We all knew Sangam would go away, and we didn’t take pictures anyway. Oh, there are plenty of photos of places–of markets and temples and old trees and streets. There are plenty of pretty, posed photos in saris; photos from trips away. But there are so few photos of real life. Chai time, reading the horoscopes, the stupid sex column in the Pune Mirror. All of us, hunched over that one computer in the corner that worked. 9 AM meeting. Reception. Dancing in the hall to 5 minute music.

Coming back to New York is like rediscovering the things I forgot I took for granted. The most important one, the best one, so far, is I know where I am going. All of the time. I understand the way the streets are laid out, I can read all of the signs–but I don’t need to! I can use the subway to get almost anywhere–at least, anywhere I usually want to be–without thinking. It’s the same sort of confidence I am rediscovering behind the wheel of the car: radio blasting, making wide turns, back to one-handed-driving and going a little too fast at night when there’s no one on the roads. I feel in charge, again, of the outcomes of my travels. It is nice not to rely on a rickshaw driver to know where he is going. It’s nice to know what your end destination looks like, and to know so well where you want to be, after months away. Certain subway stations are familiar, friendly, even at 2 o’clock in the morning, when the the trains are slow and the platform’s too full (I’m looking at you, West 4th).

In some ways, it is hard to be home. It’s hard to wake up and ride on a packed and sleepy commuter train every morning, to learn new faces and names and routines and responsibilities at my new job. It is hard to live with my parents again; somehow, telling them whether I plan to be home for dinner feels one hundred times more restrictive than signing out at the gate at Sangam. And being out on Long Island–even if I am only thirty, thirty-five minutes from midtown Manhattan–makes reconnecting with friends more challenging. When you leave a bar at 1:45 and don’t get home until 4 because the next train isn’t until 2:59 and you have to walk home from the station because nobody is coming to get you at 3:35 AM, you realize why the suburbs were made for married, settled people.

That’s the hardest part, maybe, about being home. I have my favorite lipstick back, I have tights and boots, I have Cherry Twizzler Pull ‘N Peel, I have the Strand bookstore and Clinton Street Bakery and short hair, again–but despite all those familiar, homebound things, despite their sudden and surprisingly surprising return to me, I feel loose, unmoored, distracted, unsettled. It feels weird and strange to be tied down, to be in one spot, to be back where I began. Not North Carolina (and what I wouldn’t do for a North Carolina spring, none of this wet, wild, gray weather); not India. Not even Cambridge or West Virginia, or, God forbid, Florida–all of those places life after Lynbrook took me to. Here I am, in New York, city of dreams, city of ambition, city of always building up and up–but I am ready to be scattered, still. Like Belle’s dandelion seeds, on the wind–give me adventure in the great wide somewhere, you know?

But I can’t decide where, or how, or why, or when. Well, the when is clearer–not yet, not now. This is good, for now. I am going to learn a lot, I am going to be a real adult with a real job at an organization doing amazing things. (How often do you get to copyedit a letter that mentions your company’s good deeds, and those good deeds include, oh, you know, lowering the maternal mortality rate in Bangladesh by 40%, and increasing family planning in Tanzania by 35%, and so on and so forth. I work somewhere amazing.) But I am a forward-thinking person, and, above all, a settled person, I like to feel organized and ready and planned. So I cast my mind over the questions again and again: do I want to go to grad school? If so, what kind, and when? Do I want to work in NGOs? So far, so good. But do I want to do it here, in New York, in the U.S.? For the next few years, sure–but then what? Do I want to write? I want to write. I always want to write. But do I want to write? Is a notepad on the LIRR going to cut it, these days? Do I want to teach? I am good at teaching. I get so much satisfaction out of teaching. But is that the kind of difference I want to make? Big or small, Jessica, big or small? How am I going to apply my skills, what kind of contribution am I going to make? And, regardless, where? Do I want to move to France, work for some international NGO in Paris, regain my full fluency, fix my grammatical errors, and pass the language down to my children, raise them up somewhere where they’ll eat endives and read Proust? (Yeah, right. But–I voted in the French presidential elections last weekend, at the International School of Brooklyn, down where Carroll Gardens becomes Red Hook, this adorable red school that was probably once a church and had hand-drawn flags of every country imaginable draped across the halls like bunting. I want my kids to go to a school like that, one day–) But I don’t want kids right now. For the first time since I took a drag of a milkshake at Cook Out and imbibed all that Southern culture: I do not want to be married, soon. Give me the white dress and Mason jars and Provencal-style wedding some other, other day. Before all of that, I want to go back to India, I want to go to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, I want to work in a tiny place where I am the only American for miles, and after a while it doesn’t matter anymore. Except, maybe I don’t. Maybe there’s something else I will discover I want to do.

I don’t know what the answers are, and I am beginning to understand that it’s okay not to have them. It is all right to just put one foot in front of the other and not know where exactly the path I am on will take me. Two years ago, I would never have dreamed I would have gone to India and come back. Life is full of unexpected opportunities. It’s also full of confusing transitional phases, which I am fully experiencing right now. But that’s okay. You have to cross bridges to get from island to island. Some of them are treacherous. But I know how to swim.

My new bedroom in my parents’ house looks like a bomb hit it. I have a plastic box of folded saris, blouses and petticoats. I want to wear one for Passover. Just to know they won’t sit in that box for the rest of their lives. Papers from Sangam, old event schedules and stickers and postcards, and presents for friends, are scattered across the floor. My suitcase has caved in. Empty.

