Heading home -- but the adventure's not ending

I truly can't believe it, but I'm scheduled to board a plane not too long from now that will carry me home to San Francisco. My seven weeks of leave have flown by in a flash!

I know I've been quite absent for the past 10 days, but there's more to come. While I haven't been posting, I have been writing -- in and around hanging out with family and dear friends, eating delicious Delhi and Bombay dishes and just plain relaxing after traveling to something like a dozen cities in just under five weeks. Over the next month or so, I'll post here and there to recount some of the fun, the frustrations and, yes, the food. Stay tuned!

For now: Thank you to all who have joined in this adventure with me, via the blog, via video chat and, of course, in person! It's been an incredible journey, as I knew it would be, and I'm so thankful to have finally had the chance to make it happen.

And as a parting picture, please enjoy this snap of me from earlier today, taken by my lovely husband. Mango season is here! Just one more nice surprise along the way on this trip. Incredible India after all.

Mangoes are a sticky, delicious business.

A constant cacophony

One of the things Vivek prizes about life in the States, as compared with India, is the relative quiet. He especially enjoys the porch of my parents' house in Pennsylvania, where you can sit and hear the crickets chirp or the corn stalks rustling at night -- but hardly anything else.

I've certainly noticed the contrast, too, on returning home from trips here: The 101 from SFO can seem eerily quiet after the constant shouting and honking of streets in Bombay, Bangalore and Delhi.

Often on my trips, I've had a big break from the noise each day -- inside an office, high on the floor of an apartment building or simply being out far away from a major city. On this trip, however, the noise has been a constant companion -- more of a closer approximation to what it would have been like for Vivek growing up, I imagine.

Sound has a fair bit of routine where I am in Calcutta, not too far from Park Street (apparently no one calls it by its new name, Mother Teresa Sarani). The day starts early, with the sun. India shares one time zone across its thousands of miles of horizontal space on the planet, which means that the sun begins to rise somewhere around 5 a.m. in Calcutta but doesn’t begin to waken anyone in Bombay until 7 a.m.

Birds, having no boundary but the sun for their sleep, begin chirping, cawing and tweeting in a fury at 5:30 a.m. Around the same time, heavy metal parking gates begin to open and close, creaking on their hinges as if the weight of the country’s constant change is bearing down on them, day in and day out. As gates open, engines rev. Car locks beep closed or unclosed, and as the narrow alleyway outside begins to fill with traffic, the air begins to fill with car horns.

Before too long comes the swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of floors -- tiled, marble, earthen, cement -- being swept. The sweeps mingle with the conversations of students heading to class and deliverymen explaining their appointments to guardsmen.

At lunch, the talking, car horns and car engines become a cacophony, as Calcutta’s streets, unchanged and unwidened in many neighborhoods, try to funnel many more cars than they used to. Beeps to warn, beeps to yell, beeps to accuse, ring out.

After lunch, a hush settles in. Morning cooking and cleaning are over, cars are back at rest, and everyone’s tired from the heat and a too-big lunch. But the peace lasts only a while, as school and work begin to empty out at 4 p.m., filling the streets again with chatter, diesel engines idling and, yes, honk, honk-honk, honk!

As the din ebbs and flows outside, it picks up in the kitchen: chopping, frying, the swift hissing of a pressure cooker’s whistle. Birds make a last forage, landing on balconies, rooftops, trees. TVs snap on as home-goers check in on the news or a soap opera; either way, dramatic, swelling music and hurried, excited Hindi fill the air.

As I post this, we're somewhere between dinner preparations and what Kate and I deemed "beer o'clock." In fact, my chai -- the drink before the pre-dinner drink -- just landed on the desk with a tiny, soft thud, after it was carried here on softly padding feet by a kind soul. (As a pure generalization, Indians walk much more softly than Americans.)

As the evening approaches, a cap might snap off a chilled bottle, or ice might chip into a well-formed glass, as the before-dinner routine begins. Perhaps friends have gathered at a club or bar to pass the hours. As laughter and stories fill the air, the wait for dinner drags on.

Unbelievably, 9 p.m. has arrived. Table settings, which had been silently waiting, come to life as plates are flipped over and serving spoons begin to clink against bowls. Even the stove comes back to life as rotis are flip-flopped on the pan.

At 10 p.m., curtains are pulled shut, dragging their rings along the way. Fans are turned into high, whirring gear and lights are switched off with satisfying clicks. There is still noise outside -- the occasional car rumbling past, a faraway horn, a yell of a vendor with his last wares of the day -- for it is still India after all. But there is mostly quiet, for there are only seven hours left before the dawn.

KSRTC for the win

I can now add a check mark next "riding a bus" in India.

I'm not a huge fan of buses in general. My experience in the States has been that trains are much smoother than long-haul buses, and local buses -- especially in San Francisco -- are too slow and not on time enough. As Kate and I cross southern India, however, there's an abundance of mountains -- and thus, a lack of trains. So our choices have been either to hire private cars or to take one of the many buses available.

