Fresh Feeling

September 24, 2012. The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all. – Doug Coupland

I left for Tanzania this day last year. We slept in a long hotel room, sheets clean and duvet molded to my anxious body. A rerun of a reality TV show ran in the armoire, and I remember a light sleep, a tender hug in the white bed.

I lie in an ivory bed again, electronic music from a sleek computer, an economics textbook with bold markings and graphs and relatable jokes interspersed to keep me from wavering. My roommate Skypes or studies outside on the unscratched window seat, glossy wood reflecting dark circles. On my walls, I tack paintings from a local artist, the wood crooked and the paint sloppy, a Thai prayer with Chinese script floating vertically under a thin Buddha, waxed paintings of a Maasai warrior in lavender twilight, a lashed and slender and rouged women draped in French jewels.

I leave the lights overhead dark, and instead surround myself in yellow glow, in non-fluorescents peeking from pale shades.

Thousands of friends, of acquaintances brushed against in a Latin class, of that boy from summer camp, fill my screen, spreading ideas and opinions and political affiliations and life changes. Words and photos and stories topping another, competing, and overflowing, ceaseless.

I sit in a grey blanket, the warmth draped across bare shoulders, across sunburnt shoulders.

I am alone, still. Music shifts through playlists, though minor violins and through aching piano chords, and I hear words seeping under the door, of people friendlier than me, more pockmarked and smarter too, and I search for loneliness, for quotes or blogs or other nineteen year old girls with melancholy dispositions and soft white skin.

My mom read an article before I moved into my new dorm of regrets, of things to do in four years of brick buildings and white columns and blonde boys, of thumping bass shocking a dirty living room floor, of red cups strewn, of nights alone.

I start anew, the cracked and damaged wall repainted, no longer stained with Indian curry and hung with red felt prep school banners.

I yearn to make this school mine, to make the paths and churches and domes dear, to paint my story in the walls and crevices of this school.

Ends, snip snip, a broken hair falls

February 25th, 2012. Four channels of smiling Indians, singing love and longing and dancing joy and lust. One of static. A loop of Sherlock Holmes on the sixth and I leave my world for two hours, my offshore offwhite walls and vacant seats and cold stewardesses who wear tiny red bindis and tightly felled buns. A man waits for the bathroom, silver textured prayerbook in right hand, cotton white prayer beads in the other. His suit is tacky, his horse bit bracelet too, but I am offensive with my legs curled under, my feet bare. 
I watch the place creep over water and soon over land on my screen, on the others beside me, and I wish I was not here. My fingers cramp, stiff, poor circulation, I tell myself, the air vents recycling breaths from the Freckled French boy behind me, his awkward sister, with her gaudy pink shirt and the twenty-something Indian boy across the aisle who pretends to look ot my half shuttered window at the murky blue, when actually stares at my frizzy hair, illuminated from the cold light.
I wish for the barred light at Mother Teresa's, streaming in panels and angular shape that cut the washroom in intersecting lines. The dappled warm light that angled across limbs into the side room where I squeezed packets of green fruity shampoo into a tumbling bottle, the thick liquid dripping like moss into the funnel. Light that found unseeing eyes, found shivers and poses and insecurities, found Ama's uneven nostrils every morning, as I perched on her checkered bed. Found Maya Gudi and her unworded hug, her gangly arms wrapped around my soft hips. Light illuminated Anu's smile, coaxed by a rub on a pudgy into sparks of missing teeth and beauty interspaced. Pushpa and Priya as they exercise their tired English phrases to my worn Hindi, their naked bodies hunched into rolls, the stools soaking as they wash each other. 
The light of cold mornings where I hold Fatima's hand as she shakes with Parkinson's, Mary, wrinkled and arm twisted. The brown and golden light on Rosie's face as she scratches her lice-covered and flat hair, the slight namaste as her fingers form a temple, a church steeple, a holy dome. Ranjeet Kaur's stoic faces she hold out bruised and sore fingers, brown and purple and pink, for my awaiting needle every morning.
The slight obtuse light filtered by smooth walls and smells of curry as Shanti and Belmadina shear and sort fresh cabbage and carrots into metal buckets. As they hold slim arms to my blood pressure machine, the silver mercury rising as I beat my hands in pumps, and pumps and pumps. 
The strong and sometimes severe sun light over the meadow as Anita and I sit on the edges of cries, picking grass, her silence profound, I think, my contant chatter indicative. I don't understand, she will say, and I say, ok. 
The cloudy light as Kamla prods me with a stick, her green shawl askew on her confused hair. Pushing me toward the top of a dusty tree, unripe oranges hanging from yards above. I can't reach, I say, and she moans, and I say, No Kamla, nein, no oranges today. You're not even supposed to be having them anyway, come on, aja, chello, aja Kamla. And she moans again, and I pull her stiff wrist towards the meadow, and I take the barbed thin stick from her hands, gently, and throw it on the ground among crumpled leaves. She moans, pulls bak, and her green shawl falls on the ribboned concrete, and so I don't press her. I sit next to Sima, an overweight unstable woman who excuses her lack of diet and exercise on fatigue, a head cold, I am tired, no sleep, my eyes are falling out, they hurt, my arm is swollen, my feet too. I watch Kamla with my hand shading from the heat, and she drops the stick, inching towards the middle ofthe field where she stands motionless, ragged men working in the walled field feet from us, Priya and Alyssa pulling weeds and overturning cracked yellow soil with little shovels. 
I return to the tree, my fingers avoiding thorns, and knock down an orange. I peel the yellow fruit for Kamla, bolo donyvad Kamla, say thank you. Donyvad, she says, weakly, chipped mouth hinting at a smile. 
We walk back to the center, my hand resting loosely in Suzanne's, her eyes blank, voice soft, my other in Nico's, and I sing snippets of familiar pop songs that they do not understand. 
Kamla drops her orange twice, the road soaking in dirt and grass, and she washes the adhesive fruit in a weak spout protruding from a bed of wild flowers, warm and rosy and yellow blossoms for prayer and patience and patients. She delivers the orange, few pieces eaten, to Ama's bed, and I feed the rare fruit to her. She spits the seeds from her bed onto the floor, and we both chuckle. 
Donyvad, Kamla, I say. 
Pictures they draw, Sunita blue puffy flowers, Sebrina a cross, I love you, Jaya her name, bold and purple and dominant and she looks guilty and sneaky, and I laugh as I take the crushed and ruined crayon from her small hands. I collect them under the end table, covered in a cloth to hide my jacket and IPod and scratched keys, for use next week. The bulging mirror next to an out of date calendar, the picture of a beautiful and effeminate Jesus basking in the creamy light of the small room.
My light in the place is red and green and blue, the horizon line seeping onto screen, my plane having flown a little further. Clouds peak and sag, spirits and stratus and seeming the same as the place I came. 
I support Ama as she shuffles to the bathroom, and I am not fazed, the splattered urine on my once-white torn shoes. She hunches as we walk back to her bed, and I tuck her into the flimsy blanket, as always. Every day for the past three months. I call Sebrina, can you translate? Ama, today is my last day. I won't be coming back here. Sebrina overflows my words, repeating adding, subtracting, I'm not sure how much and Ama starts too. We cross our words, running sentences, she she starts crying, her voice cracks and she says, hold my hand, please, please do not forget me. I wish you a long and happy life and a good man and many children, why are you leaving? We will meet again, either when I am I alive, or when I am dead. And I start crying too, I promised I wouldn't, I will never forget you, I promise. Don't forget me, she says. My hand rests on the top of her blanket, abler her bones that I can feel shift beneath. 
Sebrina says, she wants you to hold her hand, so she can bless you. And I peel the cloth back, hold her hands in mine, mine patterned with intricate designs of orange tapestries, done for a good price, good price, by a seventeen year old in Green Park. I love you, I say, and she says it back, or imitates it back, Iwuvyew, and I cover my wet mouth with my hand. I stand up, bye bye, I wave, my henna wet and glowing as I wave to all the patients sitting upon their pink and ornage and yellow beds preparing for an afternoon nap. 
The light dims in the cabin, and I turn my harsh screen off. I wish I relived my days, my last one too sad, but wish I had another, wish I wasn't going to another country to start again, again. 
Someone behind me sprays a noxious fruity perfume. Who are you meeting? I hope you have a wonderful time. 
Orange and white lights shine in rows through the darkness to me, miles above. I see traffic stopped, cars moving, halted. I will not forget. You are preserved in my heart, in my words. 

