29: Lost and Found in Human Connection
(Readers note: this blog post felt too personal to add images of travel locations or monuments so please enjoy more words than images on this post.)
Today I walked into the most beautiful home decoration store I’ve seen in all of India. It was three stories of magical home furnishings, textiles, ceramics and fanciful baubles and jewels that I desperately wanted to adorn my future home with. Maybe it’s the antibiotics I’m on or maybe it’s just that India has whittled down all of my superhuman strength but within 30 minutes I was ugly crying in front of the sales clerk.
In the last 12 hours I’ve had two of the most impactful, sad and beautiful interactions while in India. The first a widowed Indian woman in her early 30’s and the second an openly gay Indian man. You simply cannot imagine how it touched my feeble and delicate heart being able to know and connect with these people, even for such a short time. It restored my lost faith in India and it reinforced how incredibly hard it would be to live a life that strays even the tiniest bit outside of the culturally acceptable norms.
I’m not shy in acknowledging that I’m beyond done and ready to leave India. 3 months traveling primarily solo was perhaps too long of a stay but I can guarantee that I learned far more about life and myself than I did in Latin America.
However, in these moments I notice that my mood and temperament have soured. I’m bitter and angry and short tempered. And most of all, I just want to complain about it. While there were been major ups and downs in the first 4 months of traveling, my current feelings are uniquely correlative to the hardships in India. India has drained me of some sort of life force that I had when first starting to travel. Latin America wasn’t easy per say but it’s complexity lacked complexity. And as a result, India has made me tired. I’m struggling to find a way to refill my reserves so I have the strength and stamina to continue this journey. And yet, there’s something that is intoxicating and continues to draw me to this foreign land. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I got a 10 year visa, it sounds crazy, I know, but I’ll be back.
And then I had the honor of meeting these two humans. And the earth’s axis shifted.
Story 1
Around 11PM I entered my dorm room to start the night’s ritual of getting ready for bed. Of the 4 beds in the room, 3 were occupied for the night. I started with small talk with a roommate who had been in the dorm already so we already knew each other. I was asking her how her day was and just casually saying hello. As she asked me about my day I quickly fell into my current default mode - complaining. “I’m sick. I’m ready to leave India. This place is so hard…” and so on. I’m not sure why I default into this mode with people, let alone Indians, but I do. It’s my own way of coping with the circumstances I’m currently in. Maybe I’m searching for the empathy of others who “get it” to validate my feelings? Or maybe I’m desperately trying to find the tiniest of strings of validation to hold onto so I don’t feel consumed by the dark of India.
She, like many others, agreed that these are all true statements. And then something magical happened. Our conversation began with the most innocent of topics and continued until the wee hours of the early morning. It started simple enough, somehow we got onto the topic of online dating and she admitted that she too, has used dating apps but that she had to lie to her friends that she uses them. She had to lie about the simplest and most benign act of trying to online date. While that didn’t surprise me, it also blows my mind. But it didn’t end there, everything just compounds from the simplest of events. For example, she told me that if a woman says openly that she “doesn’t know about marriage” that means she’s a slut. Straight out. No other evidence needed. It is just fact and truth that she is a slut. She told me her cousin divorced his wife because she “asked to be spanked in bed” and the idea of this act was not just shocking but unfathomable to believe she may have been with another person before marrying him. She told me that she has seen a therapist but that she has never told any of her friends or family. You only go to therapy if you’re literally insane. In an odd twist of fate, she shared that it is ok if women make more money than their husbands but only if the man has access to it. And that married women cannot have any male friends but it’s totally acceptable for men to have female friends.
I knew the answer but couldn’t help question it. Is this real? Yes dear friends, this is real.
We covered topics ranging from sex before marriage, dating Indian men, divorce, socially acceptable norms for women, sitting in the unknown of not wanting to have babies, career, money, Indian male masculinity, shame and how the ABSOLUTE worst thing you can be in India is…vulnerable.
She had had lunch earlier in the day with a childhood best friend, a friend who is supposed to know and love her with abundance and without judgement. During the conversation she mentioned to her friend that she is lonely. A moment of true vulnerability and also an eerily similar moment I’ve also recently shared on the blog. It’s a real human emotion and we all experience the beauty and pain of it. She shared with me that instead of her friend saying literally anything to support her, instead she felt judged and shamed by her. This judgment from sharing her feelings continues to reinforcing that the worst thing you can be in India is vulnerable because being vulnerable means you’re anything but the socially accepted norm.
In my opinion, being normal is India’s greatest desire and biggest weakness.
