Out of the Air

Generally, as airplanes approach my destinations my curiosity gets the best of me and I stick my head to the glass of the window, straining my neck to see what there is to see. I push at the pane; I get frustrated that my view is limited to what I can see through this tiny immobile peep hole. And at night especially I am annoyed that so many cities look the same. I remember gazing down at Bahrain and thinking it looked just the same as Samoa or Bangkok. Small lights forming a conglomerate of one to form a golden puddle - a glowing bruise on the landscape.

But as we lowered to Mumbai the patches of light seemed somewhat different. They crept up onto hillsides in the outskirts of town, and were boxed in by clean lines where white turned to black. But the difference was that if I looked closely, the lights almost seemed to be pulsating; beating to a rhythym both chaotic and harmonic. I felt I could actually see India's heart.

And immediately upon exiting the airport I remembered the India we touched four years ago. And the memories envigorated me - this is the asia that bustles with its own life, even as it is influenced by the West. This is the chaos of taxis actively plowing through red lights forcing trucks to stop; this is the random serenity of a cow in the street in a city of 16 million people.

Two days ago I had felt that my memories of India might have been misleading me. That perhaps in storing my previous experiences for later viewing, my mind had edited them and made them more foreign, more extraordinary. And I thought that perhaps Mumbai would prove the most calm, most familiar of all of India's cities, given its strong British history, given its high (for India) GDP, given everthing.

But Mumbai is not New York, it's not Jakarta, it's not Kuala Lumpur. Mumbai is Mumbai; and the enchanted India that my mind remembered is still very the enchanted India that we see around us. India is still exponentially foreign; and she still ignites the senses as no place else is able. It feels good to be out of Asia, and back to the Subcontinent once again.