India still lies over me like a thick dust, inhibiting me from resuming life as usual upon my return. I research jet lag and try to wrap my head around the biochemistry of my anatomical clock. I have flown westward which promises a quicker resumption of normalcy. Avoid caffeine, sugar, sleeping in the daylight. I am doing everything wrong, India still nagging pulling at my pant cuffs. India's message is clear, write me down. I have no idea what the compulsion is, the physical need to tell my stories. I find even well-crafted travel writing boring, even superfluous. If I want to know about India, I want to read stories written by Indians from behind doors I could not enter, not some water-downed ethnocentric adaptation, recounting how some experience of the brown other transformed one's moral, ethnic, or worse yet spiritual convictions. I do not want to write about how I found God in India or worse realized my own privileges contrasted against the backdrop of the underdeveloped world's depravity. None of that is true and yet all of it is. India may have turned me into a cliché but if I want this headache to lift, my eyelids to lighten, I have to write it down. If nothing else, India has taught me to follow my instincts.

How do I do this? I don't think it makes sense for me to write this down chronologically, already my mind's memory is juggling the experiences. Memories fly and fall like random cards from the shuffle. The girls fingers were long and her clap stung. All of her joints in fact are long and skinny, knobby. Her eyes are wide with excitement and she speaks almost no English. We will be on the train together for at least 17 hours and she is clearly happy about this. She is dressed like a western-dressed Indian girl. She is 13 and her small breasts are just beginning to brave the surface of her t-shirt. But not yet, she is still just a girl and I am trying to thing of some bridge in, since words fail me. I know girls and I have a sense we have some things to talk about. She is all energy, words, movement contained, but we lack language and privacy. There is no such thing as privacy in India. It's just something you try to carve out in a look between two people amongst onlookers, in the cadences of typical conversation. We are in the sleeper car of a train on the way from a small city called Bikaneer, known for their, namkeen (spicy nibbles) and a smaller town nearby that houses a temple called Karni Mata in which 1000's of live rats are revered and treated like royalty. My original purpose in visiting Bikaneer was to visit the temple, driven by some sort of fear factor impulse, and it was a convenient stopping place en route to my destination. We begin to play a childhood clapping game. She stands up excitedly and hits my hands hard, as if force was part of the tactic, her fingers are open wide like webbed feet. I show her how to close them. The universe is funny. I cannot think of more than a verse of even one clapping song. Usually, I could call one up at request, but for the rest of the journey second verses get lost in the dust storms coming through half-closed windows. It is early in my train journey and I regret wearing white pants. I am filthy. I look at all the other women in their saris and wonder how they maintain such cleanliness. Even the backs of their necks do not show signs of the desert or the dust settling on the blue pleather benches that transform into beds in the night. These thoughts only come to completion later when I roll around trying to find some comfortable position on the bench to rest. In the day there is too much interruption. You are never alone in India, and my status as a lone woman traveler brings much curiosity. I've learned to say I'm married. 'Next time'�, they say 'bring your husband'�. I respond, 'I will'�, and try to imagine my boyfriend amidst all these stranger's faces. Familiarity and strangeness are shifting in my mind, as they are now upon my return. India is magic like this, spitting you out of what is comfortable and making you scramble for your surroundings, pretending to not feel drunk while a thousand strangers watch most hospitable, lending a hand. Her fingers were so long and the clap stung and I could not remember what came after Miss Maty Mac Mac Mac all dressed in Black Black Black, so we just played for speed until our hands felt numb and then we giggled like young girls without distinctions. Children have a universal language that I would try to employ throughout my trip. Instinctual, visceral, I traveled like this, remembering what I already know, stumbling through what I don't know yet.

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