Reflections on India… one year later
“It sounds like you didn’t like it there.”
This was a new friend’s response after he asked me to explain what living in northern India had been like.
Perhaps he concluded that because of my description of the sights and sounds and smells of living above a slum community…
Or perhaps it was after I explained the struggle of adjusting to the poor air quality, unsanitary water, and vastly different cuisine…
It also may have been his conclusion after I told him about the everyday event of witnessing men peeing on the side of the trash-strewn road while their eyes followed my every move…
If you look at my life in India from the surface level, it would be easy to conclude that I didn’t like living there.
But I immediately responded to my friend, “Sure, it was often difficult… but I loved it! And I miss it every day.”
What the surface level doesn’t display is the depth of beauty in the culture, experience, and people of India.
Honestly, my first several months living in India were every bit as challenging as the pictures above might lead you to assume, and in many ways, even more so. But the perspective-changing switch for me came when I began to develop relationships within the community. From my local vegetable seller, to the aunties on the street corner, to my Hindi language teacher, it was the people who inclined my heart. When I developed relationships and began to identify with the delightful people of my city, I fell in love with the place.
Now that I have been back in my passport country for a year, the ache of missing my life and my people on the other side of the world has lessened a bit. Yet at this point, I still describe my life in terms of “pre-India” and “post-India” since it was such a formative time. Even looking back at pictures, it almost seems surreal that those photos are truly reflective of where I lived. In my limited time as an adult-like human, it was – by far – my most momentous experience. But I realize that someday it will just be a chapter in my life and not hold the significance it does now.
About a month after returning to the States, I was explaining to a mentor who lived in Asia for most of her adult life how I was struggling with being back in America. I shared the following metaphor: growing up, I was a square surrounded by other squares. I fit in and I knew how to act. But when I moved to India, I was a square living among circles. I stood out in every way, and I had no idea how to act like a circle. Yet, over time, something began to happen… my square sides started to morph as I became enculturated and learned language, and I formed more into something resembling a triangle. When I arrived back in America, I very quickly realized that everyone in my passport country was still squares, but I felt at odds as a triangle. I asked my mentor if I would ever become a square again. She gently shared her wisdom that in her decades of cross-cultural work, she had witnessed many Americans spend some time overseas but then return and adjust back into the expectations and norms of American life. Then she looked at me and declared, “Jaimie, I think you’re a triangle.”
Over the past year, I’ve realized the tension of being a triangle… there is this feeling of never quite fitting in anywhere and my identity never quite making sense to the other shapes, whether squares or circles or even trapezoids. But here’s the thing – I’m not the only triangle! I’ve discovered other triangle-people all over the world who can relate to my feelings and experiences. Beyond that, there is a great benefit to being a triangle in that I can adapt to different cultures and situations more readily as well as relate to individuals who feel “other”, since I know intimately what it is to be an outsider and foreigner. Since I am orienting my life toward cross-cultural work for the foreseeable future, being a triangle may actually be a gift.