After a trial 90-minute ride this morning with the Kerala State Road Transport Corporation -- to Ernakulam from Alleppey, where we'd stayed on a houseboat -- Kate and I decided we were up for the 5-hour ride to Munnar. At the total fare of Rs. 131 per person, or about $2.60, it was certainly the economical choice.

Not our bus, but one similar to it -- in Alleppey.

The test ride was decently smooth -- even though we were sitting behind the rear axle. A very sweet young woman in Alleppey had helped us locate a bus to Ernakulam with empty seats so we wouldn't have to stand until seats became available. (Very helpful with our huge bags!)

(Side note: Kate traveled all over South America in buses, and I always pictured vehicles like this -- but then I found out that her buses were often grand coaches with fold-out flat seats for sleeping and even champagne on one route!)

I was a little nervous about heading all the way to Munnar on the bus, as it's a winding road up to the hill station. But I have to say I was fairly impressed with our driver. The bus was hot and crowded, of course, but everyone was friendly and helpful. (We also had seats the entire time.) The conductor pointed us to the right stop (we got off just short of Munnar, at a junction closer to our homestay) -- and two other backpackers helped toss our bags off the bus.

Inside our bus from Alleppey to Munnar. Think U.S. school bus in terms of style.

All in all: I think this was a smoother ride than when I traveled up the mountain by car in 2009. I don't know if I'd attempt this just anywhere, but happy to have a chance to test it out here in lovely, well-planned Kerala.

Just a normal day

While it might seem a little silly in some ways, I suppose, one of the things I really wanted to get on this trip was a sense of real life in India. That is, of course, real life for a typical, middle-class family -- specifically, my husband’s family. What’s it really like to go through the daily acts of simply living here? What does it feel like to be here, to have this as your anchor point to the rest of the world? What does one think about throughout the day? (Big questions, I know.)

I’ve been here on five trips previously, of course, so I’m no stranger to Indian life. But as a first-time visitor, a co-worker on assignment or a wedding attendee (at my own or someone else’s ceremony), it’s impossible to see what a normal, run-of-the-mill day might look like in a normal, run-of-the-mill week.

I’m happy to report that, in my eight days thus far, I am getting a sense of what a normal day at home looks like, at least -- and so while it might bore the Shankar-Bhatnagars, Mathurs and Indian friends following this blog, I shall now report back to you what I’ve learned. In a nutshell, it centers on food -- but perhaps that’s just my skewed view. It also centers on mornings, which, perhaps owing to the high temps of the afternoons, seems to be when most of the work gets done.

Mornings, as I got the sense a few years ago in Bombay, are quiet. It seems from outside that few people are stirring to enjoy this time, as office workers don’t start heading out until 9 a.m. From inside houses, however, I can tell you that preparations for the day are well under way. From 7 a.m. or earlier, chai is boiling, ingredients are being assembled for meals, papers are being read.

Around 8:30 a.m. today in Chandigarh, I stepped out onto the balcony for some fresh morning air. The park across the street was uncharacteristically empty, as the kids, I presume, were all at school. (It’s nearly 4:30 p.m. as I write this, and the park, including its slides and swings, is now teeming with kids.) The traffic on the main road behind the house was calm, such that, aside from the trains just beyond the road, the world was quiet and calm.

Of most interest to me, in this unusual calm, were the street vendors pedaling by on their bikes and bike carts. Vivek has always said that you can get anything delivered in India -- but here in Chandigarh, I’m able to really see it. Veggie wallahs bike by with carts full of turnips, cabbage and those delicious red carrots I’ve only seen in India. Men with burlap sacks tied to their bikes yell out for the “Paper!” they’d like to recycle. Saree- and scarf-sellers even come by -- and last evening, we saw a vendor with a cart full of plastics. The stack of his wares must have been four feet high!

But back to the morning. Sometime during or after breakfast, domestic help arrives, in the form of maids and cooks. Deliveries also begin, including milk, freshly-pressed kurtis from the dhobi or tiny puris for panipuri (Vivek -- you should have been here).

After the rush, lunch happens -- sometime after 12, but closer to it Pops is deciding -- and is often followed by a nap. (Pops told me the other day about how his naps became longer and longer as he got older. I’m trying to keep mine to under an hour for fear that I’ll somehow reverse the defeat of my jet lag.) Kids begin to get out of school around this time, and you can see them walking or biking or even scootering home in their uniforms and backpacks.

A nap is followed by tea (I can hear ours for today being made now), and soon after, dinner preparations begin again. Dinner, however, typically isn’t eaten until after 8 p.m., so a few hours of work for another day follow. (In my case, that’s packing for our trip to Dehradun tomorrow.)

Of course, in the midst of this, there aren't any sons or daughters running around in the houses where I'm staying. Ma and Pops are each the youngest of their respective families -- and so as their children have grown up and moved out, so have the children of my in-law aunts and uncles. But I can get a sense, least, of what a day in Vivek's life might have been like. (No doubt he'll tell us in the comments, however, if I've missed anything.)