I went to the mall. Where else to readjust to America? The sweatpants and dyed hair and teenage girls with their too-low tops. I bought a nose ring made of surgical steel that won’t turn my nose purple like the 10 rupee ring I got outside the Food Bazaar in Vishrantwadi and felt, mildly, like a traitor. Like if I had tried harder my nose wouldn’t have gotten infected. I remembered the quest for sea salt, the rickshaw ride with Bronwyn, the sight of Steph with half her face in the little glass bowl after she borrowed some, too. The Tare with their new tattoos. All of us, in our temporary lives, making dramatic decisions. Adding some permanence to a fleeting experience by altering our bodies, the only thing we know we’ll carry on with us, in some lasting way or another.

The first few days I fell asleep at seven and woke up the next morning at three. I almost didn’t mind. Everyone still in India was awake, online. I played Bollywood songs quietly, so no one else in the house woke up, and talked to what felt like my real life on the other side of the world. But even that world has begun to disintegrate, to scatter to different continents and hemispheres, so I am beginning to ground myself in my new reality. New York.

I took my first bath in months. My knees and thighs and feet and hands and arms are stained with mehendi. As is so often the case, the designs I specifically sought out–the gorgeous bride and groom pasted onto my skin by Pratiba, Shoba’s daughter-in-law; the intricate designs Em painstakingly, kindly, applied to the tops of my feet–are already starting to fade. Whereas the graffiti, drunkenly applied by friends on my last night in India? Still there. The moustache and the words “tiffin wallah” framing my left knee. The cartoon penis on my right thigh (thanks, Em. Thanks a lot for that one!) alongside the Bullwinkle-looking moose. The initials on my left leg that are going to stay there, on unexposed, unweathered skin, for a long time, reminding me with a thud against the inside of my brain to just make a decision. And: the soles of my feet. Everybody’s name, like a patchwork quilt of friends, a new way to carry your memories home with you–in your socks, your threadbare, dusty Converse sneakers. EmBronPhlipStephEmilyJenMinaGwenAartiPriyaSayaliHayleyChrista. Coming with me on my next adventure.

I took one of these on the way over. Same terminal. New hair. New nose. New sweatshirt. New outlook on life.

Say when, will we ever meet again
Say when, will we ever meet again
Say when, will we ever meet again
Say when, my friend, say when

Say where, and I’ll meet you right there
Say where, and I’ll meet you right there
Say where, and I’ll meet you right there
Say where, my friend, say where

Say why, do we have to say goodbye…

And so on.

It’s a real question though. Why do we have to say goodbye? I leave Sangam today. Our final event also finishes today; we have been hosting a WAGGGS Leadership Development Programme seminar on the environment, which has meant that a Planning Team gathered from around the world lead all the sessions (we have 46 people here from 39 different countries), and we SVs carry tables and make photocopies. This is fine, though, because I have been trying to cram all of my end-of-season tasks into this event–make a logbook page, empty my individual folder, steal photos from Sangam’s hard drive, and…well, say goodbye. Here at Sangam we have compliment books, where we write nice notes to each other whenever we feel like it. We also use them to write our goodbye messages. So I have a stack of twenty-odd books on my desk, which I need to write goodbye in.

I am scared to go home. I am afraid of the reverse culture shock–both transferring from the developing world back to the developed world, and the culture shock of realizing that  people don’t discuss important issues or talk about major global needs all the time, every day. Nobody at home knows what the MDGs are. None of my friends from home have attended U.N. conferences. None of them are Girl Scouts, which has never felt so lonely before. I am overwhelmed by the process of explanation and storytelling ahead of me, already exhausted by what I know will happen–nobody will want to hear about India anymore, about how my life and priorities have changed, and I will have to wrestle with these issues on my own, or risk being that girl who begins every sentence with, “When I was in India…”

Luckily, I don’t have to worry entirely about no longer contributing to global needs and major issues. I got a job, for an NGO, back in New York. I start on April 2nd. I will be the Communications and Marketing Assistant for EngenderHealth. They work for women’s reproductive and sexual health in Africa, Asia and the Americas, both on the clinical and the advocacy sides of things. I am really thrilled that I can go home but continue to make a difference in the world. I know it will be a big change to begin work at an office, a place where I can’t lie on the floor when I’m tired, or cut paper out with the funny shapes scissors, or shout and dance around the room when someone is stressed and needs cheering up. And it will be a change to go from a residential workplace, where my coworkers are my friends and family; instead, I will be commuting to an office. I am preparing myself for this adjustment. But I am looking forward to using my writing skills and my organizational abilities full-time, and to adding my voice to this really important agenda.

There is too much to process. Too much to think about. I will leave you with a song my friend Steph has been playing over and over again:

I started to write this post six weeks ago, but life has been so busy here at Sangam. We held our World Thinking Day event, and then, four days later, we kicked off our Essence of India event. That guests for that event were mostly Americans, but almost all of them had lived or still lived abroad, and they knew each other through the North Atlantic WAGGGS training pool. Some were very enthusiastic Girl Scouts; some informed us that they had only come to Sangam to use us as a “resort.” Needless to say, Sangam is not a resort–we push our visitors to explore the real side of India, to challenge themselves as leaders and participants in Girl Guiding/Girl Scouting, to try new things. So it was a bit tricky to balance those two halves of the groups, as well as many of the guests who floated in the middle.

On top of that, during this event we held our Community Programme Fun Day, when kids from each of the Tare’s community partner organizations come to play and the participants put together activities for them. The kids had a blast, and it was clear that they really enjoyed the efforts of the participants who threw their all into the day. (For instance, one woman, who teaches small kids back at home, did the most amazing face painting on all of the children! A tiger face or butterfly face is equally delightful to Marathi-speaking kids as it is to English-speaking ones!) And the kids were so obviously enamored of the Tare, who spend four days a week looking after them, teaching them, getting to know them (on their separate sites at Door Step School, Anand Gram, Deep Griha, and two Mobile Creche sites). All little Indian kids call adult women “didi,” which means “big sister,” but they also asked for the Tare by name, which was just fantastic to see. It is clear the Tare have really become part of the communities at the organizations they volunteer at.