Maybe words are holy

February 17, 2012. Sanitized dew forms puddles on palms, and I rub my hands together, to show her. Devi runs hers together questionably, circles of whiskered lines, and I take her fingers in mine. The boil on the bottom left corner of her mouth juts out as she objects, takes her hand away, and I do not comfort, only pull her trembling arm back, my gloved hand impersonal and moist. 
I hold her fingertip, wipe the tip dry, and punch the needle into the calloused skin. She cries, and the bright room locks her sounds so all turn, and I squeeze the tip harder, the drop of blood forming, swelling, reflecting windows and eyes widening and tearing, and I catch the moment, the blood, in my dark blue reader, and I unhook my hand, watch hers fall, waiting for the hourglass to stop spinning, waiting for her hatred to drain. 
She squeezes the blood farther, red crossing down her hand as it reaches sanitized pools and drips quicker, and Sister Maria shakes her shoulders, shames her, orders Devi to the cracked sink where Lady Macbeth wipes clean. 
I write the number in silver metallic, the date, the time, her 327. I raise my hand above my head. High, I say, and she is embarrassed, turns her head and looks at the tiled floor, her boil lowering, and I say, no more sugar. Sister translates. I say, ok, acha, done, and still she standwatt racing my gloved hands through the air. 
She watches, they all watch, as I prepare the next. Urge the tiny needle into a hole on the tip. Extract the needle. Place into a glove, to be discarded among spoiled cabbage and cookie wrappers tomorrow evening, the cows witness and the peacocks too but none other. Replace the reader. Spray Ranjeet Kaur. Repeat again. 
The courtyard reflects the halfhearted sun, catches warm breeze, reverberates screams too. Alyssa holds her torso and she thrashes, an animal past tipping. Terri binds her arm, I duck teeth and bites and kicks and cut, cut, the sound my goal. My nail clippers flashing, pieces of dirty fingernails falling or flying, up my sleeve, in her hair, but I am fastest, and so I click again, once more, my promise, one more. Rohima, her two yellow teeth pincers in an open mouth, bends her neck, about to sink into my tense arm, and I rip away.
She bites herself instead.
The toes are easier, knees bend at odd angles, and she screams, AMA, AMA, mother, mother, and I think of mothers, only briefly, a fleeting second of flashing comfort and anger, before I spin from her thrash at my stomach. 
I finish, and we stand, the yells unnoticed as I shakily pour fingernail clipping caught in dimpled newspaper into a rusty square garbage bin, the semicircles falling into a banana peel, an unripe orange, a crumbled cracker. 
I lift Tuja Ama from the tangerine metal bench, my hands cupped under her armpits, around her shoulders, her stomach, where she won't fall, but I feel her collapsing as we get closer. I call for help, I cannot support, but no one comes, and so I boost myself, haul her frail body to the wheelchair. I lift her up again, grasping at the thin grey pattern of her dress, bring it up farther, farther. I push the bedpan with the toe of my ruined shoe under the wheelchair, and back away, three feet, my yard of respectful distance. She pees into the metal through the hole in the chair, some streams missing, and gliding instead around the tiled floor, snaking in pale yellow towards me, spraying my ankles, and I make note for next time.
I haul her body up again, slide the dress down, her knees covered again, and I measure my steps to hers. 
My work is ugly, my shoes soiled and stained and my fears evaporated. I learn to cut hair, lice tripping down the purple sheet I drape over swollen necks and back, and bald spots less numerous. I bathe, and I comfort, I see naked woman, stomachs caving in folds ands hands crippled, breasts downturned and skin soapy and dripping, and I do not feel disgust. 
My last week is ahead, my goodbyes stuck in my throat, and I pour late hours into vapid reading and chatter, bowls of fruit and trips to markets and cafes and tense streets where bombing threats hang dangled.
I promise to teach blood pressure readings, promise to write emails and books and guides, promise to promises to promise to create fire, Prometheus my vision. I promise to change, promise to not ask for change, promise to Ama to return tomorrow, promise her even though she cannot understand, promise my love, and she cannot understand, but somehow, my promises ring, my fire abounds.  

