home, in a sense

Forgive me for multitasking. While I write this, there's a can of soda in my hand and The Office is blaring on the television overhead. It's a little past midnight on Friday, July 30, 2010: exactly two weeks after I returned home from my time in India. Two weeks of readjustment to Eastern Standard Time, to red meat, to meals without rice, to the luxuries of Western society that seem gradually less opulent with every day home and every movie watched.

Truth is, I'm homesick.

It's been exactly forty days since I left Wilmington for the other side of the world. Ignore the Biblical connotations of that and instead take a glance at my first post in this blog, written the night before I flew east. I wouldn't have admitted it then (or, generally, ever), but I was scared. I failed to mention it then, but I had absolutely no idea what to expect or anticipate. To be totally honest, I think I was just hoping that the experience would be adequately "eye-opening, life-changing, [insert similar cliche here]" to give me enough to write about for a college essay.

Funny how things changed almost as soon as I landed, when I was more scared than I ever was when I first started this blog.

The last forty days of my life might not have been biblical in the temptation-of-Christ, forty-days-in-the-desert sense... but they were so, so incredible in a way impossible to quantify or even sufficiently describe. They were eye-opening and they were life-changing, but not in a form expressible via an essay or report.

But if I had to quantify it, here are some numbers:

16 (number of weeks my mom and I spent planning the trip)

3 (number of weeks my mom and I spent on the trip)

57 (the number of hours I spent on an airplane, getting there and back)

36 (the number of malaria pills I took on the trip)

37 (the number of malaria pill-induced dreams I had on the trip)

63 (the number of servings of curry and rice I ate)

74 (the number of students I taught each day)

1.139 billion (the population of India)

52,850,562 (the Kannada-speaking Indian population)

3 (the number of words in my Kannada vocabulary)

427 (the course number of Intermediate Kannada at the University of Pennsylvania)

14 (days since I've been home)

10 (months until, ideally, I go back)

So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it would be completely and utterly impossible for me to properly describe to you my experiences and the incredibly profound effect they've had on me. They say home is impossible to describe, and I guess they're right. So let me finish my soda and get back to The Office, and just know that I'll be back. It might be next summer, it might be next year, and it might be when I'm fifty, but I'll be back.

After all, in the words of the Talking Heads, home is where I want to be, but I guess I'm already there.

Namaste,

Nash