the journey begins.
After several months of reorganizing our lives around the trip, preparations were finally complete. They had to be. We bought cheap, non-refundable airline tickets, told our clients that we were leaving, and our house renters were moving in the next day. We carefully packed a pile of necessities that had accumulated in the middle of the living room into our backpacks.
“Water filter.”
“Check.”
“Flip flops.”
“Check.”
“Toothbrushes.”
“Got ‘em.”
And so on.
Then, on a full-moon winter night, we took off for the other side of the world.
We set our intention to spend the next four months thoroughly steeping ourselves in chai culture. Our mission: to connect with people and document our experiences with chai drinkers (which in Nepal and Northern India is just about everyone), tea farmers, tea leaf pluckers, fellow chai wallahs (makers of chai), tea cup potters, spice merchants, dudh wallahs (milkmen) and the cows too. We realized this was much more than a creative research project. It was a personal pilgrimage to the land where chai was born and continues to flow in every home and at chai stands on every street.
Although we enjoyed one the most memorable times in our lives, it was not easy. For a foreigner, a full India experience includes a certain degree of discomfort. Inevitably, you get sick, either from amoebas in the water, a chronic cough from the thick pollution, or any number of obscure viral illnesses. Often, frustrations are brought on by cultural gaps and attachments to what we perceive as ‘normal’. Litter, noise, spicy food and extreme smells overload the senses. At the same time, the lack of a Western standard of personal space amongst a billion people, and the sometimes-frightening, heightened awareness that we are living in the mystery and anything could happen, became endearing. We oscillated between ecstasy in the present moment and longing for home and our own bed. We prayed continuously, laughed a lot and were constantly reminded of how blessed we are. This is what made our chai pilgrimage a spiritual journey.
I grew up in India, but have been living in the US for last 24 years. It is funny, but whenever I go back, sometimes I feel right at home, but sometime I feel very much like an outsider.
16 Jul 2008 at 10:42 am
i can relate a little because when i go home (to the Midwest where i grew up), i feel the same way, at home in some ways and totally out of place in other ways. did you see the film Namesake? i loved that film, and of course it made me long to go back to India again, but completely separate from that it, it made me appreciate and think about my own roots more. sometimes that can be more challenging than appreciating others. i think all of our roots have so much to teach us AS WELL AS cultures outside our own. just in different ways.
17 Jul 2008 at 5:02 pm
Yes, I did see the namesake (last year on a flight to India
) I liked the book even better.
You know when I first used to go back to india (3-4 year after coming to US), I used to be irritated by a lot of stuff there – the dirt, the crowd, the inefficiencies, how no one seems to be in any hurry. Now, I am fascinated by it – the crowd, the dirt, the inefficiencies , and how regardless of it all, things somehow work
21 Jul 2008 at 5:27 am