And that is how I feel about Sangam, and the city. I know the ins and outs of several parts of town really well. I know the people who work at Sangam so well. We all got tipsy and played Wii in Christa and Gwen’s house the other night, and jumped around with the controllers shouting and being silly–career staff, interns, and volunteers. Then the interns, volunteers and Tare went out dancing, and were all up the next morning to take care of the people with the worst hangovers. We know each other’s pet phrases and mannerisms (and are not afraid to mock each other for them!) and we bring up old, embarrassing stories again and again. We lie around in the lounge on top of each other and moan and groan and watch movies and eat too much chocolate. We are a family, and Sangam is our home. We work together, too, which means we are also a team–we know everybody’s strengths and weaknesses, we know when somebody needs to be sent for a nap and we always pitch in to cover that person.

And now it’s all coming to an end. I leave at the end of the week. When I started this post six weeks ago, six weeks seemed so short! I have lived here for nearly six months now. And I am glad I have lived here. I have a home, a local neighborhood. The sweet shop man knows me, knows what I like. The rickshaw drivers (most of them, anyway) know not to give me shit and that I will only accept meter price. (The ones who do still give me a hard time are well-acquainted with the sight of my back, heading off to the next rickshaw stand at Hari Ganga.) Sure, there is plenty of Pune I have not explored, but as I have learned by befriending and hanging out with our Volunteers in Training, many people who live in Pune never go to as many places as I do. They stay in their own communities–and, of course, know them with a depth I could not attain in six months, living behind Sangam’s purple gates. But I still feel that I have settled here–I have favorite restaurants, a movie theatre, the stallkeepers in Bangle Alley know me by name and give me chai, free mehendi cones, whenever I come by; I have a tailor, I met a shop owner in Clover Centre yesterday who lived in Commack for three years, and when he said we were neighbors back in New York, and I told him I had lived here for six months, he agreed we were neighbors in both countries.

This is the way to do India, I think. (This is the way to do anywhere, really.) I have adored my travels, but India, for me, after this experience, will never be a country to backpack, to see chiefly through the speeding frame of a train window. I know I will come back to India and I will travel and see more of it, because there are so many parts of India I am dying to visit, but I will always feel, now, that I have a home city, a place to call my own. The experience of actually living in a place, learning its rhythms and habits and idiosyncrasies, is so much more meaningful than simply passing through and hitting the hotspots.

This is why it will be so hard to leave.

It will be hard to leave my job, too. Working at Sangam is more than being employed, or volunteering–it’s being part of a family. Two nights ago was our last welcome ceremony. We had our usual sari-tying party in the corridor (and it is so crazy to think I am the person, now, who does up other people’s saris!) and then we stood around in the hall by the Welcome Lamp chatting until the ceremony was ready to start. Christa said that this batch of volunteers was different–in a good way, I think–and we would not be so easily replaced. Maybe everybody says that and maybe everybody thinks it each year, but it was good to hear anyway.

A few weeks ago was Holi, the festival of color and spring. It was amazing. There are no other words for it. We played with eCoexist, one of our partners focused on environmental sustainability, and they brought all-natural holi powder to play with. (Most people use factory colors, which are brighter but made with chemicals and can stain your skin and hair for a long time.) We spent the entire day chucking buckets of water at each other, throwing powder into people’s faces, smearing color in everyone’s hair. There was a DJ. The music was great. We brought out water guns. I got picked up and dunked in a water tank. My white shirt and jeans were orange, blue, green, red, at all different times throughout the day. We played drums in a drumming circle and then ate and then ran around and played color some more. We got sticky, muddy, dirty, sweaty, gross, wet. We wandered out of Sangam into the slum next door and played some more with the kids and the bright factory colors. We came back in and showered, but my cheeks were pink for two more days. It was so much fun. The best way to end my season at Sangam, to go out with a bang. To play and laugh and scream and fight with my friends here. To make the most of the dwindling time. To forget time at all.

But Robert, Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement, thought otherwise, and he began to organize what he named Girl Guiding, with his sister Agnes. A little later he married a young woman named Olave, who became the first World Chief Guide and the true innovator and leader in Girl Guiding. The two of them together grew Boy Scouting and Girl Guiding/Scouting into an enormous global movement, spanning dozens of countries and time zones and cultures. Lady Baden-Powell outlived her husband, and came to India in 1966 to open Sangam (at age 78!). She was devoted to the end of her life to the millions of young women who admired her, emulated her, and followed her movement. Today, 10 million girls are Girl Guides or Girl Scouts and 1.5 million adults serve as volunteers. And every year, all of these individuals celebrate what is known as Founder’s Day in the Boy Scouts and World Thinking Day in the Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.

February 22nd happened to be both Lord and Lady Baden-Powell’s birthdays, and so Thinking Day is a day to honor the founding of our movement, and the two people who were the initiators and driving forces behind Scouting and Guiding worldwide. It’s also the time to think about the scope of that movement–literally, do some “world thinking” and remember the millions of fellow Girl Guides and Girl Scouts around the world, working towards the same goals and following the same principles. A day to remember that we are a global family, united under our World Flag and by our Promise and Law.

We had an amazing World Thinking Day here at Sangam, as you can imagine–where better to celebrate global Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting than at a World Centre dedicated to bringing together Guides and Scouts from across the world? We celebrated with over 300 Bharat Scouts and Guides, twenty-four event participants, all of the Tare, and all of the staff. I was chosen to write up the official Sangam blog post on the day; it took quite a personal turn, and I would love it if you all went to read it here to discover all the awesome things we did on Thinking Day, as well as the depth of my feeling about the day.

I also made the video capturing Thinking Day, which you can watch below! But I recommend you check out the blog post beforehand to really understand the sentiments and the reasoning; Jen said it nearly made her cry, if that kind of endorsement means much to you!

