India Always Wins: The End of the Wastrel

Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked of Americans: “We go to Europe to be Americanized.” Perhaps this was true during his time, and perhaps it is yet so for some among us. Europe still possesses an undeniable romantic allure—that of antiquity and refinement, sensibility, liberality, and voluptuousness. But most Americans don’t require Americanizing these days—we have no need for consecration of our worldview and values and lifestyle in the crucible of another culture. We take for granted the notion that we are the greatest nation on earth—any feelings of inferiority that may have prevailed in Emerson’s day have long since been dispelled and replaced with an unassailable national chauvinism. Why go elsewhere when we’re already at home in the only country that matters? The vast majority of us don’t even have passports.

Yet there are some Americans who do buzz with curiosity for the wide world. We are anxious for at least a glimpse of the strange, the new, the different, the other. For some a single glimpse is enough to forever sate their curiosity, to settle any inchoate cosmopolitan stirrings. Others leave home and never return—finding something in the outside world that won’t let them come back, they become expatriates.

The mind of the expatriate, I confess, is a difficult one for me to plumb, at least that of the sort who emigrates from the First to Third World (to use an outdated formulation). How does one turn one’s back on home, on the soil from which one grew, without a compelling economic or political or social reason? It strikes me that this sort of émigré—the First to Third Worlder without the exigency of circumstance to propel him—must either be running from something or else nursing a profound grievance with his native culture. Perhaps this betrays a lack imagination on my part, or a deeply rooted, deeply disguised parochialism—perhaps the decision to renounce one’s homeland falls well within a continuum of orthodox behavior.

In any event, I never feared, upon departing for India last September, that I might be embarking upon a course of permanent expatriation—that I might, as some joked with me before I left, “never come back.” There was hardly any danger of that. Neither was I expecting, under the duress of estrangement, to surrender myself to a fond and nostalgic patriotism. During two previous stints in Africa—both comparatively brief, although significant enough to merit mention—I found myself missing specifics—people, places, foods—but nothing so abstract as the idea of America and of all of the ponderous values and conceits it is obliged to support. If I missed generalities I missed those things that make America appear so vulgar to everyone else—the excess, the convenience, the endless distraction—those things that most inspire my guilt when I contemplate the American lifestyle in relation to the rest of the world. And guilt, after all, is a decidedly poor foundation for love.

My time in India has been focused foremost on work, on furthering my “professional” experience; it has only secondarily been a voyage of discovery, although I don’t claim that landing here, of all of destinations on earth, was the result of any coincidence. I’ve felt India’s call since reading Midnight’s Children in May of 2002; it was quite natural that when I started casting about for passage to the developing world, I began and ended my search here. Still, my cardinal motive for coming has been utilitarian; I’ve never sought or expected transformation from my time here, as I’m afraid so many Westerners do. In general, I don’t believe that people are transformed by a single event or experience, severe emotional or physical trauma excepted. True transformation comes about through the accretion of innumerable incidents, accidents, and experiences, great and small, spanning many years, each intertwining and acting on every other with unpredictable results and consequences. Transformation is a gestalt whose strands are nearly impossible to disentangle. It is only our need to impose a rational order on all things—a need to account for all phenomena—that causes us, in retrospect, to assign to transformation a single source or cause. India alone, I knew, didn’t have the power to transform me, and, more to the point, I didn’t want it to.

Yet aside from my primary purpose of learning and doing things that I hoped would help to improve the lives of others (on whatever modest scale) both in the immediate term in India and in the longer term of a useful life, I’ve also hoped that my time here would serve to broaden my sympathies, my appreciation and understanding of the world. Perhaps this seems no less lofty a desire than personal transformation, but I think it is, at least, a change more easily and clearly effected. Change, though, isn’t the right word; it isn’t change I’ve hoped for, only growth, an increase, an expansion of thinking and feeling. I hoped that India would make me a bigger person.

But after eight months, it seems that I’ve only come here, after all, to be made smaller. Although I’ve gone a good deal farther than Europe, Emerson’s Atlantic hopping contemporaries would no doubt recognize what’s become of me—I’ve been Americanized. India has defeated my internationalist pretensions; it has made me willing, in my darkest moments, to surrender my passport. For the time being, I desire nothing more than to return home and to lead a blameless American existence. I want familiarity and comfort; I want to crawl into the cap of an acorn and to forget that a world exists beyond its curling edge. I’ve no particular ambition to propel me now. Doubtless the effect is temporary, but I can’t deny that India has laid me low. I couldn’t even say how, exactly, it has won—with a million swift and subtle jabs, I suppose. It must have vanquished me by attrition, for I never felt the stunning, conclusive crash of a landed haymaker.

Upon my arrival in India, I was met at the airport by Jason Fults, an American Fulbright scholar living in Delhi. We had been in contact through e-mail for several months, and he had kindly offered to let me crash in his bed for a few nights while he and a friend, who happened to be on the same flight over from Newark, put up in a hotel. After making our way into the city and discharging our bags at our respective quarters, we all walked to a South Indian restaurant close to Jason’s flat for dinner. While we enjoyed our meal and chatted, Jason offered intermittent advice on getting along in India. He had recently been sick for the first time, he said; it was almost inevitable that one got sick here. One couldn’t really escape it. He repeated something a friend had recently told him: “India always wins.”

At that moment, having only arrived in the country two hours before, the words stuck me as a portent. Somehow I knew that, sooner or later, they would return to me—like every aphorism, they carried the predictive force of the absolutely general—and I would tremble before their truth. And now I find them lapidary, fit to be chiseled into a headstone. I concede: India has won. For the time being, it has won. I will not yet admit final defeat; I’m not done with India. Some day, I shall return. But until then, the wastrel will put away his pen. There are yet many stories that could be told of my time here, but how could I possibly hope to recreate a creature so various and strange as India at any remove from its pulsing heart? I can only write with this country’s overwarm and pungent breath filling my nostrils, its harsh and importunate voice resounding in my ears. I only want to be honest as possible. I can't risk slander; even India, which has handled me so roughly, deserves the truth be told of it.