Welcome to India.Ari

Welcome to India: to pass through security you must walk through a highly suspicious metal detector seemingly made out of wood, probably fake wood, and place your bag on what appears to be a conveyor belt moving through a metal box with a man passively watching something on the metal box, presumably a screen, but more likely…the metal box. Amazingly your luggage arrives and the man holding a name card with your name on it is right there near the front of the crowd.

The man, a young man about your age, makes a call or two on his cell phone, interjecting an English word here or there, and says a taxi is coming. Then he makes another call and the guy he’s talking to is all the sudden 50 feet away on the other side of some motorbikes. You lift your bag over the bikes and walk through, as they are parked far to close together to fit you and your bag between, and follow him to his taxi. Apparently the man who was holding the name card and the taxi driver are good friends. Your bag finally fits into the trunk after significant manipulation of both the bag and the trunk and you find your way into the car. The driver enters on the opposite side of the car that you are used to and from then on nothing is familiar anymore, at least not for a while.

You are on a road but there are no lanes. People driving cars, auto rickshaws, scooters, motorcycles, bikes, are all weaving in and out of each other in what to you seems like the kind of graceful disarray you might arrive at if you turned the world on it’s head. Your driver seems to be honking with his forearm as he drives, everyone seems to be honking, ceaseless honking. While you sit in the back and try to keep your mouth from gaping open and gathering dirt and dust and whatever else is flying around your two friends up front are engaged in some sort of heated discussion, you imagine maybe about cricket. Eventually, a very long eventually, you arrive at a stoplight and people actually stop, and this surprises you. Then the driver will turn on some Indian pop music and everything will seem ok, even great, for a while, you even think you notice yourself laughing out loud. You arrive at some smaller streets where you can see remnants of old stop sign indicators, but clearly, very clearly, after only being in the country for one hour you are already very certain of this, nobody would stop at a stop sign in India.

You pull up at your new home around 10 PM. Your temporary host briefs you on the padlocks and the lights and the AC and the bathroom doors that don’t yet exist but will apparently materialize tomorrow. Your first is impression is once again slightly mouth gaping, but you focus on the fact that the AC works, there are few bugs, far fewer than the dizzying array you expected, and that you are deliriously tired and should go to sleep and avoid any further impressions. Sleep then hits you on the head with a hammer.

You wake up in the morning with a bug bite on your neck. Today will be your first full day in India, you think. Today you will ride on the back of a small motorcycle with no helmet and you will experience several power outages: welcome to India.