Adjusting

Today I saw a cow eating a discarded newspaper. It struck me like most things have in recent weeks: unexpected, unsettling and seemingly absurd.

Most agree that the human mind has an inherent tendency to impose order upon the chaos of its environment by classifying its contents. Without classification, knowledge of the world and the ability to live in it would be impossible. Culture is the method of classification that imposes a collectively shared cognitive order upon a world that, objectively, is totally incomprehensible.

What happens when one must adjust to a foreign culture? What happens to one’s now useless systems of meaning once used to decode her surroundings? How can one collapse her order of the world into another foreign system of classification? And what is lost in this translation?

It is impossible for me to assimilate the world I see here with the world as I know it. As I adjust to life in India, I abandon my points of reference along with an urge to classify all that I encounter. I try to process information without judgment. All that is simply is. Begging amputees, constrictive gender roles, indigent children are no longer individual moral crises. They are simply connected parts of the larger cultural system.

There is a boy who lives in the open-air courtyard beneath our flat. I estimate him to be about ten years old. It is hard to tell, however, because he is confined to a metal cot. He remains prostrate through the hottest hours of the day, feebly swatting at flies. Sometimes he pulls a thin blanket over his entire frame, giving the impression that he has disappeared.

I always look for the boy on my ascent and descent from the apartment. Yesterday I was surprised to see the cot empty, the blankets thrown aside. I glanced around for a clue to his whereabouts. Several yards away I caught sight of his emaciated frame, silhouetted by the brilliant morning light. He limped slowly, with rigid, unbending limbs like those of a scarecrow.

My first impulse is to approach his bedside, to bring him cold water or maybe a snack. I know enough Gujarati to ask him his name. “Aap kaa shubh naan kyaa hai?” I could ask. “Maru naam Amelia che.” If I wanted to engage in further conversation, I could easily ask one of my Gujarati friends to translate.

But the truth is that far more lies between this boy and me than a barrier of language. Although we live less than thirty feet apart, we occupy different worlds. I cannot begin to imagine what he is thinking during those long, lonely, humid afternoons.

Last week we visited Ahmedabad’s train station for the first time. When Jay picked us up for a late dinner, he insisted we go to the only twenty-four hour restaurant in city. We drove through the desolate roads while the radio blared Indian pop music. The streets looked eerily beautiful, like the abandoned set of a movie. Colorful wrappers littered the ground and twinkling canopies of lights were suspended overhead. With the warm breeze blowing in through our car window, it was almost possible to forget the sea of bodies that had inhabited the same spaces hours earlier. It was as if we were momentarily privy to a post-apocalyptic vision.

But the streets were far from deserted. Thousands of motionless forms lined our route. Tucked beneath blankets and lying in rows. Families huddled together in an indecipherable mass of arms and legs. As we approached the station, the density of sleeping people increased.

After parking the car, we walked to the nearby platform. Jay noticed my eyes fixating on a sleeping teenager lying in the middle of our path, her face resting directly on the filthy pavement. “It is OK,” he said, waving his hand as if to fan away the stench of the nearby bathrooms. “This is their bed. This is the real India.”