2. You go on a staff picnic to a giant Ganesh built by a cement company and the Kharla Caves (rounding out your Maharashtran cave expertise!) and then have lunch at a roadside restaurant and drink Mazza and sweet lime sodas (not the same as fresh lime sodas, sweet!) with all of the lovely local staff. At the caves dating back thousands of years, having been carved by ancient Buddhists, a contemporary Hindu temple made of blue metal and surrounded by colorful flags and powder and flowers has been tacked on–the Hindus obviously decided to cash in on the holiness of this spot!

3. You volunteer with the Community Programme for a day, and accompany two Tare, Olivia and Alison, to their site at Mobile Creche. You trek through a construction site–cement buildings, scaffolding, rubble, puddles, dirt, dust, women in saris carrying bricks on their heads, men pouring buckets of water over ledges without warning–to reach the nursery and school where the workers’ kids have a safe space to play and learn while their parents build a fancy new apartment building on this spot. You help the kids make papier-mache globes to kick off the month’s curriculum on the environment, smile at the mothers who come to breast-feed their babies before heading back to brick-carrying and cement-pouring, step in a (still warm) puddle of pee, teach the kids the letters, E, F, G and H (and pronounce words like “horse” with all of the letters, including “R,” which Alison from Australia does not!), and sing songs and play games before eating lunch with the teachers and traveling back to Sangam. You remind yourself that you are not super skilled with babies or little kids and should not grow up to teach kindergarten or elementary school but also realize how great it is to see a kid learn something–see the light bulb go off–and you experience the hard work that is being a Tare!

4. You hold international dinner with the Tare, staff and two independent guests visiting from Canada, and make bruschetta with tomatoes, red onions, olive oil, oregano and triangles of white bread toasted in the broiler. You burn your fingers and can’t get the garlic smell to go away for days!

4. You head to the Handloom Weaving Expo with booths from every region in India displaying thousands of gorgeous fabric wares in more forms that you can imagine–raw material, saris and punjabis, tablecloths and bedspreads, bathmats and cushions, skirts and shirts and scarves and silks–and talk Philippa into buying a gorgeous, super expensive sari but buy nothing yourself because the sheer number of goods is overwhelming. (And there are no awesome pants, no matter how hard you look.)

5. You take some more photos documenting your absurdly long (and growing longer) hair.

6. You visit a school which receives funding from the UPS Foundation, sing songs with the 9th Standard boys and girls, and go on a tour through the village in which they live. UPS provides funding to Sangam’s Community Programme, which is how we are connected to this village school. They have a pre-fabricated classroom on site, full of twenty or so computers and made entirely of materials and parts brought over from the U.S. The ceilings are those same pinboard panels that my high school used. Bizarre! More impressive, though, was the amazing mountain range that simply rose up behind the village and the school, like a tidal wave–and there sat the school, and whenever the kids walk from school back to their homes, they walk straight towards the mountains. It makes me question (not for the first time) my parents’–and, now, my–decision to live in New York, especially Long Island, which is, in the area I was brought up, pretty much devoid of striking natural beauty. The ocean is lovely, but the beach areas on Long Island are mostly built up and full of human debris. The mountains outside this village were stunning, in their grandeur and their singularity, their stand-aloneness.

7. You cover your hands in red, white and blue and bleu, blanc and rouge paint and leave your mark on the wall in Priyanka’s room, which used to be the staff lounge and contains the hand prints (and some foot prints!) of thirty to forty past volunteers, interns and staff members.

When we reached the hotel, Manish offered to give us a tour of Agra the following day. He was so charming and so friendly that we took him up on it, and then proceeded to settle into our lovely little hotel with a big, warm comforter on the bed and a cozy little restaurant that fed us a great dinner. We went to bed early and fell asleep at once, and all too soon, it was five in the morning, and we were up, ready to visit to the Taj Mahal.

We put on our saris in semidarkness, cursing ourselves for being silly enough to want to wear saris to the Taj when it was freezing and dark and early, especially when we discovered we had forgotten safety pins to pin up the pallu! Luckily, Phlip had tons of bobby pins, and we haphazardly pinned the pallus that way before adding a layer of sweatshirt and trotting off to the Taj. It was only a two minute walk, and the walls loomed up before us so impressively in the pre-sunrise light. The emptiness of the streets, with only a few open shops and some sleeping dogs, was somehow perfect. It felt like traveling back in time, and that feeling stuck with me even after we encountered the other tourists queuing up for sunrise entry. We got some odd looks for being in saris, and lots of hawkers faux-complimented us on our Indian dress (or perhaps they were sincere–hard to tell!), but the best moment was in the security check, when I had to unzip my sweatshirt and get poked and prodded by a lovely Indian policewoman. She gave me my first genuine smile of the morning, and I like to imagine that it was because she got to see my pleats up-close! I had worked to make them particularly lovely and neat that morning, even with sleepy, fumbling fingers.

We carried on through the gate and towards the big, arched door that leads through to the Taj and well–it did take my breath away, the sight of that white dome through the perfect, deep-red, minaret-shaped archway. Even in the early light I could see the incredible detail, like lace, or cake icing, and I was standing yards away. It was huge, too, so much bigger than  pictures make it seem, and the crowds seemed to fall away at the delicacy and the beauty. Since it was still early, we rushed past everyone standing at that perfect picture-taking point so we could get up close right away. We did stop to take a few photos, though, at the halfway point, and a lovely French couple took some of Philippa and I together. It was really nice to speak French even for those few sentences, and it was another lovely international moment that I so enjoy at Sangam and was really thrilled to have there, at the Taj, this otherwise over-touristy, overblown monument: that moment when you have overheard someone speaking a language, and you choose to use it, and they just accept, in that friendly, global family sort of way, that you share that language, and use it back. They had heard Philippa and I speak in English to each other but totally went with it when I spoke French, and even asked us, in French, to take a photo of them, and–well, it was a nice reminder of world citizenship at its best. (So was this dusty, beat-up car parked at our hotel, covered in signatures and messages written in dozens of languages: European languages, Arabic and Asian ones….This car had been literally driven around the world, and I assumed it was a relic, a souvenir parked at the Hotel, until it pulled away, full of luggage, that afternoon! It also belonged to French people. Two good French moments!)

