These First Days: Driving Home

There have been so many experienced emotions in these first days. Deep emotions, some that make life seem beautiful, still others that make life appear complex and difficult.

I’ll never forget the ride home from the hospital.

We emerged from our hospital room No. 212, like bears who’d been in hibernation all winter. Sleepy, groggy, and out of sorts. Our world had been doctors with kindness, nurses with pricks and pinches, nursing students with questions and repeating answered questions, and a whole ensemble of medical staff that routinely checked on us. It was a good world, not a cruel or crude world. We felt safe in our confinement with the clean tiled floors, the hot Indian meals served at our door, the newspaper delivered in the morning, the routines of the elderly staff that had bathed me, nurtured me, and smiled even in light of our worlds separated by the huge language barrier.

The drive home though. Our cocoon was no longer warm, our bear’s cave no longer sheltered from the wilds of the world. India is a place we’ve come to love and her people are kind, generous, and gracious. But I had entered a new India on our ride home. Her roads were suddenly too small and compact, her cars drove too recklessly and with abandon they shuffled past one another in mesmerizing stealth. Her weather was too hot and sticky, her scenery it looked different. I don’t remember that temple. And when did that frame of a building with bamboo scaffolding and sharp edges crop up? Little boys sleeping on the road-side taking a siesta from their work as cobblers, old women tap-tapping on our windows with wilted fingers, a woman in gaudy gold, bright orange-pink-red sari being whisked away on the back of a motorcycle. This isn’t the India I knew 48 hours ago. It’s new. It’s changed. It’s a little scarier. It’s a little more adventuresome, maybe too much for me at that moment.

Shane is asleep in his car seat. Don’t cut that corner like before. Take it slow, Babe. Ben is gripping the steering wheel, remaining focused on the road, the cows, the bullock carts, the scooters and motorcycles and bicycles, the dogs, the cats, the women in gaudy gold, bright orange-pink-red sari’s. These are the same streets we drove at 3:00 a.m. but 48 hours ago. This is the same city, the same people, the same dust and crowds.

But not that day. Because Shane was in his car seat and the world we’d returned to was totally different. To us.