How the Places We Go Change Us

One, I am hungry; two, it’s not polite to refuse—but I’m not even sure how to say thank you. The language barrier is a vault; I’m on the inside. Metallic taste of guilt fills my mouth, mixing with aloo paratha and spicy mango pickle. I retreat to the window as we sluice free of the city. Dusk grates pink over fields of canola and wheat, and I feel I have been here before…but where exactly is here?

A week ago, it was a Boeing 747, my first time flying, eyes losing their virginity to the troposphere, its gleam and vacuum. Tonight, it’s the Nilachal Express cutting a 2,000 km diagonal across India. Wherever ‘here’ is now, it is fluid, more brushstroke than thumbtack. Half a world from home, my heart and horizons stretch with each mile.

Chin rooted on my hand, eyelids stalled open, I watch thatch roof villages run up and fall away. Women walk single file from wells, carrying water on their heads, three and four pots high. These are the pauses in India’s throbbing heartbeat.

The air is stuffy with our humanness and curiosity. We are six to a compartment: a sweet family of five, fragrant silken gold gods all of them, and then me: pale and wispy with a shaved head. The father has that wiry, weather-kissed look of a man who works outdoors, probably with his hands. The mother glares out the window, eyes bright, watching. The baby ogles me. Our eyes meet. Something melts and he giggles—at how white I am, I assume. His mother smiles not at me, but at the father, who grins at all of us, while the other two, slightly older, take turns climbing up to my bunk.

I wake up to drops on my arm. Thinking rain, I reach for the shutter. Instead, I see the mother dangling the baby at the window as he pees through the bars. I recoil and shudder, realizing what is on my arm. No one seems to notice my reaction as I rush to the bathroom, horrified.

As I scrub and dry my arm, holding my breath against the reek of the toilet, I catch my face in the mirror: contorted, distressed.

I climb up to my bunk for the night. Enough for one day. It’s dark out, nothing left to see. I lay back and see that saucer-eyed baby boy nuzzling against his mother, and I begin to miss my own mother. I start to long for things I do not have yet. I am fifteen and having kids has never crossed my mind. As my thoughts pitch and settle to the train’s rhythm, I see her, no one I have met yet, eyes deep and full of things to come. I fall asleep, dreaming of children who have their mother’s eyes.