But back to the Taj Mahal, and India. Amazing. The gardens leading up to the mausoleum, with the ponds and the trees and the perfect pathways, were gorgeous. You forget, I guess in the same way tourists to New York forget that the Empire State Building is surrounded by other buildings, and sidewalk, and shops, and people going to the work, that the Taj Mahal is surrounded by gardens, and pathways, and stairs that lead up to the central domed bit, and that two buildings, one a mosque and one “added for symmetry,” according to Philippa, frame the mausoleum, and that the site itself is surrounded by a huge wall that encloses all of it but is still too short to block the domes rising up, up, up into the gray-blue morning sky. All of that, you don’t see on the postcards, but in real life, the enormity of it is astounding–the marble islands floating in the water, perfect places to stand and admire; the benches, and the trees labeled with their proper names, and the gardens. And then, to counter all of that awe and splendor, is the detail, the infinitesimal detail. We went up close and saw the inlaid marble and the ridiculously intricate carving and the yellowing of some of the marble and the brilliance of it in other spots, and then–just when you think it can’t get any more astounding, you begin to process the design, the architecture–the gorgeous way the doors and windows and outer chambers were placed to let light into the central tomb. I got to run my fingers over this incredible artwork put into place centuries ago, and look out at the gardens across the river, which was dry and muddy but somehow still impressive in its barrenness, and then–we were standing on the eastern side of the mausoleum when the sun really came over the horizon and the trees. And the entire right side of the Taj Mahal glowed. Just glowed, golden, perfectly, the color of the sun, or butter, or gold, really. And it was gorgeous.

We left the Taj slowly, headed back to our hotel, ate breakfast, climbed up to the roof of the hotel to take a few aerial-view photos of the Taj, and checked out just in time for Manish to come pick us up. Then we began the rest of our Agra adventures. I loved the Agra Fort, because, as with the Red Fort in Delhi, I loved imagining the lives of the people who had called it home. The courtyards, the balustrades, the beautiful mosque, the two halves of the palace–Hindu and Muslim–decorated in the styles of those two Indian cultures, one side for each of Shah Jahan’s favorite wives. It was beautiful, and enormous, and we wandered around for a good while, constantly taking photographs. The whole day was like that–every time I turned around, I saw the most beautiful thing I had seen that day. So I had to take a photo. And again, and again, and again, after we left the Fort and went to see the “Baby Taj,” built before its more famous cousin and about one thousand times more intricately decorated. The marblework was breathtaking: floor-to-ceiling inlaid flowers, geometric patterns, and the sun illuminating hidden corners and sharp angles to bring out the vibrant color–unlike the Taj, which gives the impression of being pure white, the little Taj is all color, like a kaleidoscope. Then, the camera came back out at the gardens behind the Taj, across the river. There it was, the Taj Mahal, almost as close as that morning, but I was surrounded by fruit trees and green grass and fresh air and freedom in a way the wall-enclosed Taj did not permit. This was where I took my silly Taj photos–pushing it over, holding it up–and Philippa and I relaxed and ate Kit Kats under the trees’ shade.

It was after visiting these sites that Manish proved himself to be an amazing rickshaw driver and tour guide. Already he had informed us he had no fixed rate for his day-long tour–”pay what you feel in your hearts,” he said–and had provided us with lots of information about each site we had visited. Then he took us on a tour of various workshops, and at each one, the staff were extremely friendly, spoke great English, and were not particularly pushy (for India) about Philippa and me purchasing items. As a result, we learned all about inlaying marble, and got to see the process of shaping the pieces of semi-precious stones to insert into the marble, as well as the extremely fun surprise of the way carnelian literally glows when you turn a light on it. We learned all about carpet-making, and saw each step of the process at the Kanu Carpet Factory: the drawing of the patterns, the weaving, the scrubbing, the shearing, and, finally, the finished product, which our carpet tour guide unrolled and laid out, one after the other, with the most incredible snap, like a salesman version of Aladdin. Then, also, a jewelry store, where the owner explained about star rubies, and other jewels unique to India and even to Agra. Then, finally, a fabric store with saris and punjabis and cushion covers and bedspreads, where I spent too much money on the most gorgeous, hand-sewn, patchwork elephant quilt, for a double bed that I do not yet own in an apartment I do not yet rent with money from a job I do not yet have! But it is wonderful, and I have been saying since day one that I wanted to buy a bedspread, so I feel less guilty now than I did while handing over my debit card.

Manish topped off his incredible tour with two visits to this lovely garden cafe, tucked down three side alleys, where the kitchen was simply part of the owners’ home and a baby and dog came out and played. We had really amazing food at lunchtime, and came back before catching the train to have chai (either on the house or on Manish–incredibly generous either way) and to sign Manish’s book, which is full of recommendations and messages written in dozens of languages. We sat and chatted, and Manish expounded with his theories on family, and love, and life, and travel, in a remarkably forthright, not superficial way. It felt as though Philippa and I were really getting to know him, just then, and he seemed genuinely interested in us, especially as I was in Indian dress and we had told him about living and working in Pune. The oldest son with many younger siblings, he supports his entire family, and spoke wistfully of traveling. I really hope he has the opportunity–he deserves it. He took us to the train station, found our platform for us, pocketed the money we “felt in our hearts” without even glancing at it, and shook our hands twice each before sending us on our way. A really down-to-earth, fundamentally goodhearted guy, and it was a pleasure to meet him.

