Highlight: A Semester Abroad in India

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Judy Wolf
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Jessie McComb remembers stepping off the plane, walking into the Madras airport, and thinking, "This place looks like nobody has been here since 1972."

Twenty-two hours before, she had left her comfortable, middle-class home in Leominster, Massachusetts (the birthplace of Johnny Appleseed and plastic pink flamingo lawn ornaments), and stepped aboard a plane bound for India, where she was to spend a semester abroad at a university in Pondicherry. She had arranged the direct enrollment program herself, but despite her hours of meticulous planning and preparation, she never suspected that she was about to embark on the most challenging and introspective episode of her life.

She glanced around hoping to locate her advisor, who was scheduled to meet her. With translucent skin and hair so fine and blond it's almost white, this 20-year-old college student must have been easy to pick out of the crowd. He approached her, bade her welcome, and led her to a waiting taxi, an old white Ambassador. The classic lines of this sturdy and ubiquitous Indian automobile would soon become a familiar sight, but for now it looked like something out of an old black-and-white movie. Inside, the seats and ceiling were covered in a paisley cloth. As she sat, large springs shifted just below the fabric to accommodate her shape. "My advisor spoke to me, but his accent was so heavy and his words came so fast, I couldn't understand what he was saying," she recalls. "After 22 hours in the air, I was feeling a bit delirious."

She sat and stared serenely at the smoking incense and elephant-headed Ganesh deity ensconced on the dashboard. It was the middle of the night, and they drove for two and a half hours to Pondicherry, a former French colony on the southeastern coast of India. Despite the influences left by the French on the local food and seafront architecture, the town and surrounding agricultural communities were strongly traditional and Hindu. She had chosen the school and location for this reason, but was beginning to wonder what the reality of it would mean to her.

She watched out the window as they entered the town, past a hospital and people sleeping everywhere. A dog darted across the street. The front bumper caught its side. She heard it yelp, then saw it scurry away.

They pulled up in front of the guest house, and she understood her advisor to say, "See you in ten days when we come to pick you up to take you to University." He handed her his phone number and enough money to get through until the banks opened, then he was gone.

After a couple hours of sleep, Jessie awoke to the pale light of pre-dawn and went outside to find a phone and let her family know she'd arrived safely. She noticed that there was a park nearby. No one was around. The world seemed peaceful, manageable, motionless. She went back to bed.

* * *

When she stepped outside for the second time that morning, she found herself in a very different India. "There were tons of people," she recalls. Her senses were flooded with color, movement, noise. The smells were wonderful and terrible at the same time: rubber, diesel and wood smoke floated on an undercurrent of sun-baked clay and tarmac; the cloying musk of bodies in motion mingled with silk and sandalwood. Overwhelmed by the crowds, stunned at the sight of ragged and rotting beggars, she retreated to the guest house. There she sat in her room, terrified, for the next day and a half.

"Then I realized I needed to eat," she says. It was the bare essentials that got her outside again. "I told myself I had to pull it together and go find food."

Armed with her guide book, she soon discovered the nearby Sri Aurobindo Ashram, where a community dining room fed large numbers of Indians and a handful of foreigners, including a German woman with whom she spent the next few days exploring the area. "I found I had to teach myself to do everything," she says. "I didn't even know how to eat properly. I'd always imagined 'survival skills' as being relevant in the middle of the wilderness, yet there I was surrounded by everything you could need or want, but I had no idea how to access it."

* * *

After ten days, her advisor picked her up to take her to the university. She moved into a women's hostel (dormitory) on the university campus. "Life will be easy now," she thought.

In that first week on her own, she had realized "everything I never wanted to know about myself-spiritual, mental, emotional, physical....I had conversations with myself: 'I can't handle it here, I have to leave!' followed by 'Imagine how much there is to discover!' Finally I decided I could do anything for four months. I remember thinking 'I can't wait to get to the point where I don't want to go home, where I never want to go home.'"

At university, she made friends, initiated conversations with locals, and began to learn the basics. "When someone asks 'Do you want to go out for a dhosa?' it helps to know that's food," she says.She realized she had to learn how to learn. "It's different there, in that situation. You have to learn from people. You have to ask for help from the stranger next to you on the train. That's not part of American culture. We don't break that boundary."

Normally an avid scholar, she began to adopt a unique perspective toward her experience. "Who cares about the style of a certain sculpture during the fifth century? I can look that up in a textbook at home! What I can't do is experience what it's like to sit in the inner sanctum of the Kailesh Temple."

* * *

In deciding to come to study in India, she had eschewed conventional programs and arranged her own direct enrollment at an Indian university. Her guiding principle as she navigated her way through the culture in which she found herself was "If you want to know what their culture is like, participate in it, don't just look at it."

