I stared out the window as her breathing slowed to a rhythmic pattern, the jet lag creeping up on her. I was grateful that, for once, the dogs behind the house were quiet, and Carrie would be able to rest. The exhaustion on her face when she arrived seemed to be from something more than the journey. She was asking why I had run halfway around the world, but I wondered what had caused her to do the same.
35
The next day Carrie woke up early. It would take her a couple days to adjust to the time difference. We waited until dawn and quietly left the bungalow while everyone else was still asleep. I had my camera with me, it having become a habit for me to carry it in case I happened upon something interesting I wanted to make sure I remembered. During my time here, I’d learned that my memories of the country had gotten distorted by how long I had been away from it, and I wanted to be able to bring myself back to these moments, to this culture, no matter where in the world I was or how much time had passed.
“We’ll buy you some shoes as soon as the shops open,” I said.
Carrie looked down at her flip-flops, standard-issue California gear. “What’s wrong with these?”
“Trust me. You don’t want to be traipsing around in open-toed shoes all day. The streets are filthy. There’s a ton of debris that could cut your feet. Not to mention animal dung all over the place.”
She shuddered. “Yeah, let’s avoid animal shit and Indian hospitals.”
“Agreed.” I pulled the heavy front door closed, and we stepped onto the road leading out of the subdivision.
As soon as we emerged from the gate, Carrie gasped. She stared at the shantytown across the street. The inhabitants had a direct line of sight to the posh living quarters within my family’s upper-caste neighborhood. “That’s pretty fucked up,” she whispered into my ear as she looked back and forth between the stark socioeconomic lines.
“I know. Space is a scarcity. It’s not like back in LA, where there are entire areas of the city for the poor, rich, et cetera. Here, everything is mixed together. You can’t pretend the poor don’t exist.”
I considered how this scene would appear to someone who hadn’t grown up seeing it. For me, straddling the two cultures had been a way of life, and both seemed normal or abnormal depending on the context, but I could appreciate how jarring each would be for someone who hadn’t previously experienced it. Tushar would likely look at America in the same wide-eyed way that Carrie was now experiencing India.
There was more activity than usual for this early hour of the morning. Men along the side of the streets dyed giant spools of string into bright pinks and oranges. The string was then coated with a paste of rice flour and ground glass to make it abrasive enough to cut kites from the sky. Nearby, vendors had set up stalls where they were selling vibrant paper kites—patangs—with contrasting colored circles on them, all in preparation for the Uttarayan holiday.
“You picked a great time to be here,” I said to Carrie as we trudged along the side of the road. “The annual kite-flying festival is in three days. You’ll love it. It’s a citywide competition where you try to be the last kite standing.”
It seemed as if an electric current flowed through the air as the city prepared for the festival. Smiles were wider, eyes shone brighter, and no one seemed to mind the flash from my camera as I documented the process. Children stood on flat rooftops, flying colorful kites and practicing cutting others with razor-sharp string. Their shrieks of laughter filled the air. People were too distracted to stare at Carrie as much as they normally would have upon seeing a white woman in the city. Even the cows on the street managed to stay out of people’s way while they prepared.
“It looks like you’re getting pretty comfortable behind that lens,” Carrie said after I framed a shot of a little girl swinging a kite around her body as if it were a lasso.
“Yeah, it’s been fun to think creatively after so many years of being a lawbot.”
“You seem happy doing it.”
“I am.” I realized that as different and unexpected as my life was from where it had been a few months ago, I was content for the first time in a long while. It was amazing what time and a change of place and perspective could accomplish.
The next day, Carrie and I hailed a ricksha and made our way toward Happy Snaps. I had not seen Tushar since Carrie had arrived. Inside, we found him tying bright-orange string to a royal-blue kite with a yellow circle on it. The paper was so thin it seemed like a strong wind could have ripped right through it, but I knew looks were deceiving. Indians had turned kite making into a science many generations ago, and not much had changed over time.