The train arrived not long after, and Philippa and I settled in for twenty-tour hours of sleeper train, with only one berth between us, all the way down to Pune from Agra, via Hyderabad and Jalgaon and other out-of-the-way places. The night was freezing, particularly as we had not brought blankets (my elephant one was packaged up, and there was no way I was ruining it on the train!) and my window latch was broken and kept flying up and letting the cold wind in. We curled around each other, and our bags, like jigsaw pieces, as Philippa put it later, constantly readjusting our arrangement at 9 PM, 11 PM, 2 AM, 4 AM, to get comfortable. We woke with the rest of the train at 7 AM, not particularly well-rested but having survived the night, and began to read station names as we finished out nine more hours of train travel accompanied by daylight, showing us the enormous expanse of India we were zipping across. I saw so many things out that window: tiny villages and open fields and little, out-of-the way stations full of people of all types, old and young, rich and poor, weary and well-traveled or fresh, about to start off on journeys. The train rarely stopped, just coasted slowly through stations, and people hopped on and off. A bunch of young men sat by the carriage door with their feet dangling out, playing cards and listening to music. Philippa and I ordered biryani and ate lots of chocolate and mashed-up Oreos (I slept on them when I was too tired to care) and stared out the window. India is amazing. The Deccan Plateau is amazing. The lives, each individual tiny life, carved out of this country–every country–continue to amaze me. The same feeling I have on the subway, of the enormity of all of these individuals packed into one place, going about their own impossibly unique business, struck me again and again as I watched mothers carry babies across fields, smoke waft out of tiny shacks, laundry hang from a dozen lines, boys on train tracks washing under pipes, fruit sellers and drink sellers passing goods through the bars on the windows. The looks Philippa and I drew were curious but (except for one man, who stared at us unblinkingly the entire time he was awake) not rude, and we were cozy and comfortable and safe in our little window-seat berth as we headed home to Pune.

And that was another incredible thing–that Pune really was home. We got off and hailed a rickshaw and knew exactly where to go, and passed by a dozen familiar landmarks. We took a shortcut I knew and loved, rattling past shops and houses and some pigs that are always at that shortcut intersection, without fail. We got to Sangam and signed in at the gate and there were the usual faces at Reception, at tea, setting the dinner table. We were home. Dirty, tired, exhilarated, and home.

At a certain point we saw tons of people lining up to board a flight, but since ours wasn’t flashing on the board, we paid them no mind. About twenty minutes later, a young girl went running pellmell down that same corridor towards the same flight. At which point we noticed our flight was on the board, so we meandered in the direction of the gate, and realized we, too, were on that flight. We proceeded to be the very last ones on the plane–as well as the only foreigners–trooping down the aisle red-faced to find our seats. It was hilarious. As soon as we had sat down the flight began to pull away from the terminal, and we were up in the air in minutes. I was asleep immediately, and two hours after that we had landed in–Delhi. It was midnight and it was freezing cold.

We made our way to our hotel, which was located not far from the airport in a ragtag alleyway crowded with dozens of hotels and tarps covering the lanes so that even the next morning, at first light, the street was pitch-black. We had a first-floor room with a flat-screen television, a very fancy bathroom with a glass sink, and bed that could easily have fit five people, but only two very thin blankets. We froze all night long. The next morning, though, we had breakfast on the rooftop, dressed in sweatshirts and long sleeves and leggings, and began to excitedly plan our day. We had from nine o’clock in the morning until our train to Agra at five o’clock, and we had a lot to do!

We started with the subway. Delhi is such a different city than Pune. For starters, it’s the capital of India, and it’s full of people from all over the country, there to work or to live or to seek refuge from somewhere else. Its streets are filthy compared to Pune’s, and the layout of the city is more confusing–the separate neighborhoods do not have the same sharp characteristics as those in Pune, so it is harder to tell what kind of area you are in, and where people live, and what they do there. There are highways and bridges stretching across the city that reminded me of the Long Island Expressway–the same views from the road of yet more road going another way. There is also an amazing subway system, impeccably clean, incredibly easy to understand, and equipped with women’s-only cars at the front of every train. Pink signs hanging overhead and pasted on the floor indicate where the women’s car will stop, and after watching one packed-to-the-brim-like-sardines-but-worse rush hour train speed by, with men crammed against the doors in ways I have never seen even in New York, Philippa and I decided to get on the next train in the women’s car.

It was similarly packed, with one woman breathing down my neck and another squished against my backpack and another right in front of me, but it was so peaceful, and so quiet. There was, honest-to-God, the faint scent of perfume, and all the women were quietly adjusting socks or retying hair or just hanging on quietly, on their way to work. I have never in my whole life been in such a peaceful subway car. And the weirdest bit was that the cars in Delhi are not separated by doors or walls; there’s a squishy bit, like you see on New York buses, to aid the train in making turns, but otherwise the next car is just right there, no divider, nothing blocking the men in the next car over from striding over. Except they don’t. They just stare. And stare. Later that day, when we rode the subway after rush hour, there was room to sit and spread out, and I spotted young men in the neighboring cars watching intently as young women brushed their hair or giggled with their friends or tended to children. It was a bit strange, and I wondered about the principles guiding the system of a women’s only car. One thing I noticed right away about the subway system as a whole was the proportion of men to women: it was easily a seventy-thirty divide, and I could understand why women felt safer and more comfortable riding in their own space. On the other hand, I could see how the divide perpetuated the staring and the curiosity of the men, and I wonder if the segregation creates some of the behavior and attitudes that require a women’s only car in the first place. A vicious cycle!