This woman then had the courage to share with me some of her most intimate and deepest truths. Things she may never have shared in detail with her closest friends. Over the course of hours she shared with me that 3 years ago she lost her beloved husband and now she’s working on rebuilding a version of her life desperately trying to speak her truth but struggling to even be empowered to do that in India. The answer her friends and family gave her to battle her grief was to just find another boyfriend. But the rules change when you’ve lost a partner. She should really only marry someone who has either lost their wife or is divorced. If she happens to meet someone who has never been married the questions surrounding this would be scandalous. How could he possibly marry her when she’s already “been had” by someone else?
This woman was endlessly fascinating, wonderfully eloquent and courageously bold. And as I heard her story, I fell in love with her. To see this fierce woman speak her truth to a complete stranger was awe inspiring. Knowing she is an Indian woman doing this fills me with a wonder I can’t articulate in words. This doesn’t happen here. Legitimately. This sharing of feelings and being vulnerable does not happen in India. While we exchanged stories and life metaphors there were moments where I was furious at the grand scale injustices that it is to be a woman in India. While I didn’t want to offend her, I felt like she would understand when I had to emphatically ask her, “Why are you still here? Why don’t you leave India?”
She deserves a life filled with unconditional love. A group of friends who allow and welcome vulnerability. A life that is messy but not necessary to sweep that mess neatly under a rug. The ability to date whomever she wanted and never have babies if that was her wish.
Everything she described to me filled me with desire. A desire to leave, to flee, to escape, to get up and abandon the ship. So I told her, “Leave. Leave this place and follow your heart somewhere else. I wish, in the deepest parts of my heart, that these things you want could exist in India. And perhaps in time they will. But they don’t right now. And now is all we have. So leave.”
I could go on and on about the conversation we had, the things she shared and the jaw dropping realities of life. But what I hope (and think) it ended with is that I inspired this woman by articulating that she has an option. And perhaps this is first time that an option is actually tangible. And that option is choice. The beauty of choice is that she will always have it. Today, tomorrow or in 5 years from now. I urged her to choose leaving India knowing that this is way easier said than done, especially coming from me. Choosing to leave doesn’t mean you have to leave forever but at least for part of your life. I want her to experience the world and a country like the US or Australia or Canada where being the version of you that you own is far easier than being a version of you that culture and society wants you to be.
Story 2
Perhaps you can imagine, talking with this woman left me feeling all the feels. I think being a woman in India is next to impossible based on the way that I want to live my life. But being gay in India seems just as complicated.
Homophobia and denial run deep in India feeding the lifeblood of misunderstanding, shame and guilt. I had the privilege to meet and befriend a gay man in OSHO and travel with him for a few days. We talked about this in detail and about his interactions with gay men in India and how all of it was based in secrecy and lies. So it was a complete shock to my system when I was in the store and the sales clerk openly mentioned his husband.
I hesitated for a moment but feeling my privilege as a western woman I went for it. “Did you just say husband?” I asked him. “Yes”, he said, “I’m married.” He then proceeded to tell me that 10 years ago he came out to his family. His family basically disowned him for 2 years and now, 10 years later, while they don’t totally support him, he has a relationship with them again.
He just recently moved back to India after having lived in New Zealand and Australia for the past decade. He and his husband met and fell in love in Australia. A gay Indian man forced to leave his country of origin to seek refuge in a culture where acceptance is far greater than distance. His family has never met his husband in person and in July they will meet for the first time.
While this story is not new or unique to gay people in India. I’m not naive enough to realize this doesn’t happen all over the world and still happens far too frequently in the US. I tell this story because the couple’s long term goals are to leave India for residency in Canada. The recurring theme of India is leaving.
They left. They came back. But they will leave again.
Everyone who can, leaves.
I broke hearing this. In the middle of the store I started sobbing. Not just tearing up, full on crying. It was because two humans shared some of their most personal and intimate details of their life with me, a complete stranger. It was everything I needed to hear and I feel honored that they entrusted me with their stories and truths. It’s not lost on me that I may be breaking their trust to share their accounts here, but hopefully keeping this anonymous will give them and the universe faith that I’m forever in awe of what gifts these interactions were.
He was sweet and patient with me and my tears and I think (or hope) that he understood that I was overwhelmed by the greatness and beauty of his vulnerability. It filled me with unimaginable joy to know that he is open and proud. He told me, “I’m not going to hide it anymore. I’m confident with who I am. And that’s just the way it’s going to be.”
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again and again and again; human connection is my drug of choice. Meeting people on this journey and getting beyond the benign who, what, when, where and why questions has been the most powerful and life affirming experience. I’ve long forgotten what I did in Antigua, Guatemala but I can tell you the names and faces of the the 3 women who I shared dinner and tears with during an emotionally vulnerable and liberating night.
When I started this journey I knew it wouldn’t be easy. But in the most foreign of lands there are still people who are just as desperate as I am to figure it all out, stand in their truths and live this one short and beautiful life. Not just knowing that but experiencing it makes it all worth while.
- M
