India 1

Hello! This is Sara.
Well, I’m really not sure where to begin (which, I am told, are not strong words for a beginning). I have seen, heard, felt, smelt, and been dealt so much since the beginning of this trip, that I can hardly begin to pin down words to suitably describe our adventures. For instance, the word “yellow” does nothing to describe a mirror-embroidered sari reflecting glints of sunlight off of a woman’s shoulders as she perches on the back of her husband’s motorcycle, clinging to his shoulders. The word “yellow” cannot capture the motion of her fluttering scarf as it trails a mile behind her in traffic, with rickshaw honking after the bike, the whole highway constantly threatened by the insistent vibrations of blaring car horns. “Green” cannot capture the camera-shy twist of a parrot’s wings as it dives in and out of the plastered walls of a collapsing mosque. “Demure” does nothing for the painted eyes of an Indian woman as she ducks away from the street stalls of shouting hawkers, glances trained to her bruised toes. “Corpulent” comes close, but is still an ineffective word for the round belly and sweating face of the leering cab operator who has politely robbed us of eight-hundred rupees.
As you can see, of course – words can do nothing for experience. However, I will do my best to describe our adventures here with my scant cover of language.

Here are some older paragraphs I wrote, long before I really knew what we were about to encounter. They won’t get you to India, but they will get you halfway here:
The moment one steps through the doors of an airport terminal, all personal identity ceases. We become a singular rush of colors, shoes, and suitcases. Some faces are distinctive. A few voices rise above the guttural rumble of a thousand bodies: “You sir! Are you flying Delta this morning? Ma’am! Might I interest you… Look at the dog! Mommy I’m HUNGRY; don’t bite strangers! Henry sit down or we’ll go back to Mexico,” but with a loss of identity comes a loss of memory. Details become like wet rocks, impossible to cling to in the liquid rush.
Flights become long and indistinguishable. In eight hours of sitting without standing, meals served, a tango of plastic water glasses, it is easy to watch three films back-to-back without acknowledging the passage of six hours. One’s familiarity, sleep patterns, and hunger are left on the ground. There is no difference between day and night. Three days are one, and time zones fluctuate like the readings on a Richter meter. Thus stripped of personal identity and human physicality, we fly, encased in our seats, cryogenically frozen but wide awake.
Tracking through my vague memory of our flights is like watching a tape being rewound. Somewhere in the static and whine was a stop in Amsterdam. Everything was square there, and the ceilings were low. The usage of color was drastically different from the hermetically sealed white walls of our airports.