personal narrative 2

My first few memories of India

“A week in the desert,” they said.

“Staying in a 5-star-hotel!” they said.

“It will be fun,” they said.

I was only a typical Korean 6^th grader, who wasn’t really that street-smart and who spent most of my times indoors. My daily schedule was to go back and forth to school, academies, and to my house. The biggest derivation of all was probably paying a trip to a nearby playground for a little ride on the swing.

I absolutely shuddered at the thought of bugs. The worst part of summer, for me, was getting to see ants as big as my thumbnail.

And I guess the biggest turning point of my entire life was having moved to India.

What words can India be associated with? Excessive heat, a dusty gray sky, an eco-friendly community where human and livestock coexist?

In big cities where I lived, for example New Delhi, indeed the summers were melting hot, the sky was dusty and gray, and cows and elephants strolled in streets. For a 12-year-old me, India was bizarre in a negative way.

One day, the school I went to, aka the American Embassy School, took us to Jaipur, a desert city located in eastern India for a week. The teachers told us that we would be staying in 5-star hotels. They said that we will be able to experience the real face of India, and that we'll have a good time.

The journey started with a 7-hour-long train ride. You would probably be thinking, “wow! How far is Jaipur from Delhi for the train to travel for seven hours?” And I think the answer lies not in distance but in the quality of trains.

Till then, I’ve only been on KTXs, which I could actually sit down for only two and a half hours, at a seat with enough space for myself, in a pleasant compartment and with a modern bathroom. The Indian train, however, was packed with people and I hardly had any space to flinch.
Cockroaches crawled about everywhere in the compartment, windows were covered in bird droppings, and bathrooms did not contain a toilet. Instead, there’s just a huge hole so that stuff can fall right onto the trail. I was given ketchup for dinner. And I was on there for seven hours.

After I had miraculously survived through the train ride, we headed for the place we’d be staying for a week. It’s an old palace where people put in beds to let tourists stay in there.

Before I left for the trip, I think I always had slept in rooms with a door, appropriate lighting and with anything to control room temperature.

The so-called 5-star hotel room caused me a slight mental breakdown. The image was far from anything “modern” or “hotel-ish”. It was a room with no door and a sandy marble floor. There was a little fan on the ceiling and screeching beds made of thin iron bars. During the nights, stray dogs came in to sleep. The worst part of all was when I witnessed a centipede and a cockroach busying their way through the sheets.

I stayed awake for the rest of the week.

The food I had to eat was another story. We were served a typical Indian menu- those with strong, stinging masala taste. My Indian friends had no problem digesting those. I starved the whole week. There was even a little fly stuck among peppered chicken.

The major activity we did there was to visit a slum village nearby and interact with local Indians. We walked for five hours a day, and the day was scorching hot. By scorching I mean 50 degrees Celsius. Sweating all over, I was falling apart. Melting, really. It was quite entertaining to hop around streets to avoid stepping on animal droppings, except that it was really hard not to.

Well, now, after three years of my stay in India, I am proud to claim that I have been successfully assimilated. I acquired the skill of catching mosquitoes single-handedly, knocking down cockroaches, and even adept in dealing with house rats. I grew to love Indian food. Butter chicken and naan are my favorites. And an average temperature of 50 degrees Celsius became quite bearable. I love walking in the desert bare feet. The sand feels nice.

I never thought I would get fond of India. I wanted to question humanity for having me end up there, but to think about it after three years I was able to experience what the world really looks like, which I would never had the chance in Korea. India didn’t always give me pleasant memories, but I guess I’ve gone through thick and thin with the country during my stay. It’s pretty amazing how successfully a human can adapt to its environment, even it should be as demanding as...India?

snapshot

“Nice color.”

That was the first thing I have said when I spotted the fruit cart right around the corner of the street, when I moved into my new house in New Delhi. Crimson red apples, sunrise yellow bananas, pale green pears: all mixture of colors like double rainbows got me dazed for a few seconds. I have never thought about buying anything there, though. Why bother, when we had a better, cleaner market nearby? The fruit cart was the stars in Seoul where they got all drowned by the blaze of lights from the skyscrapers. But right that moment, I had to admit that those fruits seemed to be the freshest from the ones that I've ever seen in my life.

I had taught my brother how to say ‘orange’ one day. He became so obsessed with that word that he pointed practically at everything and screamed, “OH-RANGE!” At first, I was impressed at how fast he learned the word. I clapped several times and complimented, “Aw, you’re so smart!” I guess he was not as smart as I thought he would be. Eventually, I grew tired of him shouting oh-range at every possible object that I ignored him whenever he blurted out the word.

My brother, my mom and I were heading for a mall one day, when my brother subsided from his obsession with oranges, thank god. We passed the fruit cart like every other day, then my brother shouted all of a sudden, “OH-RANGE!” He then started craving that orange so badly that my mom had no choice but to buy some for him.

Popping a piece in, I was surprised to find out, it was as amazing as it looked! From that day on, we started purchasing the fruits from that cart every morning, and each and every one of them did not disappoint us even once. Every morning, our maid carried a bag of fruits, containing an extra piece almost every other day.

One morning, I was passing the usual fruit cart on my way to school. The fruit seller was talking with a woman, who seemed like a customer. The seller handed the women a bag full of papayas with a smile – the kind you don’t see everyday. It was the one of the rarest kinds of smiles, like the ones that make you smile together. His smile seemed truly, truly happy. The way he dressed, my thoughts about how he would live… He certainly was not a happy guy. I knew how those people lived- in squalid living conditions, sometimes in slum areas. I wondered what made him so happy to smile like that.

As I passed the fruit cart after on, I wondered when I might see the smile once again, and that if I would ever be able to find the answer of his happy smiles.