In any case, we hopped off the subway eventually, and went to see the Lotus Temple, which is one of only seven Bahá’í Houses of Worship around the world. The Bahá’í faith emphasizes openness and tolerance and non-denominatal worship of God, and welcomes people of all religions to pray with them. It is hard to imagine a building that lives up to these lofty ideals, but the Lotus Temple in Delhi truly does. Gleaming, immaculately white; modeled after the national flower of India, which also represents purity; set atop a pool of cerulean blue water; and surrounded by beautiful gardens and a park, the Lotus Temple is a sight to behold, especially at early morning. Philippa and I arrived at the same time as a group of eager, red-and-white uniformed schoolchildren, who giggled, pushed, shoved and were generally mischievous as they waited in line to enter the Temple, but as soon as they stepped foot inside, they hushed. It was absolutely gorgeous, with pew after pew and a ceiling that simply soared. The light was marvelous. Silence inside was required, so people could pray, and Philippa and I sat down and stared up for a long time, quietly, which is when I realized that there was nothing in the Temple to stare at–no altar, no bimah, no images or texts, nothing. Only a podium made of translucent glass, with a little microphone on it, in front of all the pews, where it blended into the enormous windows. It was truly a nondenominational center of worship. I find that idea really cool and really confusing at the same time, but maybe that’s because even though I don’t really pray, I can’t imagine not having something to pray to. It was interesting.

After sitting outside by the beautiful pools of water for a while, Philippa and I headed off to the Qutab Minar, the tallest stone tower in the world. We attempted to take a rickshaw, to travel across town, which the subway does not do, but got stuck in traffic for almost an hour, and ended up climbing out of the rickshaw and riding the subway all the way back up and then down the next line, which took no time at all, naturally. After chiding ourselves for underestimating the marvelous Delhi subway system, Philippa and I finally reached the Qutab Minar, which features lovely ruins and a mosque along with the tower/minaret. At the entrance we bumped into the same schoolchildren from the Lotus Temple! Good to know we were participating in an appropriately educational tour of Delhi. The site was beautiful, and we took lots of pictures, before realizing we were starving, and heading to Dilli Haat for lunch.

Dilli Haat is a cultural shopping center, and reminds me a bit of Disneyland India. It has booths from all the different regions of India, and is set up as this long outdoor market decorated with streamers and twinkle lights. All of the booths and stalls sell handicrafts and tchotckes and knickknacks and fabric and clocks and beautiful end tables and so on and so forth, and and in the center is a food court with stands selling food from all over the country, all adorably named. (MomoMia, anyone?) Luckily for us, most of the stalls were closed for something to do with it being the first day of a first week of a new month or something along those lines, so Philippa and I weren’t sucked into shopping all day! We did each buy something lovely, though–I got a blue shoulder bag to replace the yellow one I bought in Bath, England (which was probably from India in the first place!).

Our next stop was the Lal Quila, or Red Fort, built by Shah Jahan, the same man responsible for the Taj Mahal. We caught a cycle rickshaw from the subway to the entrance of the Fort, and wandered around inside the enormous complex for quite some time. Forts, and palaces, which the Lal Quila was, really fascinate me–something about the openness of these structures behind the immense walls, and the ease with which you can conjure up the people who once lived within them. There was the huge, bejeweled throne on which Shah Jahan sat and received tribute and heard his people’s troubles; there was the mosque in which he and his family prayed, lovingly decorated in the same inlaid marble Philippa promised me I would see at the Taj. There were the sprawling green lawns, where old-fashioned ladies in seventeenth-century saris must have wandered. And there, at the back, the “Tea House,” used as a home for the princes until the British took over, and then converted to a lounge and tea room for the best and brightest of the British Raj. That sign was sad to read, and even sadder to see that it is now a tiny cafe and gift shop. Philippa and I did not go in.

We emerged from the Red Fort suddenly conscious that our train was in a half hour’s time. We asked our cycle rickshaw driver to take us to the train station, but five minutes later turned up in front of the Jama Masjid, the mosque that matches the Lal Quila. It looked very beautiful, but we were very angry and had no time to see it; we argued with and then paid the cycle rickshaw driver, and then hopped into an autorickshaw, and found ourselves arguing with that driver, too, when he dropped us a block from the station and demanded a ridiculous fee.  We had to pay it, though, and run like maniacs, because we had literally three minutes until our train. As we clambered onto the platform and found our seats (and people in them, including this strange Russian tourist girl), the train chugged off. I suppose we could still have caught it if we had been a little bit later, since it’s standard in India to leap onto rolling trains without care, but I had a really big backpack, and could easily imagine myself waving Philippa goodbye from the station platform after tumbling off the train steps….

In any case, that did not happen, and we made it onto the train. Our day in Delhi was done, and ridiculously well-spent and well-timed, when you consider how little time we had and how much we wanted to see! And overall I enjoyed Delhi. It was the right city to visit, after Pune and Mumbai–the right city to show me a slice of contemporary Indian life, a city with less character but more opportunities than Pune. I’ve only been to Washington D.C. once, but it reminded me of D.C.–important for being important, but full of interesting people. I am glad I went.

As for our destination: where is Aurangabad? you say. What can you find in Aurangabad? Well, for starters, the Poor Man’s Taj. Properly known as Bibi Ka Maqbara, it was built by the grandson of the man who commissioned the Taj Mahal in Agra. This palace is a tomb for that man’s mother, and was meant to rival the real Taj. It’s not entirely made of marble, though, and it is much smaller, and less intricate; but it’s still beautiful, and we visited at sunset and saw the moon rise over the white dome and towers. It was a lovely way to end our first day away from Sangam, and since I will be visiting the real Taj in approximately two days, it will make for some interesting comparison!