I'm sorry, I didn't revise

February 1st, 2012. I have never seen people more ugly, I think to myself. Most smell like soiled curry and all have rotting teeth, decaying amber pillars under bulging noses and crawling hair. I track years through stiff calluses and I shiver when I receive a hug. They hold my hand and I sweetly recoil. I watch as Kamla grabs dripping lentils in dirty fingers previously clawing out lice from her ear and dribbles the yellow brown into her hollow mouth. Rice cascades and splatters, the ripples of food extending down her stained sweater.
Jyoti screams and rubs her head back and forth across a leather pillow, and she laughs and cries out, and I am frightened and disgusted. She has a bucket under the barred bench to collect her excrement, and I cannot bear to rub her back, cannot bear to face her mother who tries to pour water into the tossing mouth, cannot hold her hand. 
I run from the washroom, ashamed that I cannot wash Najma, I do not want to wipe her raw skin, damp from the night before. 
I do not want to touch the untouchables. 
I remember my first days, weeks, at Mother Teresa's. I wished for sickness, for a broken limb, for relief from the horrid. 
I wished for beauty, in a country where I could see only the smog, the men whose hair crawls up their cheeks and whose eyes crawl over me also. For white lines and straight roads and some beautiful elderly I could tend to in plush beds and beeping monitors and clean white hair. 
And maybe still, I wish.
But to paint beauty in facial features, of lotioned limbs and verdant landscapes, is easy. 
To paint the beauty of a family, of friendship, of love in a screaming and silent center, is harder. 
Kamla pries the blanket from Ama, who shivers in the sliver of the morning, and I rise to stop her. Kamla cries, her vacant eyes not seeing me, and she sobs. She runs and comes back, and I guard the bed, and she pushes me, slaps me, elbows my stomach. Others stop her, and hit her face and I wish for words. She again returns from the washroom, her bare feet tracking in grey water, bedpan in hand, and I move, and I wish I knew the words for 'I am sorry, I did not understand.'
Mary, mouth sealed by folding skin, eyes almost closed as well, leads Fatima, who shakes with Parkinson's, into the courtyard. They sit unspeaking, unknowing of each others name, their hands with wrinkles bound in veins and tendons resting near. 
A woman comes, beautiful, and holds a box of orange sweets, precious in this world. I take one for Ama, and though she wishes for the foreign compound, she says, Kamla, Kamla. I call Kamla over, and give her the candy. To Ama she gives her own.
Can I pretend to give justice to this beauty?
I stare at my face in the crooked mirror, outlined in baby blue and bulging in the right corner.  
Beauty is fascinating, captivating, inspires ships and poems and music and wars, and I try to remember why I thought beauty is in the millimeters of difference in nostril size, in the angle of the eyebrow, in the size of an upper lip. 

In Thai squiggles and dots

February 26th, 2012. My henna fades, orange lines blurring into form and shape, detail disappearing into pores. I sit on the second floor porch outside our room, Nalgene chipped and dirty and full with bitter water. I am the only in my group. Jack, short for something unpronounceable, found me as I strode towards gate three, the meeting point, arms of lead and suitcases, tourist tshirt my name. 
I gushed about the buildings glimmering tall and angular through the night, the traffic, worse in India but I didn't say that because he complained, the heat and the taxi driver talked in clipped oriental sounds of why the air-conditioning wasn't working, and I just wanted to get there, how much longer did you say?
The others have traveled before, swam in mountainous rivers with elephants, slid and watered at parks and toured temples, hoping. They decorate the s
Dcked whit drudges with drawing for the staff, a red pocohontas, a sunburnt Ariel. TO JIEW! LOVE SAM AND ABBY and I wonder where I will fit. We sit at the kitchen table downstairs, and I eat a plate of tart pineapple. They ask questions, care not for my replies, my reliefs. 
I wake hours before my twinkling alarm, find company of bits who peck the ruddy roof parallel. My ankle holds poison, the hit of a bump rising. I play plush Spanish music.
I am anywhere, I think, wiping the oblong beads of sweat that form on my nose tip.

Meditation can help, some say

February 21st, 2011. I unroll a freckled pink mat onto the dusty concrete, my footprint tracked in gold sand. The match in my hand flicks, shooting up a jet of smoke and I light the incense, perched on the back of a turtle. The turtle sits beside me, oriental designs curling like the twists of ashes and burning wood transformed. 4:52. My eyes close, flutter, my legs cross, hands in a loose ball, birds screech in voices I don't recognize, frequencies in keys changed. I hear their taloned toes tap on the pieces above, the blue plastic awnings, flaps from streetlamp to chipped railing to trunk dripping in vines. 
Breathe, in, out, in out in, these birds are obnoxious, I wonder if I screamed, would my zen be broken? The people three stories above, the ones with a soft white curtain pulled close, would they wonder at the white girl with bra-strap peeking under a loose sweatshirt, let me fix this, oh, right meditation, breathe in, out, in, out. 
My thoughts wander, my mind, unhinged at women carrying cloth under pale arches, the boy and the other and the girl now too, playing ball and catch and loudly whispering, I cannot see, I hear, in circles and squares. Is there a mind? I ask, my science urging me to disavow perceptions, neurons firing, muscle contracting in my left leg, and I twitch, breathe, breathe, breathe.
I gather the distracted child, every flag and tan line and spot under my eyelid cause for wander, for wonder. I gather, release slowly, without permission, and collect again. 
I click the button on my iPad. 4:59. Is it possible? Breathe, again, diaphragm contracting, releasing. In my statue form, I live my verbs. 

