I’ve raced through South India at breakneck speed in the past five days. It’s been more of a personal journey, however, tracing my father’s ancestors and glimpsing into a world that I never knew existed. My dad is part of a dying ethnic breed – Anglo Indians. His family is the result of European colonization in India – a mixture of Indian, British, Portuguese, Dutch, and even Irish and Scottish. My great-grandfather first settled in the town of Trichy and, while I was there, I walked through the houses that were once his and explored some of the land he had originally bought. It was an incredible experience. In addition, I managed to visit a huge Hindu temple which contained an elephant that was accepting money and blessing people with its trunk!

There are so many things here that you wouldn’t believe or even understand unless you saw it for yourself. The sexism here is rampant and frustrating. You never see women outside. Only men. Women are at home. Women get married before they’re 25. The caste system ends up playing more of a role than I ever imagined. But what is the POINT of searching and praying for marriage and money if the end result is a lifetime of misery? So many of the women look unhappy and I’ve met many people whose arranged marriages have broken up. All these people married off to strangers at young ages to please their parents, please society, secure their futures…WHAT future? To me it seems like such a plastic goal. Free will is something that I have always taken for granted.

I’ve become very accustomed to the Indian Railways over the past few weeks. Train stations are chaotic, dirty, bustling and amazing places. The trains themselves... let’s just say that last night I spent the night in a train berth, watching the cockroaches crawling around the walls. People sleep on the floors of train stations, and even put up beds on the platforms. And people are selling something everywhere – chai, coffee, mangos, bananas, newspapers, sandwiches, the list goes on. It is colorful and uncensored, like much of India. I saw an ad today for “bacteria-resistant briefs.” I doubled over laughing in the train station.

It’s time for Bangkok now. I still haven’t processed India. I think I’ll be reeling from its effects for years to come. What a phenomenal adventure! I’ll close my India section with a poem I wrote a few days ago on the train:

VOYEUR
Quiet hours on a rocking train –
Staring out yellow water-colored windows
Lends time to ponder the barefoot boy
Running through mud-soaked fields,
Feathered rice shoots licking his heels.
Then, next in line his mother:
Chocolate sinew arms balancing water on head,
Sashaying violet and orange saree-slung hips,
All squinting eyes, swinging hair, iron grip.
And ancient brown suede hills
Steeped in tradition and bounty reaped by man,
Roll unperturbed, hugging the land.
Mother and son, beneath the monsoon rain,
These flashing moments on a rocking train.

~Hope