I thought: So at last I'm here; India. But I wasn't sure how I felt. I was too dazed by how different everything was from anything I'd ever seen before. 

        Later that afternoon I took a walk. The streets were lined with venders selling wares from small stalls. Goats, bullock carts and people jostled for position on narrow thoroughfares. Everything I saw stimulated my imagination. As I wandered around, I felt like an exotic adventurer, someone who'd demolished his links to a constricted past and was now experiencing unforseen realities on the other side of the world: the smell of jasmine, mushy slabs of cowdung on the ground, Hindi movie‑music blaring from transistor radios, and skinny carters hauling various cargoes either on flat hand‑drawn carts or in sacks on their shoulders. Everything was part of a barrage of new sensations. 

        Eventually I made my way down an uncrowded street toward a section of grubby beach along the Arabian Sea. I sat on the sand and listened to the surf. Further down the beach, fishermen stooped over narrow wooden boats next to a low dune near a cluster of huts. I was in a meditative mood. As I gazed at the water, I thought somewhat grandly that from now on, because of my marriage to Suman, India was to be my second home. For months I'd prepared myself for my first encounter with the Indian subcontinent by reading Indian philosophy and religious thought, studying Indian history, and in general trying to familiarize myself with the culture. But I'd gone beyond books now; I was actually there. 

        After spending almost two hours at the beach, I returned to the hotel, washed up and went to dinner in the hotel dining room. Following the meal I walked briefly in the dusk streets, stopping occasionally for a cigarette while eyeing the colorful surroundings. Eventually I returned to my room. After reading for awhile, I prepared for sleep. I phoned the deskclerk to remind him to make my morning wake‑up call, then crawled into bed. But sleeping wasn't easy. Because the hotel's walls were thin and all the building's windows were open in the hope of a cool breeze to offset the oppressive heat and mugginess, it seemed I could hear every noise in the building: running water, farts, people coughing up phlegm, snatches of conversation in a variety of (to me) incomprehensible languages. 

        My first day in India had excited yet also disoriented me. Unable to sleep, I tossed and turned in bed. I felt under a self‑imposed obligation to like the subcontinent, not just because it was my wife's home, but because my sojourn there seemed to me a test of my quality as a human being. At that time in my life, this was typical of how I responded to new situations. I never took my surroundings at face value; instead, I always viewed them as a backdrop against which I was supposed to act out a morality tale concerning how a "liberated" person was expected to behave in such an environment. Consequently, now that I was in India I felt a need to openly and impartially view everything I saw, since I had already concluded that this was how an experience‑hungry world traveler was supposed respond to the subcontinent. Unfortunately, my will and my emotions were at odds with each other. India was new to me and, as such, it startled and disoriented me. Pounding sunlight, deformed beggars in the bazaars, odd spice‑smells, unfamiliar languages, all unsettled me. Although I yearned to be a worldly person, I was in fact naive. Beneath all my posturing, there lurked an old puritanical dread: a conservative Christian vision of the world as a satanic place that mutilated prodigals and rebels. This conflict between my fear of the world and my aching to be at ease in the world determined much of my behavior during those years, certainly when I visited India that first time. I was caught up in a desperate battle to create myself, to force myself into transcending the influences that dragged me down into fundamentalist nihilism. In the past, no matter how much I had drunk, acted independently, behaved boisterously or put on a show of being a sensation‑hunting wildman, I had never been what I'd pretended to be: liberated from the narrow religious world of my childhood. Although since entering the army I'd grown more clearheaded and more committed to methodically confronting the personal and social dilemmas with which I was obsessed, I still often despaired, feeling, as I did, emotionally and culturally unequipped to respond intelligently to the new experiences that ironically I sought out with such fervor. Such were the contours of my discomfort ‑‑ in India and elsewhere. And so that night, my first on the subcontinent, I lay awake in bed, tossing restlessly, slapping at mosquitoes, listening to various street and hotel noises, and in general uncertain of what tomorrow would bring. When I finally dozed off, I had a fitful sleep. 