Without order, Mosquitos bite my wrist

January 23, 2012. Alex, Kelly, Kathleen and I drove to Jaipur this weekend, a Sikh man named Jassi explaining the yellow flowers abundant on the roadside and braking and steering between camels and hundreds of multicolored trucks. We passed under the waning sun, turned amber through smog and cut by bare trees and telephone lines crossing the grey sky. Our hotel room a brothel, the lights dim and bedcover red silk, and we slept curled in tight knots. The voices of white tourists crept in from the lobby, and a singing man outside our window waited for the cries of birds in the morning.
We ate toast smothered in butter and pink jelly and then drove through the tiny town of Amer, filled with goats and camels and dirt a shade darker than Delhi. We left the car at Amer Fort, bridging the gap between curling pink walls that stood against the stark mountains surrounding the village. Alex and I rode an elephant, named Lucky, to the top of the fort, and caught the reflection of shimmering lakes and blue mountains in our bare faces. 
The elephant driver, swaying on the neck, asked for a tip, please, please, tip, tip. And we didn't give money because a sign forbid us, but I felt guilty, still. Lucky idled away, her painted trunk swaying in splashes of pink and blue and green. 
We visited palaces and temples and tombs, red and pink paint chipping from shrines. I stood in a tower, looking across the mountains, down onto the city of Jaipur, the sky clear and blue, experiencing the world through my camera lens. 
Kathleen drove to the hospital late Saturday night, Jassi accompanying, we followed hours later. Skin sallow in the green tinted fluorescents, imperfections bumpier and freckles louder. The pigeon rested in the window sill, mesh filled with skins of insects, those trapped in squares of soiled wire. We watched a Kung-Fu movie on the small screen, and we tried to follow but the pinches and punches and kicks and characters all blended, the frames melding, and I don't remember past the eyebrows of one man. 
We left the city hours and minutes later, ancient dust disturbed by our presence, the ghosts of temples and tombs awakened by children perched on rooftops, strings of kites pulling from their tiny hands. Red, blue, black dancing cloths rise and dart from the porches of the poor and the rich and the in-betweens and the city and sky are awake. 
I am awake too.

Bits recoil

February 11th, 2012. New volunteers come, the promise of more arriving in sandy darkness. Daisy, with a British accent that conjures images of Oliver Twist, speaks in self conscious tones and has not processed, yet. These people are impermanent, and in forgetting names and faces and kurtas picked and coffees ordered I retain my solidity. They lug pink and blue and black suitcases and unpack and then pack again, some with profound statements that define their time, others with desire to come again, a few bring tears around a wobbly wooden table. I watch the wonder, document hostility, misunderstanding, acceptance too, from my place on the tan couch under a thin orange blanket. 
I watch the changes of love in Anna Karenina. The passion and lust turned through gestures of delicate white hands and building of hospitals and children deserted into something both greater, and some things lost.
I see the changes of love in myself too. My patients as dear as Tanzanian children, their facial features imprinted. I prick sanitized hands, scoop drops of blood as they wince and I comfort in little Hindi phrases as my gloved hands rub theirs. Some healthy, others near death, the little numbers in strict language tell me, and I write notes starred by metallic pens.
This one cannot speak, this one, crippled by a train accident years ago who loves green parrots and looking out the back door at the cows grazing in the fields, this one responsive, this one grinds her teeth when she sits, a byproduct of her medicine, this one can stand, do exercise. This one likes pink nail polish, the peachy colored one, not the magenta. 
I know them all, names found through medical exams, and my arrival in the morning is not a surprise. I am family, too.
The longer I am away from home, the harder to return, I think. 
The longer away, the more I find about the reasons I left.
Dreams plague my sleep still, and waking, I try to resolve and forgive and forget and pretend like my family is the one found behind bars at a home for the destitute, shaded by full trees carrying unripe oranges.
I have run from my home, the windows glowing with afternoon light, orchids blooming and dog sleeping at my feet under the spell of chasing squirrels in her dreams. 
I ran from anger, from the passive, from aggression, from my judgements and fear and silence and from those I thought did not see the chasm opened by changing names and changing apartments and changed love.
Tolstoy understood the love that is not as simple as any book or movie or phrase one can quote and write for moments of sorrow and weeks of solitude. The painful metamorphosis of children and parents and growing up and growing older and realizing when change is fruitless in another, can destroy.
Destroy bonds created in riding lessons and watching timeless movies under soft sheets and over cups and cups of coffee and shared addictions and secrets told over a dorm phone's spotty connection when no one else would listen.
I am too tired to run, exhausted to lie, unwilling to destroy bonds and connections with those that I love most.
Love is frustrating and passive and aggressive and territorial and conditional. Somehow, though, I think the opposite is true too.
Love is willing to change, requires change, be it through boxes of toys discarded or shoes collected at the base of the stairs, and this, I think I now understand. 
Love oversteps boundaries and forces tears and names called and actions regretted and keys taken and doors slammed while the dog cowers under a glass table, and judgement brought, thought too, Skype conversations turned into pixeled anger and silence, inspires nightmares of desertion and hope and then hope destroyed and hope rebuilt again.
Plastic surgery and judgement about smoking and cigarettes and clothing cannot compete with shared music loud in a car's speakers.
Love brings forgiveness, apologies, from both, in roundabout ways when one or another cannot say the words except only to hope for peace without having to ask. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have judged you, too hard to say. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have called you that, unthinkable. 
India has taught me my fragility, my dependance, my immaturity, my wish for words when none come to my grasping hand, my willingness for change. 
I do not think that my family will heal whole again, that I will build a storybook life where my fractures and theirs are healed, that my parents will rekindle lost affection.
Leaving those, who have guided me through epic novels and French textbooks and soccer cleats, has changed us. But thirteen hour flights to foreign lands has also rebuilt hope in myself, in my parents, that cannot be destroyed. 
Leaving has brought an apology, if at least not to my lips, to my fingers. 

