If I squint, the sky looks like a marigold, petals unfolding and unfolding, ochre staining the grey. It’s almost beautiful. Even smog and blackened asphalt, mutilated plastic and burning trash on the side of the road can have a heady glow if hot enough. We eat our aloo paratha in silence. Each piece is carefully wrapped by my Smita Masi in tin foil. Two weeks from now, when I board the airplane home, I won’t remember this moment. I won’t remember the sweat on the nape of my neck and upper lip, my body pressed between sister and aunt. I won’t remember the hot, dry wind and how it did nothing to ease the discomfort I felt—a discomfort that lingered with the acrid smell in my hair.
It is my first time visiting India in ten years, and I am still adjusting to the time difference, to the smog, to the turmeric that stains my tongue and relatives whose names I don’t know. It is strange how fast the world spins when you are no longer at its center. New Delhi seems to spin the fastest, something or someone flying around every corner, colors blurring into mini comets’ tails. I am in a never-ending state of vertigo.
A cow sidles up against our car, skin pulled taut over her ribcage. Here, the cows are as human as we are, Smita Masi says, noticing my wide eyes. Her skin is brown rather than ivory, a hump rising behind the tufts of hair on her neck. She, like all of the other cows in India, is a holy being: their slaughter is banned in most parts of the country. She wanders idly, more at home than I am amidst the traffic.
The few memories that I have from India as a child—buying mango from the side of the road, playing cards with Nana before bed, watching the news with Chachi over a breakfast of warm paratha—seem almost illusory. I am reaching for that version of India, just waiting for it to appear like some mythical deity in the Mahabharata with eight hands and endless strength. There is an ever-widening gap between these memories and the reality of the country that half of my family calls home.
I continue to eat my paratha, watching the rickshaws and street vendors vying for space in the crowded street, traffic slowly inching forward. A child is weaving between the cars, knocking on each glass window as he goes. He moves with the ease of the cat that climbs the fence in my Chachi and Chacha’s backyard, nimble and light on his feet. When he reaches our car, my masi rolls down her window, handing him a paratha. The tinfoil glimmers in his small hand, his eyes the size of tea saucers. He thanks her, only the saffron color of his kurta pajama visible as he darts back into the traffic. His kurta pajama is the color of the sky, of the marigold petals unfolding overhead. Maybe it is okay that this India is different from the one I thought I knew. Maybe it is okay to just be an observer, a tiny part of something much larger, to lean into the spinning rather than resist it. In two weeks, I won’t remember my own discomfort. I will remember the paratha. I will remember the cow. And I will remember the sky.
