Burning Garbage

“That’s them burning garbage next door,” so a fellow FSO winked at me. The acrid smell had seeped into our oddly appointed consulate and was now permeating the conference room’s chilled air. It was OK, really. That was my fourth day in India and, by then, I’d been used to the omnipresence of garbage.

So many writers, bloggers, and friends had warned us of this: India knocks you on your back, kindly helps you get back up, and then offers you a chair. If trash was the only thing I saw this tour—and it is everywhere—I would be in for quite a trip. And fall. But not even a week in, I’ve learned to look past that. What makes India unique, or any foreign place for that matter, is not what shocks and appalls our delicate sensibilities, but rather what challenges them.

As I was driven home yesterday—another thing that’ll take some getting used to—I began to think if India liked me. Like, like liked me. I asked Abbie what she thought and we tried to hash out what India thought. It kind of felt like we were seventh-graders, glancing at the beautiful but intimidating student across the hall and wondering if a dropped pen, turned head, or batted eye-lid spelled out our future together. Last night, though, I said to her, “You know, I think it’ll be OK. I think India’s alright with us being here.” The gecko running across our apartment floor and monkey/bird calling outside seemed to echo some sort of sentiment.

That’s the thing. When travelling abroad, one has to crack the code of foreign-ness. What does this country mean when it does this? When people nod their heads every way but Sunday and all the water not in bottles can make you sick? When you walk down the road and almost think your name is Otto by the frequent calls of auto rickshaws tailing you with hopeful eyes? It’s the semiotics of this new society Abbie and I are attempting to pry open, at least just a little bit.

But then again, we’re the new ones—two twenty-three year-olds standing on millennia-old dirt and listening to a language first spoken some 7,000 years ago. We’re the ones India is trying to make up its mind about. India has centuries of experience with foreign bodies entering its circulation. It will take more than a few days for it to decide to accept and enfold us, or to expel us and send us the way of so many conquering/ed armies.

For now, we’re overjoyed to breathe India’s trash and to walk, or try to walk, down its streets in search of an elusive grocery store. In these streets lit with the lights of the new century is a maze older than our ancestors. We’re honored to step where billions have stepped and hope to be remade like so many others.

In the end, no one can resist for too long.

-Matt