The real purpose of going to Aurangabad, however, was to be in close proximity to the Ajanta and Ellora Caves. Neither of these sets of caves are really caves; they started out as mountains, and were carved into temples by ancient Buddhists, Hindus and Jains, using chisels and bare hands over the course of centuries. In Ajanta’s case, these cave temples were created in two sets, the first in the 2nd century BCE and the second in the 6th century. They are entirely Buddhist, run along a cliff face, and are most famous for their incredible paintings–no flash photography allowed, to preserve the pigment (so sorry in advance for the blurry photos!). Ellora is a little younger, and those temples built over the course of generations between the fifth and tenth centuries, and feature Buddhist, Hindu and Jain temples–they are, according to Wikipedia, demonstrative of the religious harmony during this period in India. Ellora Caves are known for their sculpture, and at their center is the most amazing thing I have ever seen, the Kailasanatha temple, carved from the top down into an enormous hunk of rock to create this intricate, multistoried series of temples, bridges, tunnels and caves, adorned with hundreds of statues and carvings. It was gasp-inducing. Literally.

We did the Ajanta Caves first, and spent most of the day trekking along the ledge, bare feet burning on the hot stone, before ducking into each of the thirty temples, where it was cool and dark and beautiful. Nearly every temple featured an enormous Buddha at the back, and along the walls and pillars and ceilings were the remnants of gorgeous paintings. As the temples went along, they became more intricate, and, oddly, more church-like, with big, curved ceilings like cathedrals, and central stone statues or temples reminiscent of altars. The last temple, however, had an enormous Buddha carved into the wall, lying on his side, achieving Nirvana. It was incredible to behold. So were the carvings decorating the columns and ceiling and entrance. Just beautiful, and breathtaking.

We followed Ajanta with a really lousy lunch, at the only restaurant near the caves, and then headed to the little Taj and the most amazing dinner. We were completely tuckered out and collapsed at our little, cozy hotel, before getting back into the car the next morning and heading out to Ellora. The caves there were less dramatically set–no cliff face–but still stunning in their beauty. It was really cool to see the Hindu and Jain caves after having seen all the Buddhist ones at Ajanta the day before; the Hindu caves were chiefly dedicated to Shiva, and they were dramatic and expressive and humming with energy in an exciting way. The Jain ones were different, too, and set apart on this lovely half-mile walk that meant really strolling through the landscape and taking in the mountain scenery and the treetops down below and the incredibly bright blue sky. But by far the piece de resistance was the Kailasanatha Temple–400,000 tons of rock were scooped out of this mountain by 7000 workers over a few hundred years to create this incredible, open-air world of stone, replete with a small army of rock-carved elephants at the base of a towering, multi-storied temple. Reliefs of Shiva, Parvati and other Hindu gods and goddesses in all their many-armed glory were around every corner. Window seats and stone steps and benches offered the chance for peaceful reflection, and bridges and tunnels the opportunity to explore. I never wanted to leave. It was the most amazing place.

Nothing could ever top Ellora, but Dalautabad Fort, where we went next, was still incredibly awesome. Described by the guidebook as “Tolkienesque” and built by Yadava kings, it was Muhammad bin Tughluq who decided to turn it into the capital of India. In 1328 he marched the entire population of Delhi to Daulatabad. Then he ran out of water, and was forced to march everyone–something like 10,000 people–thousands of miles back. It really is an impressive fortress: it sits on this immense hill that took us an hour to climb, and has a series of gates and defenses and lots of cannons and a very deep and forbidding moat to keep intruders out. There are spikes on the doors so elephants can’t shove their way through. Most terrifyingly, there’s a pitch-black spiral tunnel, with no windows and no lights, that leads up a series of twisting, narrow, stone stairs to the second-highest level of the fort. Those who don’t bring flashlights resort to cellphones, and those who don’t have cellphones probably turn back. I would have, regardless of the light situation, without everyone else to coax me along, because this tunnel is the home of hundreds of squeaking bats, which you can’t see but can definitely hear and smell, hovering right above your head. I made it, though, and together we managed to get past the monkeys and the endless Indian tourists trying to stop us, the oh-so-fascinating Western tourists, for photos (as I said to one guy–”You have this incredible view, this incredible fort, and you want a picture of me?”) all the way to the top for an amazing bird’s-eye view of the city and surrounding landscape.

After working our way back down to ground level, we headed again to Aurangabad to the Paithani and Himroo Weaving Centre. This form of sari and shawl weaving is two thousand years old, and is, according to the centre, a dying art–the techniques used mean that a single shawl takes weeks and a sari can take months or years. The results are gorgeous, however–they use silk, and their products, because of the intricate weaving process on these huge, old-fashioned wooden looms, are reversible, with no backside full of loose threads. We were given a tour and explanation of the looms, and then sat down and given chai and had hundreds of scarves and shawls and wall hangings and other beautiful fabric things brought out for us. I caved and purchased several things; they were just too gorgeous not to buy, and I converted the prices to dollars to make myself feel better! It felt good to support them, too; they are reviving this traditional art, which is really spectacular, and I am happy to not only own something they’ve made but to have seen how they make it.

The five-hour ride back to Sangam involved a pit stop at a roadside restaurant with really great food. We were probably the only foreigners to ever step foot there, and five men came to take our order and peer at us. The food was spicy and delicious, though, and we all fell asleep on the rest of the ride back. All of a sudden, we were in Pune, and at Sangam, and in our own beds. It felt like we had been away for ever, not just two days. And tomorrow, Philippa and I take off for Delhi and Agra, for three days of adventure in the North. I am incredibly excited. Having seen Mumbai and now Aurangabad, Ajanta and Ellora–and Pune, of course!–I feel like I have a picture of what the state of Maharashtra has to offer, and what the culture looks like, tastes like, smells like, and sounds like. I am looking forward to seeing an entirely different region of India, and acquainting myself with new fashions, foods, people and places.