled. He had a watch on one wrist, and a red thread—a Hindu custom—on the other. He brought us some water, chatted for a few moments, then left us to rest on a stone platform under a tree. Lulled by the wind and the soft lowing of the ever-present cows, I drifted off to sleep.