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As the year draws to a close I’ve been reflecting upon the experiences which have been most significant for me. My two trips to India certainly stand out. It was a real test of personal strength to travel alone as a woman knowing that I was going to be entirely responsible for my personal safety and well being. There wouldn’t be the reassurance of emergency services such as police and ambulance as we have here, I’d be completely alone, save for the few days spent with some relatives.
Both trips were exhilarating. I let myself be guided by my intuition, if a situation or person didn’t feel right I didn’t hang around to find out why. Just because an individual or family were friendly and warm it didn’t mean they had my trust, that’s something earned over time. It was emotionally taxing though to be constantly aware of potential dangers to safety, not smiling as much as I do normally was really hard, a friend of mine had told me to leave my smile at the departure lounge at Heathrow and pick it up on the way back – ‘it means different things out there’ she said. Being firm but polite was not too difficult as it’s part of my business personality and staying reserved and quiet was easy since I was travelling alone and there was no one to talk to anyway – the funny outcome of that was most of the locals thought I couldn’t speak the language, some went to great pains to speak to me in English while others would talk about me not knowing I could understand every word that was being said!
‘It’s a land of extremes’ as a friend once said, true to a great extent, a place where chaos and tranquillity dwell as neighbours. Here are some shots from my last day there.
It’s good to be home again after three weeks in India. I wanted to start my trip there from the beginning – my earliest childhood memory is of this spot when I was eighteen months old and my parents had taken us on holiday. My mum had told me to stand on the side while she bathed my brother in the water. So I stood and like most small children who are drawn to shiny, bright objects I remember looking at the Golden Temple ahead of me, to the right my mum had taken off her silver watch and placed it on the edge of the water, another attractive, shiny thing to look at for a toddler, until a splash of water saw it disappear into the tank, followed by lots of commotion to try and recover it. I also remember we travelled to places in a white taxi which had red leather seats and I lost my milk bottle so my mum had to improvise with a Coca-Cola one. And the village we visited where there were beautiful peacocks. A few years ago I related these memories to my mum to see if they were accurate, we were both quite surprised at my recall.
