It was in Ahmedabad, after many months of travel through the giant country called India, that I gave up being a backpacker and became a tourist. I was worn out and wounded: my digestive system would never fully recover, I’d lost 20 lbs. & I was limping. My train had hit a cow, my motor rickshaw had hit a car, my bus had hit an ox, and finally, a pedal rickshaw had hit me.

I’d seen sites of grandeur- Agra’s Taj Mahal, Jaipur’s Palace of Winds; I’d seen sites of squalor- the Calcutta slums, piles of refuse lining roads like snow-banks, thin women making gravel by breaking rocks with picks under a murderous sun.

The physical extremes of India had caused emotional extremes in me: despair in unending heat, joy in monsoon rains, awe at the bowl of stars over me on a desert bed, terror navigating the long jungle path between the restaurant and the beach in the South.

There comes a time, when you are exploring a new place for a lengthy period, that withdrawal becomes absolutely necessary. In India, the only way for me to withdraw was to pay for “luxuries”. For an insane amount ($60/night- what I usually spent in a week), I moved into a hotel that was perfectly cool, into a room that was perfectly sealed (no monkeys coming in through the window here). There was a swimming pool on the roof! There was a bathtub in my room! (It was all about the water after the Thar Desert; if I wasn’t in the tub, I was in the pool.)

The food was edible. More than edible- it was delicious. The hotel knew tourists and the chili was greatly reduced. I’d been living on rice and bananas for some time. (I remember looking forward to “scrambled eggs” on the train. It was included with my berth. Served in little tin tiffins with no accompaniments, the eggs had been scrambled with chopped green chilies and my first bite, my only bite, burned my mouth and brought tears to my eyes.)

I stayed at the luxury hotel, with some guilt, for a couple of weeks. Outside beggars clawed me for money, rickshaws carried ceramic Ganeshas to the sea to be thrown in, noise and vehicles assaulted me, women with wide bare feet pulled carts down hot asphalt…and just when my hackles rose for them, I saw men with the same feet carrying huge bundles on their heads.

Look, India is worth the visit, it’s worth a long visit…the most amazing things I ever saw were in India- cows at bus stops, waterfalls in jungles, rafts in crocodile-infested waters, parrots in trees, camels in deserts, elephants in traffic jams.(read my poem)

I’m just saying: Do it when you’re healthy.

One day I was in some temple complex somewhere, sitting in a shadow, when I saw a white woman. I hadn’t seen a fellow traveller in days. Solo backpackers are always quick to share, friendships are cemented after one conversation- that’s true wherever I travelled, but in India it’s even stronger. We have a concern for each other there.

I got up and walked toward her. We came close to each other, appraising each other’s level of grime. “Are you okay?” I asked seriously.
“I’m coping.” She didn’t smile. She had purple bags under her eyes and a red tika on her forehead that had dripped over the bridge of her nose. “And you?”
“Ditto.” My smile was rueful.
She looked into my eyes and we connected in a very solid way. “It takes its toll,” she said.
I nodded.
It was unbearably hot standing there in the sun. She stepped into a nearby temple door without saying good-bye. I didn’t mind. It was too hot to talk. I headed back to the shade, my dizziness tempered by her gaze.

Outside Chiang Mai Wat in Thailand, an old woman sells birds in tiny bamboo cages. For a pittance you are granted the power to free a creature into the sky. I bought them all.

The largest bird cage I’ve seen rests on the summer patio of my favourite restaurant (Fall River, outside Perth, Ontario). It’s easily 8 feet across and 6 feet tall, several feet deep and full of twittering colours making quick jumps from side to side to side, from top to bottom to top.

I stood in front of it one afternoon wondering at their lives- the crowding, the sweet breeze sweeping in, the untouchable sky. I felt that it was like sitting in a classroom in the spring when the only thing you want is Out, when your body yearns to run, and the clock will not tick.

After 10 minutes or so, a man at a nearby table said, “Can you imagine how it feels to be able to fly but unable to fly?” I answered immediately. “I know how that feels. I am stuck in this body.”

It’s supposed to bring luck to open a tiny bamboo cage in Thailand and free a tortured soul, but really it’s like ringing the dismissal bell at 3:10. It’s like being God and allowing death.

Indian Railways tickets are dirt cheap. The trains are crowded, uncomfortable, slow and unbearably hot. They are often hours, sometimes days, late. More than once, I sat in a train station for more than 24 hours, amazed at the chaos and incredulous that no one seemed bothered by it. The absolute best thing about the train is that you can run- if you’re late, or if you jumped off at a station to buy bananas- you can run even though the train has started moving, and you can catch it- grab a handle and jump on like some kind of hero.

This photo is taken from a train I was on, through the window. The windows don’t have panes of glass, just two metal bars across a large opening. At this station, the professional beggars took some time to dawdle, as all children are wont to do, and watched the workers work. The boy is a spray-painted silver Ghandi. (Click photo for close up.)

Many homeless people sleep in the stations. For the rest of my life I will remember a thin man and a thinner woman lying on a grey rag, spread neatly on the cement floor by a track, with the tiniest baby nestled between them, too tiny to be alive, I thought. They were defenseless and had to be exhausted to sleep in such a place. But they had nothing to steal, it seemed.
Ah, but still, they had the rag! You might think it was nothing…you might mistake it for garbage.

One day, a train stopped right beside mine, and I surreptitiously watched a young woman eat newspaper-wrapped curry and rice with her fingers. When she finished, she dropped the wrapping out the window onto the tracks between our trains. As I was judging this “littering”, a boy swooped down the track, grabbed the newspaper, opened it and licked it, sucked it and then tossed it on the ground. “Oh,” I thought, “Now it’s garbage.” Before my train moved, a goat came along and ate the newspaper. And I learned that nothing is really garbage.

Train robbers were a real threat- I was told they were bandits who would stop a train, come aboard and rob each passenger and then disembark. Once my train stopped in the middle of the night with a lurch. I rolled right out of my short bunk with a thud, scared the bandits had come. In fact, we had hit a cow and didn’t move the rest of the night.

I met families who brought stoves and cooked whole meals on the trains where we slept, talked, played games and music, and for some time, lived together. (It took four days to get to Delhi from Bangalore.) They told wonderful stories too. My favourite was about a woman who had terrible stomach pains. She went to the bathroom, which is simply a hole over the rushing tracks (please hold it ’til we get out of the station). To her surprise, when she squatted, a baby popped out of her, slid down the hole and disappeared. The train stopped, and they went back to pick up the baby who was perfectly fine, waiting on the tracks.