Culture Shock

"A healing wind blows in India."
    - Banta Singh Sihota
           Victoria, B.C. 1985


 Early morning in a clearing mist and rising sun I am walking along a precarious crumbling curb carrying two year old Nika in my arms.  It is early January of 1986.  The air is cold but the dry dusty street shows little sign of the night's moisture.  Karen follows close behind me with four year old Shannon in tow.  We are leaving the hotel in Connaught Circle and walking into old Delhi towards the Red Fort, our first "tourist stop" in India.  I can't believe these streets.  The curbs are nearly a foot and a half high and breaking off in huge jagged chunks along the cement gully that passes for a sidewalk.

It is not fully light yet.  An ox cart creaks by pulled by two ancient white beasts of burden, the traffic weaving by around it.  At a bus stop ahead, a group of elderly sanyasins clothed in orange robes await the bus.  They seem to have stepped out of another century and appear specter-like in the dim morning light.

Although the dilapidated condition of the street is a surprise to me I am still basking in the glow of the hot bath and night in a safe hotel.  There is a security in the fact that we passed the first test of any new arrival to India, the initial culture shock.

Although I had traveled to Greece, Mexico and Central America and felt that I was a man of the world, the first 48 hours in India were a plunge into cold, sobering waters.  The main airport had the feel of a military prison and after waiting forever in the wee hours of night, being interrogated by customs officials in military khaki and pulling our baggage out of a veritable mountain of unsorted luggage, we were basically hijacked by two young cabbies who charged us ten times what we should have paid and took us to a hotel that was a nightmare of disrepair.  Karen was so afraid that the children would electrocute themselves on the bare wires protruding from the wall outlets or fall down the open elevator shafts that we left after only one hour despite the fact that they would not refund what we had already been made to pay in advance.

By this time the sun had come up and the cab driver dropped us off at the edge of Connaught Circle, the center of New Delhi.  We had not walked a block when we were accosted by money changers who approached us with all the sophistication of street muggers, scaring Karen badly and adding to our general sense of depression. By the time we had extricated ourselves from their clutches and passed three or four more beggars we were ready to pack it in.

We had been too scared to eat yet, for fear that we might eat the wrong thing and become ill but Karen was now weak from hunger and so we chose a restaurant at random, descended into its near empty interior and asked for menus. By this time we were on the verge of a nervous collapse and we began arguing about what was safe to eat and what was not.  A young Westerner dressed in Indian clothing who had entered the restaurant ahead of us, got up from his seat and approached our table.

"Excuse me" he said, "I couldn't help but overhear your conversation.  I went through exactly the same thing when I first came to India.  Perhaps I could help by suggesting something?"

After our recent encounters on the street, my alarm bells all went off, but we badly needed a friend.  He recommended an omelet to us, which we devoured hungrily and washed down with tea.  After breakfast he suggested that we might book a room in the hotel where he was staying where he felt we might be comfortable. 

He explained that he was an American student who had spent the past few months in India with several fellow students and their professor.  They were doing an in-the-field study of Indian dance and music.  We followed him to the hotel where he introduced us to the desk clerk and we checked into a room with a hot bath.  We only saw him once again.  The next morning he appeared at our door with a friend and gave us a travel guide, something like "India on Five Dollars US per Day," saying that since they were returning to the States they had no further use of it.  He was the first of many angels we met in India.

After a night in a good hotel, a solid meal and a hot bath, things would look vastly different.  The first thing Karen said to me when we checked into our room and I was beginning to talk about getting return airfare was, "Remember God".  After all, God had been uppermost in our minds when we made the decision to come to India.  Or should I say, when Karen made the decision?

When Karen announced that we were to leave our cozy little lakeside cottage at Shawnigan Lake and fly to India I was stunned. How did she imagine that we could withstand the rigors of foreign travel with two young daughters?

India was a distant dream to me, a place I'd once tried to reach, long ago and far away, guitar in hand and knapsack on back, in the magical 60's.  But these were the days of terrorist bombings, closed borders, soaring costs of living and practical thinking.

Not that my thinking had ever been very practical.  I was about to turn 40 and still dreaming of supporting my family through music.  But Karen's decision really pulled the rug out and I suddenly felt like Rip Van Winkle.  Where had I been all these years?  What had I been imagining?  This was certainly Karen's way of getting revenge.  You want to play music?  Okay!  I want to go to India.  Are you coming or not?

Although on the surface I was having a prolonged anxiety blitz, underneath, a wiser, quieter part of myself knew something had to give.  We'd been living on the edge too long with our bank balance going down and no real possibility of immediate income. Karen is restless by nature anyway and her spending one year in this blissful lakeside setting while I volunteered my music at rest homes and hospitals was an act of tremendous discipline and reserve. 

We'd sold our house to come to live on Vancouver Island and when a friend's investment proposition did not materialize, we were suddenly aware that at the rate our money was disappearing we would soon not be able to do anything extravagant even if we decided to risk it.  This new idea of jumping on an airplane was truly diving in at the deep end and I have never been a confident swimmer.  However, the more I thought about it, the more attractive the idea became.  This still did not prevent me from getting sick only a week before our departure.

There were other factors, however, adding to my state of tension.  A friend of many years had only recently suffered a mental collapse and this event had caused much chaos and confusion in our home since we were his closest friends and what at first was aberrant behavior soon became a psychic chasm gaping wide and seemingly ready to swallow all of us.  I was so intimidated by what was happening that I just wanted to lock my door and hide.  But we had some good guidance in the form of an elderly Sikh gentleman who'd been a friend of the family since we'd moved to the island. In the midst of this crisis at a point of what we felt to be real physical danger, we went to the home of the man who'd introduced us to him and who was also Sikh.  He called the older man who was then living in Victoria and over the phone, translated our dilemma.  The elderly man's advice: we must help our friend no matter what the danger.  And so we did.

This man had counseled us on several other occasions and had helped me before I was married.  He was known in the community for his gift of foresight and his ability to counsel and guide.  After the above mentioned incident had passed the crisis point, we consulted him as to the wisdom of taking our children on a long voyage to India.  He assured us that this was a good thing for the family, he gave us some instruction and blessed our journey. 

That settled my conscience, but as I said, still did not prevent me from falling sick just before moving so that the weight of the last minute details fell on Karen's shoulders.  If someone had told me twenty years earlier that I would have to be coddled into going to India, I would've laughed.

Most of our friends were shocked at our irresponsibility in taking our children with us.  Many said things like: "You're not taking the children....are you?"  But our experience was that the children were the most natural travelers of us all, the most adaptable, the most courageous, the most uncomplaining and the most willing to open unfamiliar doors.  In a deep sense they were our guides and through them we were introduced to a side of India that perhaps not many childless voyagers will ever see.

Most Indian people responded to our children as though they were related to them and so we were all immediately closely related.  And the journey itself, far from being the physical and emotional struggle I anticipated in view of my past, was a healing release from a culture where our spirits had felt such restraint all our lives. India is a land of Living Spirit. 

Not that Spirit is less alive elsewhere, only that in India there is more consciousness it seems, of it's living presence by more people.  For us, India was to be a doorway into the deeper country of our Spirit, a reminder that in trusting in God one is not sticking one's head in the sand but rather accessing an ancient wisdom alive and active in the Universe. 

Here, in a way that had never happened to us in North America, the power of the Spirit would be demonstrated to us.  In a strange way it is not Spirit alone that directs and guides, but one's individual openness and consciousness of its presence that acts as an activating power in our lives.