A Little bit of History

“India,” he says, pronouncing it with the verbal intonation of a ring announcer, delivering a heavy thud in the middle, and letting the end roll out from deep within his chest.
“India?” he repeats, this time questioning more than stating. Perhaps, with my large eyes, dark hair, and earth-colored skin, I could be Srilankan, Bangladeshi, or even Nubian, all of which I’ve been previously mistaken for.
I give him the customary Indian head nod, the one that usually confuses dilettantes to the world of Indian head gesturing – is it a yes, no, or maybe? I follow it up with a toothy smile to affirm his guess.
The Burmese monk smiles back, raising his silver and grey toned eyebrows in delight.
“How lucky you must be to come from the Land of the Buddha!” he exclaims.
I wish I knew. I was mostly tuned to answer the usual questions posed by curious travelers, the ones that teed around post-card adjectives, storybook scenes, and popular India’s most beloved buzzwords – Bollywood, Saris, Curry, and Slumdog Millionaire.
“You must have heard many stories,” he says.
I haven’t, I tell him. Those weren’t the kind of stories I was told. There were grand tales about Gods, demigods, human ones, and even one about a lady living on the moon, but never was there one about Buddha.
I only had two vague meanderings with Buddhism in my childhood. The first was a namesake, my neighbor who shared his first name with the Lord – Gautam.
The second was a crude sketch of a meditating Buddha from my eighth-grade history textbook. Our teacher had asked us to swiftly read through the lesson about Buddhist India; we were told that the meat of the test questions would come from the 30-page chapter on the Indus valley civilization. So we marked our pages with tiny crosses on top, skipping breezily through an imperative chunk of Indian history. The only one enlightened at the end of eight-grade history was Buddha.

“We are coming to India this year, to visit Bodhgaya, the birthplace of the Buddha,” the monk announces, with veritable buoyancy in his voice.

“Have you been?” he questions. I nod my head with a looming shower of regret.

”You must go,” he says, with a gentle smile. He bids goodbye a few minutes later and walks over to join a group of adolescent monks. The drape of his crimson robe forms delicate ripples across his back, and the gentle swathe of the fabric resembles the breezy fall of my mother’s sari.
I am two thousand miles from home, yet I still learn things about it.