Reticence unexplained

February 9th, 2012. Sunil stops his car outside a run down cluster of buildings, the gate unlocked and ajar. I step from him into wind. The sign reads Thai Embassy, blue behind white, other words in Hindi too, and Sunil speeds away, stop start, stop start, his driving explained. Funnels of exhaust shooting through corroded metal piped and through my corroded veins. I walk to the cracked gate house, paint peeling, and two men, mustached and mismatched and surprised at my skin, stand behind rusty bars. The older says, the embassy is under construction, here's the address of the place to apply for visas. The younger stares. The older is overly friendly, helpful, and lingers in talk and words. Married, without a ring, all Indian men. Wives submerged in home life, husbands forgetting presence. 
I take a rickshaw to the new building, Tolstoy House on Tolstoy Marg. How many working near have read, can read? Sign in, first floor, two flights up, over there. And I smile and the men smile back, always. I take a number, many sit in the waiting room in front of glass booths where stressed Indians check and stamp and copy papers. Monks in burgundy draping sit, eyes fluttering in sleep, all others Indian men frantically filling forms and others watching green numbers flash for their turn. 
A woman motions to me, and my token is discarded. I know no lines. My process painless, I leave within minutes, you can pick up your visa tomorrow, and she talks with her eyes, framed with hot pink bejeweled earrings, dangles distracting from eyebrows too thin. 
We sleep through alarms spaced six minutes apart, interrupting finally dreams and nightmares and thrashing noisy sleep. The sky, even at 1:47 is still not black, cool blue light pollution, and then gold and red glows from lamps and temples. Jassi drives us to Agra, where we sleep in the car next to tented homes and a cow sleeping also as twirls of color enter the sky. We walk to a dry river as the sun rises over a grey, then dusty brown, then gleaming Taj Mahal. Cameras snatching and snapping, documenting what has been seen before. 

Turn left, then left again

January 28th, 2012. Its 4:13 am, my legs are sealed to the couch, and I mindlessly uncover forgotten spaces of the Internet. My tapping on the screen a metronome clocking through a friend's cousin's beach album from 2007. I watch the transformation from gangly limbs to braces to insecure body fat covered by tight expensive clothing to self-assured senior with hair dribbling down in blonde ringlets. Our paths so easily tracked, envy made easy too. She is perfect, I think, through this screen, pores airbrushed into smooth pixels to tantalize freshman boys, teeth whitened to smirk and smoke and smile too and I fall for the illusion. 
I forget my beauty, my family, my friends, wish for hers. I want to tour in Florence, kiss Grecian sun and bask on yachts cutting through dimple-less water in Antigua. I want, I want. 
I remember then, as I watch the gas assistant pump air into flat and threadbare tires, his hat gathering greasy hair into knots, hands begrudging the car. I remind myself, every day, and starless night, and before every festival fire and firecrackers and fire-red bindis and red skin disease and hands dipped into pots of crackling chilies and standing before the black pools shining with white lights. I remind myself, until I remember.
And then until I forget again. 
I count my lucky stars, even though the reflective light shining from a city still awake and still dreaming obscures them. As I rub the back of Mary, who cannot talk, cannot speak her name (it is forgotten), who nods and smiles and remembers me, I count them again. And as I wipe the moisture, tears maybe, but it doesn't matter, from Punja who cannot herself lift to do so, and as she doesn't thank me, and as I don't need affirmation, as I crouch next to her, and as I wonder if she will live another week, I count again.
 I count them, my graces orbiting, my fixed points and my realigning pulls of gravity, changed in time, but even when obscured with smog and dust and curry powder curling in the air, still illuminating the dirtied windows of my soul. 
I wish I knew how to give thanks, so that it would mean something, so that the people who have radiated love in my direction would feel the warmth returned, so that their pain would be eased just a little.
So that a friend would know my flawed love from thousands of miles away, my offering of incense and flowers and silk and thanks, and love, love, always, love. 

White linen, please

January 15, 2012. New volunteers arrive in bursts, and the flat is alive. We talk about ourselves, I talk of India and which areas to avoid and coffee shops and drinks to order, but I don't try to explain the culture, the feel of traffic, the smell of incense burning over a tray of roasted nuts. Alex comes last, and I am not alone. 
I talk of Mother Teresa's center, the patients, the tiny happiness in the feel of a cold palm, rough calluses from years of wandering dirty streets. 
Some pretend to be unaffected, and some stare at the laundry hung from six stories above our heads, blankets drifting in breeze funneled through the blocks of apartments. 
Rebecca, a forty something from San Francisco with a hoarse voice and wise eyes asks me everything, seems interested in my life. She calls me courageous, they all do. She carries her body with power, with presence, and she falls asleep on the small leather couch as the rest chat about flights and Calcutta.    
I wait for a friend arriving in Delhi at the Subway station, moving from one end to another, alone, singing to myself. I watch from above the young and old and mostly men as they scrunch themselves to fit into cars, full. The metro seems human, energy seeping up to me, as I pace for over an hour, the unassuming clock tracing my solitude. Men kiss at me, the policemen overeager, my feet tired. I pick at crusty nail polish, littering the patterned floor with flakes of red falling form my dry hands. I walk back to the apartment, sore and frustrated and ready to punch any attacker. My keys are clutched in my palm, a jagged fist. Aladdin, one of the strays that begs for food outside our door, emerges from under a dark car, and I remember my humanity.
I watch American Beauty alone in bed, warm under blankets, and I see the beauty in a dancing bag, a dead bird, the same as the beauty of malnourished children in dirty sweatshirts beating drums behind cars and next to buses, girls cartwheeling and bending and contorting and haunting the pavement, offering themselves for spare change. 

