Anticipation

I’ve been getting restless lately, so perhaps it’s a good thing today’s got me occupied with a six-page philosophy paper. I usually get this way when I’m verging on two weeks without travel. Actually, I think it’s been more like three weeks but I kept myself busy enough last weekend (more on that soon) that it feels like two. Anyways, it’s Indian Philosophy today, Cognitive Psych in-class presentation tomorrow and then I’m leaving for Chennai, Pondicherry and Mamallapuram Thursday night (more on that too).

This restlessness is mostly intellectual; it’s not that my classes here aren’t engaging – they are and I generally love them. But there’s very little work assigned for outside of class, a fundamentally good thing as it’s kept my weekends clear for travel. Academically exhausted as I was upon arrival, I really didn’t mind. And in fact, I’ve sufficiently filled my free time with meditation, yoga, exercise, reading, writing and exploring the city to keep myself from getting, sin of sins, bored in India.

But even with all of that, I’ve been feeling a bit torpid. To some extent, I miss getting thoroughly engaged with whatever I’m studying on my own, outside of the classroom. While, as I said, I’ve been a more avid leisure reader than I’ve been since I was eight years old, plowing through Goosebumps and Animorphs, the nature of the reading has been more like savoring than concrete learning, probably because I’m a sucker for fiction. Come to think of it, my nonfiction reads have been mostly handpicked by past professors – that’s something I’ll have to learn to start doing for myself. But for now I’ll work out this restlessness through writing.

As for recent adventures, Taylor and I went into the old city (downtown Hyderabad) last weekend to properly see Charminar and the Laad Bazaar. I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to be calm and poised amidst the same chaos that stunned and overwhelmed me to the point of brainfreeze four months ago. I can so clearly remember the city’s sensory overload when CIEE unloaded us some day in our first week here and struggling to take in something totally unlike anything I’d ever encountered. Having grown up between rural and suburban Wisconsin before moving to college-town Madison, my experience of ‘the city’ had been limited to Milwaukee’s evening music scene and a handful of afternoons in Chicago. The difference between that and the hundred-thousand sights, smells and sounds sounds sounds of Hyderabad is staggering. And stagger I did, one warm January afternoon, between smoking rickshaws and yelling, pearl-waving vendors in a single-file American line into a local restaurant. Sidenote: Any hopes I had of a country-boy lost in New York City moment have been thoroughly dashed – something tells me Hyderabad’s got it all, louder, brighter and inescapably closer.

But there Taylor and I were, this last infinitely hotter Saturday afternoon, immersed in the same old ocean of noise (three points if you get the reference), sweat and smoke, feeling, of all things, lucid tranquility. A creeping smile betrayed my confidence in a place I could have nearly shit my pants mere months ago. Like when I’d sorted the ins and outs of local transportation, I felt like I was making it. And it’s a good feeling – making it from scratch was part of the unique challenge India presented that lured me from my countryside cocoon.

The day was pretty run of the mill – we saw Charminar, shopped a bit at the Laad Bazaar and had some damned good Chicken Biriyani and Pallak Paneer at a local hole in the wall – but it was good to spend an afternoon in the heart of the city so nonchalantly. It felt like I’d made Hyderabad somehow my own. But then again, it’s I who’s adjusted. So really, it’s the other way around.

Last night I realized I’d unwittingly arranged to spend Easter Sunday in Pondicherry, a former French colony on India’s southeastern coast. To my great fortune, a number of 18th century European-style cathedrals still operate throughout the city, promising a truly unique Easter service experience. Besides, no one does brunch like the (residual) French.

The semester’s end is nearly in sight – two exams next week and two the following before I hop an airplane to Kerala, free as a bird for six long weeks. A small group of friends and I have worked out a fantastic post-semester itinerary (which I’ll post here soon), taking us through India’s essentials, well-known or otherwise, before they fly home from Delhi and I travel a bit more on my own. I’ll be fortunate enough to have friends from the University in Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta, who’ve offered (read: insisted, for those of you unfamiliar with Indian hospitality) to show me around their stomping grounds when I’m in town.

All in all, I’m bursting with the same excitement I felt in the last weeks of 2008, waiting for my next great adventure to take off. Study abroad made for a marvelous excuse to live here, but this is the India I’ve really been waiting to see – India without the frills and comforts of being an American student at UoH; India, thousand-faced like Vishnu with a few good friends and essential possessions, seen from the jungles, ruins, backwaters and mountains with a sense of what I’m seeing, a sense of where and who I am. This is going to be brilliant, electric, unreal.