Goodbye Bangalore, And On What Lasts

My parents are sweet.

 

It’s the small things that trip you up, at first.

Dad turning onto the right side of the road. The discomfort of seeing people use their left hand to eat. The liberating feeling of sitting back in the driver’s seat. Reminding myself to not spell favorite with a u.

The small changes.

The sleek, new water dispenser in the kitchen. Seeing that the Christian Science Reading Room has been replaced by the Barber’s Den on Trapelo Road. The new photo frames on the small chest of drawers in the living room. How smooth the main road is now that it’s finally been repaved.

But give it five days.

And I’m back driving my mother’s Volvo on the right side of the road past The Barber’s Den like I haven’t even spent the last eight months speeding around Bangalore on the backs of motorcycles and autos on any damn side of the road that there was space.

I’m continuously awed by the adaptability of human beings. How easily we can slide back into old routines. I’m intrigued by how forgetful we can be, but also how strongly we can hold onto our memories, and what a curious bundle of contradictions this makes us.

My family dropped by my grandfather’s office last week. He’s a shy, gruff chemistry professor, and he told me that as long as I got what I wanted out of my trip, he was happy. I don’t think I quite knew what I wanted out of my eight months in Bangalore. I didn’t go to India with any strong conviction knowing that this was the right decision. But I did feel challenged during my time in Bangalore. I felt conflicted, I felt excited, I felt confused, nervous, excited, overwhelmed, content, whole. I felt like I lived it. And that I had let the experience mold itself into what it needed to be.

I don’t know how long the relationships I established in Bangalore will last. I don’t know when I can go back and see my students or my friends. I don’t know how long this feeling of acutely missing the city will linger. I don’t know how long I can wear the pink and green kurta that I bought on Commercial Street until the sleeve rips or the sequins fall off. The mehendi I got on my second to last day has already faded, and all that is left are a couple of barely recognizable light-orange swirls on the palm of my left hand.

But while the memories, relationships, souvenirs and the like may eventually fade, my experience in Bangalore will always remain with me. One of my favorite bits of wisdom from my boyfriend has been that every single experience makes you who you are. So the damage has been done, Bangalore. You’ve changed me, irreversibly. And that’s what remains.

…

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees- must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers. Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different […]

― Aidan Chambers, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn

 

I was rewarded with an EVEN LARGER Totoro when I returned.