Sad to go

Today we left Thane to embark on a tour of India. I’ll miss it here. I loved how our street is full of people even at 10PM, and that I could go around the corner to buy mini-bananas any day, any time. I loved the fresh pressed sugar cane juice I discovered two days ago by the train station, and the sweet, mild mosambi juice I’ve been chugging for two months.

The Thane synagogue is a fifteen minute walk from the apartment down a busy street. I made the trek pretty regularly in order to teach a Hebrew class for the local Jewish community, one of my favorite parts of the week. Walking down the street meant dodging merchants pushing their wares on carts around torn up potholes, taking care not to stomp on stray dogs napping on the sidewalk, and avoiding autorickshaws creatively weaving through traffic. I would pass small, booth-like businesses and watch employees go about their day’s work: huddling over a sewing machine, tinkering with motorcycle engines, measuring fabric, making photocopies, selling vegetables. Staring idly out at the street from behind a counter, and double-taking at the foreigner staring back. There is something intimate about seeing people do their work. In Thane, on the synagogue street, no one disappears into mysterious, air conditioned sky scrapers, to emerge shivering and squinting eight hours later. Women tend to children, men congregate on the corner where autorickshaws pull over. Life is so visible in a way I’ve never experienced. At home, even our car windows are tinted. We northeasterners notoriously need our space, but now I’m understanding some of what we may be missing, how we can disappear into our spaces in a way that humans aren’t meant to live.

A friend and I decided to do some last minute shopping by the Thane station during our last week here. Thane station is the greatest ever open market, plus no tourists come to Thane, so everything is reasonably priced. We stopped at a stand, its shelves stacked high with sparkling glass bangle bracelets. The shop owner must have pulled fifty bracelets off the shelves for us to try on and admire, and we each bought a few different sets. When we finally chose, he wrapped our selections in newspaper, then motioned for our wrists. We outstretched our arms, and he slid two green bracelets over each of our hands, as a gift. This man probably makes the equivalent of two dollars per customer, max. His gesture represents why I’m feeling so bittersweet about the end of my time here. Everything people say about India is true: people are corrupt, they take advantage, they don’t care about each other. But all of the opposites are true too: they are generous, they always want to help, they are humble. Everyone I’ve ever smiled at here has smiled back. I’ve never heard anyone complain about studio apartments for whole families, or one room metal shacks, for that matter.

If you have a job, you do it well. If you’re the guy down the street who photoshops passport photos, then by god, you will remove every digital forehead blemish you encounter, if it’s the last thing you do. If you’re the guy who stands between the tollbooth and the cars, passing money back and forth, if you’re one of four waiters for the same table, if you’re the woman who delivers my nail polish to the customer service desk at the grocery store so I can literally follow behind to pick it up because that’s how things work at the grocery store, then you do that job, and save up some money, and buy a motorcycle, get an education, and keep doing life. 

India isn't a simple place, but there is clean simplicity in Indian values: being with family, being devout, respecting elders, respecting education. 

I'm excited to see how I'll be different when I'm back home, cause you can't spend time in a place as crazy as this without letting it touch you. I'm really happy I came, and I'm really sad to go.