Ahemdabad Visit

 My daughter and I had gone to India to visit my husband and I was supposed to write about my experience but it has been more than a month since we have been back and I still haven’t been able to write about it. I guess I’m just lazy so I am thinking it’s time to redefine my commitment to my blog. After all if I have decided to have a BlogSpot I should at least have the courtesy to pay it a visit from time to time.  So I am thinking, sorry no, not thinking, promising actually to write at least one blog in one week. Hopefully I will be able to be true to myself.

First things first, my experience in India, because I promised someone. Thank you Jean Paul for all your support.

The farthest I had been to India was Guwahati and that was also a long time back when we were in college and our father had taken us there for a brief visit. I should say I enjoyed the visit but it was too brief to make an impact on me. The thing that is most prominent in my mind from the visit is the traffic, both human and vehicles.  This time was an entirely different feeling, firstly because it was the first time I was in charge, of both myself and my daughter. It was intimidating because I had to manage everything even though it was not my first flight. Thankfully we reached Ahemdabad without much of an event.

My imaginations about Ahmedabad were what I had seen about India, and what I had seen about India was what I had seen extremely little about the west Bengal. Boy, was I in for a surprise. Firstly the place was absolutely huge. I was there for a month and every time we passed a street I could never recognize it even if we had gone through there numerous times. That could actually be blamed on my extremely poor sense of direction which was an advantage in the sense that every day was a new adventure to me. Lhenkay was actually better at it than me because at least she always knew when we were getting close to her favorite mall.

The people and places were as variant as the colors. There were people living in gorgeous houses to those to whom the streets were actually home, kids who spent entire days in malls to kids who went around the dangerous streets begging. We actually gave money to a kid and asked him to buy something to eat with it instead of wasting it because we thought he might do that. To be certain we asked him what he was going to buy with that money and he said, “Atta” which is flour in Hindi. And I felt stupid for my earlier thought because not only would that feed himself but his family as well.  We also saw men, women and children in deep slumber on the sidewalks at night and Sonam told me about how they would all be curled up under a tree during the monsoon seasons and still be sleeping well. People who have everything suffer from insomnia and it’s amazing that those who have to struggle to get the next meal should be able to sleep so soundly and in such conditions. 

If there were sky scrapers then there were slums, if there were places where no garbage was to be seen then there were places where the sidewalks were filled with them. People and places that were as different as black and white, as beautiful as pink and blue, sometimes mixed with shades of grey and all the colors in between. And so was my experience, short lived as it was.  I could write on and on but sometimes you have just got to know when to stop.