They turn the heaters off, I stiffen

January 13, 2012. I plant sunflowers furiously, my pointer finger trembling, striking down to harvest sunlight. The tencho music is sounding in the cafe, and Indian men chatter behind me, but I am focused, ready. The gas station is overflowed with dented cars and men carrying black briefcases, rickshaws standing in the waning angled light, curtains drawn around hiding passengers. I plant my first pea-shooter, and the screen changes. A pixeled Zombie, shaking, tongue hanging as he limps and strides towards my plants. You will be struck down, and I will reap a silver coin from your death, I think. Peas fire across the screen, the zombie loses first his arm, then comes quaking onto his knees. This one has a cone on his head, harder to kill, but my Starfruit, shooting happy yellow twirling stars from five sides, lights up the nighttime screen, and after waves, and waves again, I beat the level. 
Still traffic hums, birds flap through pale sky above tired buildings, and I break from my game to connect. 
Tea is served to me at placement in the room where patients with physical disabilities sleep. The green birds chirp, a woman named Lalita calls back to them, mimicking them, as they reflect her voice. They sing to each other, and I wonder if she envies them, those with wings, while she lives without three limbs. 
I sit on a yellow-sheeted bed and sip chai from an ivory cup, watching a man hoe in one of the gardens, watch through a dirty screen, watch the furrows grow from week to week, the plants growing and shrinking, watch, watch. I wash sheets, pink flowers dipping up and down and through clean water, now sudsy and rosy and grey, and my knees are soaked. My arms lift and lower, the muscles contracting and relaxing, the pair an inverse. Water slashes and splashes, and I lift leaking buckets into other containers, and my hands are clean after. 
I've been here a month and a half, away from home for four. 
My sweetest girl, Nazima, Nazima, the best girl, the best girl in the whole world, I sing to the fourteen year old, and she smiles, her eyes nearly shut, and I wipe the drool that snakes from the corner of her mouth with a faded bib. 

Paint

January 10, 2012. Women catch fever, and fear too. Jaya covered on an old metal frame, her face partially visible under a plaid dishtowel, blinks slowly, legs shifting occasionally. She remembers to smile when I crouch down next to her, and then stares past my face, a point below my eyes. A small heater runs, warming little in the drafty room. Windows are broken, air slithers through with chill. The stretcher placed next to Punja, who shivers under shawls and blankets, becomes a symbol in this space, this world. I perch next to Punja, my favorite patient, and she talks in shrill Hindi, her crone voice resonant, and I motion with my hands. I act out sickness, my body retching, pointing to Jaya. She affirms with a grunt, and we both stay on her bed, her eyes on the stretcher, mine on the others, darting to look at the fading light on the ground. Few come close, but clean floors and sort clothes and bathe and pretend not to notice the girl dying.
She is taken to the hospital, and because the doctor is not in, sent away for later. The stretcher is carried past, the living woman in a funeral procession, the vital dirge, and we are told to pray. 
I sit with Anita at the back of the room, and we watch men sweep the newly paved road. Flowers bloom and wither and open next to the lane, crawl up the surrounding stone wall. I ask if many get sick in the cold. Yes, she says, her voice a shaky frozen whisper. Does Jaya have the same as Gita? Yes, the same. 
Lunch is exaggerated, donated by the owner of a hotel who eyes me as he passes out food. People clap and sing and yell happybirthday DO YOU happybirthday DO YOU, and the women rush to gather flowers to give, and he carries a multicolored array of weeds. 
They have forgotten Jaya, waiting in line at the government hospital, and sit with eyes opening and closing for the sun. 

Wouldn't it be nice to

January 8, 2011. In sanded and shining shades of brown, differentiations of color, this city is defined. In puddles collected on the sides of honking roads, paint chipped from walls and windowsills, leaves of scrawny trees in medians, covered by dust and pollutants. The skin of wealthy women, lustrous, illuminated and exfoliated, almost golden reflecting off shining Chanel purses, the faces of poor boys, cracked and grey, infections pushing on skinny limbs. Rotting teeth of old men, changing from yellow to deep and fading ivory, the speckles of black. 
Dogs, mangy and mud covered trot across humming streets, the cars unclean and dented. Cows with hipbones jutting, connected by sagging skin to a protruding spinal cord, dig in plastic bags of trash for food, cast from trucks carrying laborers crammed, standing, into loud hustling compartments. The exhaust pouring onto motorcyclists, wrapped in faded leather and shoes with holes, toes poking through. Monkeys screaming in bushes next to highways, the bridge below filled with children and families and women, few men. Cats shrieking on the porch outside my flat, one throwing a mouse, bloody and still alive, against my glass door, again and again, long past death, still, again. Used books curling and cigarettes, yellowed and discarded.
Brown, here too, my shoes tattered and jackets dusty, my fingernails discolored from polish. Except for me, my shoulders fair, my legs untanned,I am immersed in dust, in dirt, in ruddy Bollywood lyrics, in burnt tones of the man selling newspapers, calling in resonant chants outside my ground-floor window, disturbing my colored dreams. 

Empathyempathyempathy

January 6, 2012. It's my cafe now, my flat, my patients. Tiny specks of water filled the windshield this morning, the air is cold and heavy, and my pants are thin and jade, my socks thick and wool. I eat pomegranates brought to me in plastic bags, sitting in a quiet apartment, curled on a couch staring at a dark television set.  The cracks obscured by threads of incense twirling, draping the air in detailed tendrils, the smell filling empty space. I drink soup, listen to wordless electronic music, trancing and beating the time past. 
I miss home less. Maybe I forget more, having found my sanctuaries elsewhere. American pop music plays on the speakers here, in the chain coffee shop. I recognize none. The music sounds corny and cheery and fabricated from some hollow place. 
I try to imagine college, with designer bracelets and designer clothes and groomed people and essays and textbooks, and hot dorms and cold dorms and sororities and rush and living in America. 
Where will I fall, when the cliche pieces topple from the Himalayas into the little town of Charlottesville, from the dirty traffic whizzing three inches from my elbow. From the wide and wise sky of Africa, from the tomb standing for thousands of years watching the birth of an overpopulated nation building tiny fires at her base, into buildings of brick and columns, into art studios with track lighting, into manicured lawns. 
Where will I land?

