The Final Weeks

I’m writing this as we drive down the highway from Anand on our way to the airport at Baroda, where we will catch a plane to Varanasi to meet our friends Jeanne and Wally. I can’t quite shake the feeling that now I’m leaving home rather than returning home; somehow that apartment on the IRMA campus really became home to me in the three months we were here. We’ve been saying our good-byes to people in the last few days – to Kajri and her husband over supper, to Ajay and Mokul at Café Coffee Day, to Vivek over a South Indian meal at a restaurant downtown, to Ashok on the telephone, to two of the students who came by our apartment to say good-bye as we were finishing our packing last night – and it made me realize that despite the disruption of our late February trip home, we really did start to make strong connections to people. I console myself by imagining that I’ll be back, although I have no idea how or when.

Since I think the picture of the town of Anand that’s been given in this blog has not been very flattering – I’ve described it mostly as a dusty, unattractive, small-town outpost, which is true enough, but perhaps not the whole story – I want to close our time in Anand with a peek at another side, as illustrated by these photos. One is of an event we came upon one day as we bicycled just before dusk down one of the dusty, littered, residential streets riding back from shopping in town: a circle of girls and women right in the middle of the street, dressed in gorgeous saris, clapping and dancing a slow, simple dance to rhythmic music pouring from a boom box, some of them balancing brass water jugs on their heads. Round and round, round and round; it reminded me of people dancing the hora at a Jewish wedding. And indeed, when we asked later, we were told that most likely it was exactly that – dancing as part of a wedding celebration, which often goes on for several days. An unexpected, public, sudden beauty – with people on motorbikes, us and others on our bicycles, the usual stray dogs and cows, casually passing by.

The other two photos are the two main buildings of a temple complex that is a short walk down a dirt track off Amul Dairy Road, one of the main downtown streets. You go from a road full of honking cars, auto rickshaws, buses and other vehicles, strewn at the edge with trash, plastic bags, pedestrians, and mangy-looking animals, crammed with stalls selling everything from snack foods to auto parts, to a quiet open space with grass and flowers from which the temple buildings rise. Shoes are lined up at the bottom of the steps; each person, as he or she enters, rings the brass bell at the front of the temple; and on the floor sits a small circle of worshippers, melodiously chanting and clapping, over and over and over. Here, for me, is the soothing other side of the noise and chaos – not the religion exactly, which, to be honest, means little to me, but the sense of something outside of the busyness of normal day-to-day life, something that has nothing to do with striving and getting, something that just repeats itself, timelessly, pointlessly, comfortingly, like a nursing mother or an old grandfather in a rocking chair, back and forth, back and forth.