There is a way of being here – in India, in my mother’s
house, in this city teeming with my family – that I do not experience in the
US. When you live the kind of isolated life that most Americans live – just Payson
and me, for example – you have so much time on your hands that you feel that unless
you are being ‘productive’ with it, you are wasting it. I for one end up doing
too much in the US, or fretting about not doing enough. But here, in India, I
spend wide swaths of time just sitting down being with someone, mostly my
mother, and with other members of my family. You simply sit and watch the
children, chit chat, eat, lie down if you feel like it, since in my family at
least a lot of interaction happens on or besides beds. Payson, for example,
when he first visited my family, was amazed at how in the mornings I would take
my mug of tea, go to my parents bedroom, get under their quilts and just hang
around telling each other our dreams, going down memory lane, listening to
kirtan, Sikh religious music, on the radio, or being silent. My father, unlike
my mother, who has for most of her life been phobic around touching, loved
cuddling, so often I would lie with him and he would stroke my hair as we
chattered. This still happens in my sister and brother-in-law’s house, where
her grandchildren clamor all over them in the morning and evening.
What I want to say is that there is a different sense of
time in India, fast disappearing in the capitalistic -- time equals money and money equals life and
success --lifestyle, or disease that has infected the globe.
Bilkul/Absolutely. So good that you are able to drink this amrit/nectar of your Indian life....family really both in Chandigarh and at Behta Pani with our caring staff and our dogs, Foxy and Bali, who both love you so....as you love them.
ReplyDeleteBe happy under Lambri Peak and by the drumming Hirub stream....enough to open a small door into ananda/bliss!