I should be doing laundry

January 5th, 2012. Didi, they call. Didi, badjo. Sister, sit down here, where I lightly pat with my crooked hand, covered in withered skin. I learn new Hindi phrases, slowly, learn names slowly too. I feel there is progress, at least for me. I do not dread the morning so much. Occasionally, I seek the clock, will it faster, talk to the two green parakeets in their tiny cage and sing them sweet lullabies. I sit cross legged and paint nails to women with Parkinson's, the stone cold, and the fields whisking chill air into the courtyard. Often I talk to them, words about my life, asking them about theirs. They respond in a different tongue, in babble, in Hindi, in silence, and I cannot tell the difference. I have conversations, neither of us knowing the other person's words, but I feel it doesn't matter. 
There are moments of joy. Anita, a reclusive woman in her fifties shakes when she talks to me, her voice quivers in English, beautiful English. We watch the others exercise, race from one end of a dirty, hard field to another, and I laugh, because most are walking, some barely move from the starting line, and some trot, cheating by not touching the bench at the other end, and I am reminded of Africa, of my children there, and because I hold these two memories together, I laugh. 
I smile constantly, many times a forced expression of happiness and hopefulness, eyes crinkled, remember to smile with your eyes, but every morning, as a patient tries to hand her broom to my full hands, I smile, and say, for you. She laughs too, we both know she is joking, and I continue to scrub the floor, the marble speckled but shining, the stone damp with streaks of soap and towels and disinfectant. 
Many try to give me their cake, their sweets, their jewelry, precious items to those who have little of their own. I gently push their hands back. For you, I say.
I see love everywhere. The fourteen-year old, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, carried between bed to washroom to floor, unmoving, unspeaking, is fed every meal by an older patient, the matriarch of the center, powerful and tall and broad. A mother feeds her child who shakes her head across the metal beams of the bench, crying out in garble. The blind woman holds my hands and rubs my skin in circles and trapeziods turning them over and back again. Her hands are smooth too. 
My dad read me a passage, part of an essay published in a collection of the best essays of 2011. The writer talked of chapels, of finding silence and peace in a world of screen and images and lights and stimulation. 
I look for my chapel, here, too. For silence, for peace, for those words seemingly unattainable in a country of honking and dirt and cows and dogs and crying and sales. Maybe I find my serenity in the spooing of grains of rice into a tired mouth, wrinkled and toothless, in the rubbing of backs, in the cutting of dirty toenails, in the combing of lice infested hair. 

Drivers veer from cows, less so from children naked in the road

Things settle, eventually. January 2nd, 2012. I am alone now. Pat, the former Navy officer turned wolf-sanctuary worker, and stand-in mother to a lonely girl in India, left on Friday. She said, I wish you could come back with me. No, I'll be fine here, but I'm happy for you. New suitcases filled with trinkets and fabric and noisemakers and a little less shampoo, we hugged and the taxi drove down our fogged and bumpy lane. The heaters give a warm glow to the silent flat. Our remote for the TV is gone, the Internet is spotty and I am tired of my music. I Skype often, driving virtually to stocked supermarkets with my mom, the smell of newness, of fresh, packaged food, permeates somehow, and I could be across the house, upstairs in my cream and silky bed, asking for milk and Milanos. 
I painted nails at Mother Teresa's, "lal" always the most requested. I match, my red tips chipped from drying floors and dancing. Someone died last night, a woman said. She speaks nearly perfect English, and I do not recognize her. Is she a patient, and she says, I'm here to help. Do you have a family, I ask, a husband, children? And she says no, and I've been sucked in enough to think, for a second, that there must be something wrong with her. Who died, I ask, hoping I don't know the woman, part of me that I do. Gita, she says, and I recognize the name, unable to match a face. Another patient sticks her tongue out, eyes closed, mimicking the death. She is pretending to be Gita, and I say, I know. 
I curry my coffee habit, looking always for cozy rooms and soft-spoken waiters. I sit now in Cafe Coffee Day, the Starbucks of India, my drink finished and sweating into the napkin below. The barista knows me, and he laughs when I come. The couches are red, and the backs of chairs too short, the women wear pants and the men stare as I enter, and as I leave too. I dream of anonymity, and yet I accept, and maybe need, the attention.
Balloons still pinned on the wall, remnants of New Years, droop, deflating slowly. I can see all from my seat, and there's another white man here, hair cropped close to his head and silver jacket with ironed badges of flags decorating his arm, and I wonder who he is. 
Lalit asked, are you scared in the flat by yourself? No, just a little lonely, I said, but I like being alone, and I say that to myself, over and agin, and if I say it enough, maybe it will become so. 
 