In an effort to experience as much of the local culture as possible, she got around using the same transportation as her Indian neighbors. "I used rickshaws, rode the bus, walked places." Her skin color set her apart and drew attention. "I stand out. I'd be the only white person on the bus, with my long blond hair...and I'm not just white, I'm see-through." She laughs. "The little kids were great, they broke the ice a lot. Once they'd initiated conversation with me, their parents could join in.

Her willingness to venture onto public transportation brought her one of her favorite memories of her time in India: "I was sitting on a bus, and an old, dirty man wearing only a lungi -- that's like a sarong, typical to the lower class-gets on and pays with a 100 rupee note. The conductor holds it up to the light, then holds it up to me like I'm a light source. We all laughed. We shared a joke, even though we didn't share a language. It was a moment where neither my race or sex got in the way of communication."

She was also exposed to a level of poverty and deformity that she had never before encountered. "The population is so large and publicly crowded, that the same percentage of people may be born with genetic birth defects, but you see more of them. Add malnutrition to that, and you've got more deformed babies, plus an infrastructure that means more people get injured with less sophisticated medical care....We're not talking about someone with a limp. There are no crutches, no supports, no wheelchairs. You've got no legs? You learn how to walk another way. Some have no option, no choice without someone else's help. I saw people who barely resembled human beings. A man with no legs on a platform with wheels, skinny, malformed, wearing shoes on his hands…it was almost scary. You're sitting on a bench, and someone crawls up to your feet. Your first response is to recoil, 'What is this thing?' and then you remind yourself, "This is a human being. Treat him that way.'"

While she was in India, Jessie took a hard look at her assumptions and circumstances. "I realized 'This is real life. America is not real life.'" She confronted her reactions to what she saw and experienced, untangling and examining her responses. "Coming from America, it took a while to recognize that what we perceive as 'terrible' is not. I was coming from a perspective of privilege-the privilege of being white, of having a first-rate education. We embody privilege here, and going to India was a way to begin to realize that."

She also learned she could adapt to an environment that was drastically different than the one she knew at home. The windows on her concrete hostel had bars, but no screens. Termites would fly to the fluorescent lights, lose their wings, and fall to the floor, where they lay wriggling by the thousands. She would wake up in the mornings with geckos sitting on her chest, looking at her. When the monsoons arrived, everything came alive. Trees were covered with a moving carpet of bugs. Jessie opened her door one day to see a huge scorpion, recently squashed by a security guard, still writhing on the floor as ants swarmed to devour it.

Transportation adventures became commonplace for her as well. "Transportation is crazy. A guy on a bike is peddling along in front of you, and all you see is a pile of pots and a wheel. People ride three to a bike. It's scary at first, but by the end I was doing it too, giving people rides on my bike."

* * *

After almost five months living, traveling, and studying in India, Jessie had begun to feel at home and found herself being more and more accepted in return. She recalls a particularly poignant moment: "I remember one of the most beautiful things that happened to me. One of my friends was speaking to me, and she slipped into Hindi. I just looked at her with a blank stare, and she stopped. 'I forgot,' she said. It was like, in that moment, there was no more inspecting each other. She was saying to me 'I forgot you were different.'"

Jessie began to spend hours sitting in the seaside cafés, watching people and scenery shift before her. She was filled with sorrow at the thought that she would soon be leaving so much she had come to love. Outside the city, farming went on as it had for thousands of years. Every day, tiny fishing boats braved the choppy waters of the Arabian Sea. Cattle were painted in traditional Hindu fashion: bright, colorful patterns adorning horns, faces, bodies.

One day near the end of her stay, during the onset of the monsoons, she was out riding her bike when the skies broke into a heavy rain. She began walking her bike, huddled under her umbrella, as the street quickly flooded with two inches of moving water.

She turned down a side street. A herd of painted cows came out from a small stand of trees to walk with her. Their brown eyes were serene and gentle as they surrounded her, keeping her company. Touched by the surreal nature of her experience, she began chatting to the cows. Languid and companionable, they moved with her to the end of the street, then stopped to watch her turn the corner. She looked back, and had the distinct feeling they were wishing her farewell.

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Do you have an interesting story to tell? Or know of an adventurous or inspiring tale lived by someone else? Let me know!

Copyright (c) 2002 Judy Wolf

About the Author:
Judy Wolf (www.judywolf.com) is a world traveler, freelance writer, speaker, and whitewater kayak instructor. She's taken numerous, extended solo journeys around the world, traveling by foot, bus, jeep, camel, truck, boat, train, plane, elephant, and bicycle to over 30 countries on five continents. She currently lives in upstate New York with her husband and border collie, where she's working on a book of travel essays about her most recent adventures…that is, when she's not plunging off waterfalls or entertaining the dog.

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