I was good and ready to come home from India. I was prepared to see materialism at its finest and knew what I was walking into. But something hit me when we landed in America and I felt further away from home than I’d felt the whole time we were in India. I wanted to go back so badly and every step away from that plane felt like a step away from the residence of my own heart. I decided that talking about India even under the influence of being socially awkward would be the best way to glide back into American culture. The more I wanted to talk, the more people did not want to listen. And the people who did listen were only waiting for the moment when they could rattle off a handful of statistics about Hinduism or trafficking or India as a whole. I forgot how much Americans pride in their knowledge. But what these people don’t know is that India has a face and hands and dirty fingernails. She has a family and cooking skills, and a laugh. I don’t simply know sad and true things about India, but I touched them, held them, smelled them, cried with them, and lived with them. Trafficking was in the next flat over and Hinduism was sitting next to me on the bus. So I would patiently listen to these meaningless fun facts that were supposed to make me feel bad for people when I really just wanted to see, hear, feel, and smell India again all at the same time. I knew that people would not understand, but I thought that they might want to.
One of the most popular comments that I get is “you will never forget that experience”. Perhaps this is true. I may not forget people’s names or the places we visited or even the scandal of Frenchie underwear ads. But I never want to forget the way I felt, the way it felt to be there. Everything I own smells clean and good again; I can’t remember the way it smelled and that scares me. I never want to forget how it felt to have sticky little fingers reach up to grab my face and grin a rotted smile. I want to remember what it was like to touch the beggars and how much fun it was to have ten little bodies crammed against me under my umbrella. I wanted to feel the rain again and have dirty feet. In fact, I began to need India.
When we landed in Bangalore, I remember looking out the plane window and seeing temples spread throughout the city. People told me that I would feel the spiritual warfare as soon as I stepped off the plane, but I did not feel the warfare as expected. It was much more tangible and physical than an internal discernment for me. I could see the enemy and it was so curious to me that he would move in such an obvious way. You could point at a building and say, “that’s a temple”. You could look at the windshield of a bus and say “that’s an idol” or look at the creepy little blue people and say “that’s a god”. It was so simple to know the difference between good and evil. I could point to sin and stare it straight in the face at the same time. When we were landing in Atlanta, God spoke to me. He took my mind to when I saw all of those temples in Bangalore and said to me “look at all of those temples”. The image of a teered building dressed with gods popped into my head alongside the image of a mall—the images were identical. I saw ganesh next to a Mercedes—they matched too. The warfare in America is just as harmful as it is in India, but its not a battle against metal characters, but against the poison that resides underneath our radars. What I mean is that malls aren’t always temples and a Mercedes isn’t always a god. The idols in my life don’t show up as little blue people and the temple I visit doesn’t look like a rainbow funhouse. Everything is so secret, so hidden, so poisonous. In fact, there are surely churches that are temples. This reality scares me. I want my sin to be revealed to me as tangibly as gods appeared in India. It’s harder to see my sin here because it isn’t as obvious as a blue/gold statue.
I miss it.