People flit in and out

December 27, 2011. I was dropped at Mother Teresa's this morning, the sun angled through the pink smoggy sky, tips of buildings grey masses above. Jesse, a tall and broad Sikh who rarely slows for speed-bumps and whose beard trains outward, sped away toward the city, and I started walking on the moist newly-paved concrete, jumping down into the twisting paths of the vegetable garden that surrounds the center, roses unbloomed through the cracking earth, dust everywhere. My coat is warm, my legs bump as I shiver. Can I call this morning beautiful? Can I call this center, sundar, the Hindi translation?
A sister meets me as I walk towards the nuns house, a separate building, apart from the patients. Another nun hangs up white habits on lines, she is cold too. I'm sorry I wasn't here, I was sick. Yes, the hospital, but I feel better, thank you. Merry Christmas to you, too! What do you mean, closed? Because the road is drying? Ok. And I understand and accept, because this is India and all passes here. 
She invites me in, the house that is always locked to volunteers. You can call Jaggi here, he will send for your car. You may wait in the chapel, it seems the phone does not work. 
And I sit cross-legged on red velvet carpet, the shrine to Mary, the Altar to Jesus, the shrine to Mother Teresa, all decorated in blue and green and red flashing Christmas lights, plastic flowers drooping in buckets on the floor. The green curtains are closed, and it is warmer here, alone. I wonder what to think about, what I should be thinking in a nun's secret chapel, what do they think about when sitting here? I pick up a book, the cover wrapped in ivory paper, written in black, unsure letters, 'with praise and joy'. I read rhyming songs of belief and happiness and sacrifice and night and angels, and I don't see any of the phrases. I try reading aloud, my my voice is hoarse and not joyous, and I wonder if this is blasphemous, or wrong, me being here. I pick up the bible, and flip through, hoping a line, something, will jumps and excite and stimulate. I turn to the last chapter, Revelations, because I like the word, and I read and mumble, and an older nun comes into the room, bows to the altar, and sits in a chair in the corner.
I talk to God, hi, it's been a while. Remember when I came to the chapel at school to cry about boys and my parents, college applications and eating disorders? I liked the sounds of the creaking wood, the space that never felt empty, the organ almost to sound, my voice held more power there, echoing across shallow pews, over hymnals and under carved archways, the stained glass radiating light from inside. 
I start to pray for everyone I know, my family first, my friends, then myself, and I pray for us all to be fixed, healed, our cracks sewn with glue. 
I don't think this is the way to do it, so God, just give me endless love, don't try to fix anything. 
The clock moves across birds flying at each number, and the phone rings and we drive home. These are the laborers, waiting for work, he says, and we swerve and honk past the hundreds of men and men and men and women and children and more men that wait to build houses or shovel garbage. A few are picked, thousands more stand huddled in the chill.   

Titles seem superfluous

December 28, 2011. I prepare for solitude. Pat and I walk through INA market, hundreds of stalls with fabric, jewelry, shoes, fruits, live animals caged in wooden bars, butchers wringing necks of shrieking chickens, the smell of fish in the top right corner of the alleys. Best price, one hundred rupees, very good, come in, looking is free, come in, downstairs, yes yes, very good. 
A tattered woman in a pink headscarf pulls on my sleeve, the baby she carries is unhealthy and quiet, and she cups her hands, holds them out, shakes them, and raises her dirty fingernails to dry lips, back again outstretched, and the shop owners surround, watching. I am on a mission to find shoes, the cheapest possible, and I brush past, not looking her in the eye. She grabs my arm and I walk under awnings and concrete roofs and plastic canopies, and releases. I have no hope for her, today.
My placement is closed for the week, and I go to Earth Saviors Fundation, a school and hospice and orphanage and a home for abandoned old. The children cling, and a little girl in a white hoodie holds me and kisses the back of my hand, again, and I pull away a little. We play duck duck goose, the same girl is chosen by all, wearing pink and marron and green, and she runs, smiling nearly perfect white teeth and shining pigtails and the white hooded girl is never chosen, except by me.
A for apple, b for ball, c for cap, d for dog, are shouted by all, robots, they seem, and I draw a ball, what letter does this start with, a for applebforballcforcapdfordog, and some have books, but they draw pictures of white Santa and Christmas trees with presents below. I pick my jacket from the top of a dusty metal closet, and the teacher in the tented classroom, the roof plastic and damaged, says to me, "you are a good teacher." I laugh, thank you, not really, I just love kids. And she says it again, you are a good teacher. Do you come again tomorrow?
Yes, tomorrow.

The light overhead is yellow, white

December 20th, 2011. I say to myself, I don't write because I'm busy, because I'm learning of new cultures from Hyatt, the beautiful Saudi woman who chooses to wear color, because I'm waiting to get an objective view of India. I don't write because Nick and Sally and Jeff are here, and now because they are gone, and because I miss them and I don't write because how can I start, what stories can I tell? I can talk of the sunrise over the Himalayas, the sunset too, and I can talk of illuminated white temples, glittering water a shimmering lake reflecting bowed men in turbans and clean children, and of the mall with a red Christmas tree glowing four stories high, frantic shoppers spending thousands and corny music blasting.
But I can write of the hundreds of poor that weave between cars selling blankets and fake roses and asking me, only me, for money. I could write of the thousands of stray dogs that curl in the dust and sleep. I could write of drivers wrapped in ripped jackets, threadbare scarves, fingerless gloves, cold air tumbling through the cracks in the windshield and open walls. 
I painted nails, red the color most requested by my patients. I take tea, and see hundreds of people sitting outside the front of the center, children standing, adults quiet mostly, the sisters gathering in a huddle on the stone porch. They say, it's the Christmas pageant, will you sing a song? I try to remember the words of carols, and this time last year I knew all words, but I haven't felt cheer, and so I say, I know one, and only the first verse. 
They pray, and they sing, loudly and off tune, the words in Hindi and the songs are unfamiliar, and all eyes are on me, as always, even though I stand behind a think white column, hiding. The priest in residence tells the story of the annunciation, I catch tiny glimpses through English words dropped. And he says, come. I stand in front of the microphone, and it's too short, and all are quiet, and I sing Silent Night, the first verse, because it's all I can remember, and I am not scared because these are people I have no reason to be nervous in front of, and still, my voice shakes a little. I back away, saying thank you.
Would you like to say a few words? I will translate after. And so I say,
Thank you for letting me come to your beautiful country, and for opening your hearts to me, especially over Christmas time. It's been very hard being away from my family, and I don't think I would have been able to be here without the love and support that the people here have shown to me. So thank you, donyvad, and I wish everyone a merry, merry Christmas. 
And the priest translated, and a woman in front started crying and they all clapped, and  felt more joy than I have in weeks.
We handed out food, sacks of rice, backs of flour and tea and lentils and blankets, to all. They are the poorest of the poor, one of the sisters told me. I wished each a merry Christmas, and some didn't know how to respond, and some just said thank you, some didn't meet my eye, mostly the men, and a few who knew, said Merry Christmas, God bless you, God bless you. the sun was slanted in the sky but shining through the dirty trees, and I took off my jacket because I felt warmth.