I arrived in India after midnight and stepped out of the airport into heat that still clung to Delhi after summer. My brother was waiting. Somewhere beyond him were the roads, the rickshaws, the mountains, the borders, and everything I had imagined from home.
I didn’t know what I was doing yet. I followed maps through unfamiliar streets, climbed into rickshaws, crossed toward Pakistan in a Jeep held together with duct tape, and kept discovering that the places I had pictured were never quite the places I found. India was the first trip that made the world feel much larger than my plans for it.
The next morning, my brother and I pushed our way through New Delhi Railway Station.
Fluorescent lights blazed overhead.
The smells of chai and diesel floated over the tracks.
A vendor shouted over a portable loudspeaker.
Boxes of live chickens were stacked along the platform.…
For hours, we’d been driving past barren landscapes of brown dirt separated from the highway with barbed wire and chain-link.
Soldiers and army vehicles rolled by in the distance.
Signs every few miles warned:
NO STOPPING.
NO PHOTOS.
We kept going.…
From the top of the tower, the city spread out in every direction—a shifting mass of rooftops, alleyways, and movement.
A priest had brought me here, leading me up the winding tower steps to this overlook.
The view had cost extra.…
“Shake the Shark?”
The driver smiled.
“Yeah. You know… like from the American television show.”
I looked at my brother. He didn’t know either.
Shake the Shark laughed all the same, then he started the engine to his car.
~
He’d met us at the houseboat docks just after sunrise.…
The Jeep had duct tape holding it together. It rattled down the road as the Pakistani border gates rose in the distance.
Our driver parked in a dusty field alongside a hundred similar vehicles and promised to wait for our return.…
We sat in the back seat of a rickshaw with my brother and his school friends after school one day. Three squished across the bench seat in the back, and me in the front with the driver.
The day felt hot and sticky as we crawled through traffic, noise and daylight pouring through the open vehicle.…
The airport doors slid open, and the heat hit me.
It was after midnight in October.
My brother had warned me the worst of Delhi’s summer had already passed, but the air still felt heavy enough to wear.
I looked around and took a deep breath.…
In the last hours of daylight, I set out to visit Dastgeer Sahib, a mosque in Srinagar decorated with colorful patterns of papier-mâché.
I followed my map through Srinagar’s twisting streets.
When the call to prayer echoed from the minarets, the city briefly hollowed out, the sound hanging in the air like the steady chime of European bells marking the hour.…
The girl at the bank grew excited. I’d gone there in advance of my trip to exchange dollars for rupees.
They couldn’t do this, but I forgot all about it as soon as her eyes lit.
“My family is from Punjab,”
Her face glowed.…
