It’s my last night. Which is really strange. And although this is the final India-based post, I hope to keep the blog alive – it has been such a beneficial exercise for me and I know I will have more to say (and more pictures to post) as I continue to digest the last few months. But for the time being, this is how I’m feeling about it all:
For the last three months in India I’ve been aware of sometimes possessing an Insider/Outsider status in light of my pre-existing relationship with the country through Abhinav, his family and many of our closest friends. And there have been moments when this sense has set me slightly apart from the general traveller set, particularly those here for the first time for whom India is one enormous ongoing shock to be exhaustively dissected/puzzled over/bitched about at every possible opportunity. Or those people who are here for different reasons to mine. None of whom I judge – let every visitor to India have their own experience – but the differences have gone some way, along the road, to explaining why in many situations I have found myself much more comfortable in the company of Indians that of other travellers. And why, on a number of occasions, I have been asked if, or where, I live in India. Which is always funny because on so many levels I am so obviously foreign to this environment, and yet I do feel a significant degree of comfort here, which is perhaps what people pick up on, and which I can’t attribute to anything specific (unless you believe in reincarnation), aside from the fact that so many important people in my life are from India.
But this pre-existing relationship with India – as I have written before – was largely second-hand; reflected and refracted through the experience of others, through literature and through received imagery. And as I reflect on the last three months I realise, gratefully, that this journey has bequeathed to me what I had hoped for – my own India; a wealth of thought, opinion, emotion, founded on intensely personal and hugely varied experience in this massive land. The confirmation of a long-held intuition that India will play a significant role in my life.
And describing this sense of affirmation that I have gained here is the best way I can find of explaining why, the night before I leave India after such an incredible journey, when my adventure is ending, it feels above all else, so very honestly, like the most exhilarating beginning from which the rest of my life will stem.
