The India Years or “Eat, Pray, Love” with Less Pasta & Early 90′s Hair.

There are two books I read last year that I loved, but that hit too close to home. Eat, Pray, Love, about a divorcee who uses a year to go find herself in Italy, Indonesia, and India, and Kabul Beauty School, about a beautician who leaves her family to go to Afghanistan, and ends up helping set up beauty shops all over the region- one of the only businesses a woman could own under the Taliban’s interpretation of sharia law. I thoroughly enjoyed both of them, but in spite of my enjoyment I couldn’t help but roll my eyes.

There is something about affluent foreign ladies traipsing around far away countries to find themselves that just makes me cringe. It’s so unspeakably colonial. Wanting to see another country is one thing, but what were these women running from? Why did they need to leave their families to go somewhere so far away? What’s wrong with them? What about their daughters??

The only problem with that line of logic is that Elizabeth Gilbert doesn’t have children, and the woman who wrote Kabul Beauty School had sons…and that my mom started leaving the prairies to find herself in India when I was six.

I call the years from when I was six to eight years old my India years. My mother would go for 4 to 6 weeks at a time, seeing big cities and then going to a rural valley to practice meditation with other Westerners and their teacher. I mostly remember her coming back, she would come home to our farm house with horses in the back yard, and my little sister (who was four the first time she left) and I would lose our minds. I remember holding onto my mom as hard as I could, trying to drink in all the time we had missed. Her long blonde hair would be even longer than when she left, and she was even more beautiful than I remembered. I remember being extremely upset by how fast my image of her faded when she left. It made her even further away. Where now we have skype and broadband, in the early 90′s we didn’t have dial up in the country and the time difference made phoning next to impossible. I don’t think we ever spoke on the phone, I think it would have made her time away even worse.

When she came home her duffel bags were full of new fabrics and tiny presents for us that smelled wild and full of spices. She brought us notebook with pages that were extraordinarily thin, taught us to write in Hindi and brought us bindi’s that we wore on our foreheads with delight. Our whole language changed when she was home. If my mom was doing the laundry or making tea she was the laundrywalla or the chaiwalla (walla is a Hindi word for someone who is hired to do something). I learned how to pronounce complicated and strange sounds of another world, and read through the Bhagavad Gita with her. I liked the stories about how Ganesh got his elephant head the best.

If nothing else, my mom was alive with stories. There were ones about the buses that careened up the sides of mountains at speeds that made the western women sick with worry. There were the babies kept thin and sick at the airports by the beggars, and the dangerous power lines that were often fixed by men prodding at them with long poles and no safety equipment. There were the swami’s who were so powerful that when they meditated they could generate heat that would melt their jewelery and burn them if they didn’t take it off, and others who could create holy objects from thin air. It was a place alive with magic where things that couldn’t happen anywhere else happened every day.

I did yoga with her, meditated with her, and went to Hindu temple with her. I wrote letters to her Buddhist monk friend in my childish printing and he called me his dharma sister. And every time she left it was worse. I was convinced she would always be going away, and would never stay with us. I would dive into everything related to India so I could be closer to my mom. With everything I had, I tried to feel like India was exceptionally important so I wasn’t so unimportant and small.

India was a huge part of our lives until I was about 12 years old. I was all mehndi and plans to see the world, but as I got older my enthusiasm waned and I started to really think about that time. No matter how hard I try, I fundamentally cannot fathom what she was going through that made this necessary, and I don’t know if I ever will. I love my mom, and I know this couldn’t have been easy for her. I know she was trying to dream big - but I can’t help but be mystified when I think about it. But I love her, and while the years that led up to India and were followed by my parent’s divorce are still a mystery, I know she can’t answer my questions. I’ve tried to talk to her about it, but the person I want to talk to is the 31 year old version of her, while she’s on her way to the airport. The woman who I love and know now has as much trouble explaining it as I do understanding it.

I’ve poured over it for years and while it’s taken a long time, I’ve started to realize that the reason I can’t understand the mysterious and seductive country I’ve puzzled over for so long is because it isn’t a place on a map. India is a place in my mother’s heart that’s full of magic, chai, palaces and possibility that’s a million miles away from a normal life.

Or that’s what India used to be, at least.