At New Delhi’s traffic signals, you can buy anything: pirated books, discounted magazines, clumsy Chinese toys, blessings of various gods and goddesses, sunshades for your car, an acrobatic performance by young children, copies of the Bhagavad Gita, boxes of tissue, bright yellow dusters, flowers picked up from graveyards, slices of coconut, booklights—you name it. Someone I hear about is even planning to teach street children enough poetry so that they can sell poems at traffic lights! I’m always amazed at the variety of things, and at the way any new hot sale item finds its way to almost all South Delhi traffic lights simultaneously. I marvel at the ingenuity and the excellent business sense behind the steering wheel covers in the hot summer months and behind the little children who try to shove The Cosmopolitan down my throat because, apparently, I look like a woman who reads and, apparently, women who read must read that magazine. Who thinks of these things, I sometimes wonder; how do they pick these things up? I hardly ever buy anything at traffic lights, but I do sometimes enjoy the sheer variety of this “street market” in the most literal sense possible.
Today, though, I saw a new one that made me very sad.
An old, hunched over gentleman was selling little Indian flags. Independence Day is around the corner, and my first thought when I saw those was of our Independence Day celebrations in school, for which we were all expected to paint little flags to bring to the auditorium and wave on command. Some of us painted them, others made life simpler by using colored paper strips, and still others bought ready-made flags very like the ones the old man was selling at the traffic light today.
After that initial moment of nostalgia, though, I was struck by the profound irony of the situation. This old gentleman, too old even to walk comfortably, was dodging traffic and jumping onto the road every time the light turned red in an effort to sell a few flags… to this man, what do 61 years of independence mean? To him, and millions of others like him, whom
Maybe I am being patronizing; maybe he has a lot of reasons to be proud of this country, maybe I should stop wondering about the thoughts of someone whose life I do not understand. But then again, if I stopped wondering about other people’s thoughts, I would no longer have a reason to write!
The aeroplane I looked at this morning, was it 5 AM yet? Before sunrise anyway. Looked at it flying through the pre-dawn sky, flashing its lights, and I thought about who was in it and where they were coming from. I felt suddenly wistful; I wanted to be on that plane. Going where? I’m not sure; I’m not sure it even mattered. But going somewhere.
These years of wanderlust have left their mark. I don’t want to settle down. I don’t like having such a static identity after years of fluidity. I want to move between cultures, between sacred spaces, and reconstruct myself daily. Being an outsider is hard, but I’m realizing that it’s also the only way for me to be in really, truly in touch with myself and with people around me. That’s who I want to be. Not Indian, not Mexican, not American, not Argentine, not Mongolian, not anything but me.
What does home mean now? I am at home but am I at home? No, not really. Will I ever be at home again? I don’t know, but I have my doubts.
I think of the safe abortion poster that I woke up to in Lupita’s bedroom for so many weeks—the one she gifted me the night I left
As I write that, I laugh, because I can hear Mauro saying these words. These are his words, when and how did they become mine?
Some weeks into the summer, though, I was struggling. I was part of, and had been asked to facilitate, a group of nine volunteers from four countries; we were living in the same room and sharing all our chores but were not yet able to resolve, or sometimes even recognize, the intercultural and interpersonal differences that arose between us. In my head, I was straddling four languages—English, Hindi, Spanish, and Nahuatl—and experiencing something of an identity crisis. I was also quite unwell and could not handle the manual work I had signed up for. Meanwhile, back home in
Slowly, the tiny threads that had bound my life together seemed to snap, and different pieces—my family in India, my illness, my college life in the USA, this adventure I had taken on in Mexico—weren’t holding together anymore. I felt as if someone had ripped out the threads of a beautiful patchwork, revealing mere rags randomly placed together.
And then, that week above all others, my team had decided to work harder on our relationship with the village community. Another team member and I had promised to go to a local family’s house that night to learn how to make tortillas. Now, the last thing I wanted to be doing that particular night was make tortillas! But I had made a promise, and I wanted to be a responsible facilitator, so I went.
We walked into the small mud hut, and seated ourselves in the kitchen. A small light bulb hung in one corner, and our hostess showed us how to light the wood stove most efficiently. She handed out cups of steaming atolé, then pulled out the dough and began making tortillas. She was a traditional Nahuatl lady and wouldn’t hear of letting her guests work, even though that was why we had gone there! So we sat on her floor and talked to the rhythmic beat of her hands as she slapped the dough into perfect circles.
Her 4 year-old grandson, who loved chattering endlessly in an adorable mix of Spanish and Nahuatl, heard our voices and came into the room: he too wanted tortillas and atolé. He snuggled up to me and sat there for a while, slurping the sweet milky drink, messily scooping up the sticky rice at the bottom of his mug, then rushed to the other room and brought in his older brother as well. His mother, with her one-year-old daughter, soon followed. Then, the father came home from work, and we had a little party of eight, sitting around a simple wood stove in a mud thatched kitchen, and drinking hot atolé.
Dioselena, the baby girl, overcame her wariness of strangers and crawled up to me. Four year old Noah clung to me from one side, and his older brother,
Later, as Noah and I sat down for a while on our way back to the schoolroom where my team and I were living, the little boy confided that he planned to go back to my country with me. When I asked him if he wouldn’t miss home and his family, he was silent for a long moment. Then he replied bravely, “Sí, pero aguanto” (“Yes, but I’ll bear it”).
With that child’s declaration, all differences of culture, economic class, nationality, gender, and age faded away. Suddenly, we were just two human beings, enjoying each other’s company, bound together by the simple joy of play. My own identity crisis as I struggled between languages and cultures, all the conflicts within my team, and even my need to be with my family in that hard moment, faded into the gentle knowledge that it was all okay because, at the end of the day, we are all in this together.
In the 7 weeks I spent in Zoatecpan, I learned more about life and love and myself than I had imagined possible in one summer. And the defining moment of my stay there is simply the memory of a four-year-old boy sitting with me on a rock, with miles and miles of cornfields around us, telling me that he can bear leaving behind everything he knows in order to be with me. That boy and that moment will forever bind me to Zoatecpan, to the Mexican countryside, and to every child and every adult in every part of the world who knows the joy of play.
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