There are, at least for me, a number of stages I have to go through when I travel. It takes me a substantial length of time in order to arrive at the conclusion that I have, in fact, arrived where I told everyone I would be. On short vacations, this has the effect of sucking all the fun away. When you’re in Italy for eight days you then spend the entirety of your time denying the fact that you’re actually in Italy. Forget the nude sculptures and the young fashionistas and the people speaking Italian everywhere. You could just as easily be in Little Italy for what you’re spending on dinner.
The first month I spent in India, the twelve of us students would break prolonged periods of silence, or drawn-out moments of profundity, with a startling assertion.
“Guess what?” one of us would whisper conspiratorially. (This was usually me.)
“What?” the others would ask, an edge of genuine curiosity tinting their voices.
“We’re in India!” Sometimes they’d laugh, or smile politley. Mostly they just rolled their eyes. But it was a gag that failed to grow old because it was taking an eternally long time to strike any of us, to really strike us, that we were here.
The evidence was overwhelming, of course. There are no autorickshaws in New York, and you can’t do half the things people here do in public in Washington. You’d get fined limbs if you left your dog’s waste piled on the sidewalk or grass or asphalt like that in Pennsylvania – or if you lifted up your pants and, ah, left it yourself. The whole game was different. The first real rule about Delhi is that this is a city that has never, ever played by the rules.
The shock wore off, eventually; I’ve been here for two and a half months now and there are days when I feel it, days when I navigate the city effortlessly because I know where I am and I know exactly what to expect. I speak the way they speak, I wear the clothes they wear, and I give the beggars and street vendors the same disdainful looks that the natives give, like someone disappointedly evaluating a sewage spill, or the food that’s gone bad in the back of the freezer.
There has been only one thing, though, that helped me skip those first few steps to acceptance from the moment I got here. And that thing is – wait for it – laundry. Rather traditionally, we lack either a washing machine or dryer here in the residence. There is also a distinct lack of large rocks, which immediately crushed my dreams of filming my life as a Bollywood story with a big musical number taking place beating laundry down by the Ganges, me spinning around and belting out Hindi in a colorful kurta while my loyal crew of backup dances in unison behind me.
What we do have is a bucket. Sometimes, if I borrow from the girls upstairs, I have two buckets. My roommate and I scoured through town one day and bought a bag of detergent. And so when I have put off the painful but inevitable task of laundry for as long as I possibly can, I man up, roll my sleeves up, and turn the faucet for the bathwater on. One bucket of cold water with the detergent mixed in, one bucket of warm. Soak for an hour, hour and a half maybe, rinse in the warmer water. Feel my hands pruning from the moisture, the detergent irritating my skin like a dozen ants crawling through my fingers. Try not to scratch. Usually wind up slipping and landing facefirst into a bucket of soapy, dye-colored water.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
At the end of this feat I haul the bucket up and make my way to the roof. Sources are unable to confirm, but I may have tried, once or twice, to carry the very heavy and dripping wet bucket on my head. If this indeed happened, it probably didn’t go so well. That would at least explain why I don’t carry the bucket on my head anymore.
By the time I get to the roof it is usually night. This is not because we have an endless series of stairs but rather because, as explained above, I procrastinate for as long as possible (and longer than is feasible).
The roof at night is peaceful. The air is always exotically thick, like taffy or chewing gum or even that silly putty we used to play with as kids, to flatten against the comics section of the newspaper and try to lift the print of colored ink onto the doughy surface. The air’s like that – almost unbreathable. Hardly better than it is at midday. Sometimes I even think it’s worse.
I take my clothing out of the bucket, lifting one piece at a time cautiously, between thumb and forefinger. I let the water rain down off the cloth, then squeeze up and down the garment with one hand, sending more brown water cascading over my arm and onto the flat cement of the roof surface. At this point, the ants that have gathered around my feet in hopes of a nutritious human meal usually begin to scatter in fear. If they don’t, they are swept up in the devastating flood of Noah.
I twist the clothes then. Roll it up like a wet towel you’re preparing to snap someone with. I never question where I am, at this time. There is something about the trees looming so close above me, hedging in on the rooftop, or the size of the bats flying low overhead, or the proximity of the moon. There is no question that I am in India. It is not a countryside, or a bird’s-eye view, or a version of laundry that you would ever mistake for Minnesota, or New Jersey. Wringing the wet cloth out so hard your bad hand starts to ache – that’s India.
Sweating on the rooftop at a time of night so late even the dogs have stopped howling and hunkered down for the evening. Listening to the birds and bats and sounds of traffic, always traffic, blaring off in the distance and knowing with every fiber of your being that you are a long, long way from home. This is what has centered me. Swept me along for the ride. Doing laundry has convinced me faster than the life-threatening traffic or stomach infections or cows strolling casually down the sidewalks that I am exactly where I have promised everyone I would be.
India.
Step five.
