Now. The flight to Taipei was 13.5 hours crammed in the middle seat of
an overbooked plane next to a very large white dude in a Hawaiian shirt who was off to Thailand for what I'm fairly certain was a sex
tour. He was a little creepy but not terrible. I watched 5 or 6
movies, two of which I had already seen. The Life Aquatic suddenly
became amazing and truly moving. I barely slept and felt very
pukey at the end of the flight.

In Taipei, a weird Indian guy tried to talk to me at the terminal and
tell me about how my mom's travel plans weren't going to work, but I
luckily escaped. Even more luckily, the plane was almost empty and I
got to sleep for a couple hours. That flight was 6.5 hours.

My mom met me in Delhi and my first "welcome to India" experience was
going into the women's bathroom and having to pay 10 rupees (about 25
cents) to a woman lying on a piece of cardboard on the bathroom floor
before I could use the toilet. The only good news was that the toilet
wasn't a squat toilet and there was toilet paper -- not your typical
India bathroom. Maybe that's why I had to pay.

It was about 3AM at that point. My mom and I took a taxi to the YMCA
hostel so I could shower and we could sleep for a few hours. At 6AM we
drove through Delhi to the train station. It was already about 90
degrees outside and the streets near the station were crammed with
people and coolies and rickshaws and crazy taxi drivers. We hired a
coolie to carry our bags to the train (on his head!) partly because it is the easiest way to find the right place in the station. It was huge, no signs anywhere, lots of stray dogs and people sprawled out all over the cement floor. We made it onto the train and from there it was a 5-hour train ride to Dehra Dun, the capital of Uttaranchal, the region where my family lives. From the train window, I saw the Ganges River, sugar cane fields, wild pigs and lots of people living in crazy huts and abandoned-looking buildings.

In Dehra Dun, we ate lunch at a "Western" style restaurant where the
chicken sandwiches were strange breaded chicken patties topped with
coleslaw on a bun. The fries were pretty normal, but the ketchup was
thin and sweet. Anyway, after lunch, we started our
ascent up the mountain. The drive was honestly one of the scariest of
my life. Passing buses on hairpin turns in the Himalayan mountains --
anything else pales in comparison. After awhile, I had to force myself
to not watch the road because it was too nervewracking. (The buses we
passed were often streaked with vomit. Which didn't help.) The drive
took an hour and a half. We picked up a coolie in the town closest to
my mom's house and he was the one who carried our bags from the road
down the mountain to the house. With a rope strapping them to his
back. He looked to be about 60. (My mom gave him 100 rupees for the
job, which is about $2.50. He was really happy and later she told me
he probably makes that much in a day most of the time. It's weird here, the feeling of being served. My mom and stepdad have a cook, Vimla, and my mom told me that if she offers to get me something I should say yes more often than no because her whole sense of purpose and self-esteem comes from serving other people. It's hard to get used to.)

My mom and stepdad live in an old colonial summer house on the side of a mountain. There are trees all around and MONKEYS. Last night we sat on the porch and watched at least 15 monkeys playing in the empty lot below the house. It was entertaining, but now I see why my sister is scared of them. They're creepy and fearless and ugly. And they've been known to bite.

I'm currently scared of monkeys and amoebic dysentery. We'll see what the future holds.

There have been lightening storms for the last two afternoons. Yesterday I was reading in my room when Vimla beckoned me out to the living room. "Anjali...come here." We looked out the front door together and saw what looked like rock salt collecting on the ground. It was hail! We listened to the pounding on the corrugated metal roof and watched the purple streaks of lightening and smiled at each other.

Unfortunately, the bad weather drives critters into the house. My stepdad caught three giant spiders the first night it rained. (Well, giant to me, which means anything bigger than a silver dollar. That is not giant to everyone else; that's just normal.) And last night there was a mouse in my sister's room. She seemed completely nonplussed. "Oh yeah, I noticed the droppings a couple days ago." Um, shouldn't you do something to get rid of it? "Eh," she shrugs. She also doesn't care about the giant (to me) spider residing in her bathroom. But I do!

Luckily, there haven't been any scorpions yet. YET.

I went to the town bazaar a couple days ago, which is a marketplace perched on the edge of the mountain. I was almost smashed by a car when I leaned over to pick up a shoe I had accidentally knocked to the ground. But after being here for a week, these brushes with death seem commonplace. You almost die but then you don't die, so you go on feeling like you aren't going to die.

At the bazaar, the funniest thing to see are these coolies, both young and old, pushing around babies in strollers. Apparently people hire the coolies to push their kids around while they shop. It's strange to see ancient, ragged men pushing around babies in strollers decorated with Disney characters. When the kids get older, they graduate to ponies led by the coolies.

The power just went out. This happens approximately twenty times a day.

In a week, my family and I will be traveling to Delhi to shop, then to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, then to Kashmir to live on a houseboat for a week. So many more brushes with death to look forward to!

I'm not good at taking pictures of people. I don't like asking and I feel strange just surreptitiously trying to sneak a shot; it feels dirty. And I don't like how taking a picture of someone often makes them turn all stiff and self-conscious, and the beautiful spontaneity of what I wanted to take a picture of is lost.

And then there are the pictures I don't get because I'm not fast enough or because it feels insensitive to pull out my camera or because I would rather stand there and see with my own two eyes than capture it on a tiny screen and think about it later. There are lots of those as well.

So I'm trying to write down the things I would take pictures of if I could, if my eyes were cameras and a blink could be a closing shutter. Click.

The kitchen men at school taking a break in between meals, crouched on the ground playing cards, still wearing their white hats and jackets, their feet bare. The cards are laid out on a piece of cardboard. Some of the men sit or squat, a couple sit on small hunks of broken concrete that look far less comfortable than the ground. They are smiling. The game looks like rummy.

The cobbler in the bazaar, carving the bottom of a shoe out of a new piece of salmon-colored leather. His chest is bare and his whole body moves rhythmically as he pushes his chisel through the leather, against the small rectangle of metal he holds between his bare feet, cutting perfectly along the line traced in the leather. Even the curves are smooth and even. He doesn't look up for a moment.

The chicken with its head caught in a plastic bag, standing still at first in the middle of the trash pile on the outskirts of the bazaar, so still that I don't even know if it is what I think it is. But then it starts moving, its face becoming clearer as it pecks frantically at the bag. If it would only put its head down, the bag would slide right off. But it pecks and pecks and my sisters and I watch it, asking each other what we should do. I eye the pile of trash and shit, think about tetanus and my slipper-clad feet. We wonder if someone put the bag on the chicken on purpose, wonder if someone will come along to rescue it, or should we do it. Finally, a little boy comes tearing across the trash pile and pulls the bag from the chicken's head. It runs away. "Let's stop looking like tourists," says one of my sisters and we walk on.

Tourists stop and stare. When I stare at the little Tibetan boy spinning a top on the table or the mournful cow plopped down in the middle of the busy bazaar, I am marking myself as an outsider, because I am not pretending these are everyday things. My sister minds this, I think, but I don't mind. I stare and stare and will myself to remember. The bright green and yellow top. The clotted hooves and horns worn to nubs, looking raw and pink. The weird painful tugs at my heart, the way it makes me all feel. The things I can't take pictures of.