        In the morning I was already awake and dressed when the deskclerk phoned at the designated time. Hours later, at around noontime, I disembarked from a cramped propeller‑driven plane in Belgaum's small airport. As the plane had descended, I'd studied the sprawling landscape: rice paddies, sugar cane fields, reddish dirt roads, small villages that consisted of clusters of huts; and also the city ‑‑ a collection of low buildings in the midst of farmland. 

        When I got off the plane, Suman met me. Her first words were: "Don't kiss me, not in public. It's not done here." Her black hair was pulled up in a bun as usual. Wound around the bun: a garland of white jasmines. 

        "Okay," I said. 

        We walked toward the midget terminal outside of which, in the midst of a small crowd, Suman's mother and brother waited. She pointed them out to me. I waved. They stared at me curiously, then waved back. 
       

       

        2 

        The room was dimly lit with a single low‑watt bulb. A number of other people were present. Mr. Darvar, the man next to me with whom I was talking, was a pale pudgy man of Persian descent, a Parsi. A thin‑haired elderly fellow in eyeglasses and a rumpled Nehru jacket, he spoke animatedly about seances, ghosts and the possibility of life after death. He had a large nose. His conversation was punctuated with periodic references to the Theosophical Society, a western‑originated organization with an occult philosophy that contained elements of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christian mysticism. 
        
        AI believe in another plane of existence, a realm of being beyond this one," he said. AOuspensky, the Russian mathematician, has spoken about this plane. He calls it a fourth dimension beyond the three with which we are familiar." 
        
        We talked for awhile. I asked him some questions about eastern religions. He answered me patiently. He had a philosophical, somewhat detached manner. 
        
        A few nights later, Darvar took Suman, her mother, brother and me to a large building where Sai Baba, a well‑known Indian holy man and philosopher who was reputed to have extrasensory powers, was to give a talk. The courtyard and street outside the building seethed with people who couldn't gain entrance into the crowded hall. We, too, couldn't get into the building. But an outdoor loudspeaker system had been set up; through the system, Sai Baba's words boomed into the night. As I listened, the lurching, enthusiastic mob reminded me of pictures I had seen as a child of ancient Jerusalem streets jammed with celebrators as Jesus rode a donkey into the city on Palm Sunday. Finally the speech was over and we left. 
        
        Later at his house Darvar praised Sai Baba's moral philosophy but scoffed at the idea that the fellow possessed paranormal powers as rumored. "These gurus are always up to tricks," he remarked. I realized then that although Darver believed in the supernatural in principle, he possessed a natural skepticism that made it difficult for him to accept supposed examples of such a supernatural dimension on faith, even when he wanted to. 
        
        Because I had some familiarity with Indian religions, but little knowledge of other aspects of Indian history, my conversations with Indians often turned in a philosophical direction. It was my way of trying to get at "the real India," as opposed to the "fictional" India that I supposed ordinary tourists saw when they visited the subcontinent. As a result of this effort on my part, friends of Suman's family regularly offered to take me to temples or to show me in‑home religious ceremonies. One day Krishna Kaka (Uncle Krishna), a tall boisterous man who played the harmonium and had a throaty singing voice, suggested we go to a temple in the hills outside Belgaum. It was late afternoon when we left. As we drove, a rainstorm lashed across the countryside, drenching everything in sight. The roads were muddy and the roadside gulleys were flooded. As the car climbed the hill toward the temple, we passed through a village where a group of skinny children splashed playfully in a giant puddle. Finally we arrived at our destination: a ridge overlooking the valley below. Except for the clearing in which the temple was situated, the area was covered with foliage. The temple's entrance was near the ridge's cliff‑like edge. The downpour continued, slashing through trees and blowing out over the valley. We went into the temple. It was shadowy and musty inside. Also, a smell of incense. A short baldheaded priest with a ceremonial mark on his forehead led us to a room that contained the god's image: a small stone pillar, a lingam, that represented the god. The room was quiet. Krishna Kaka nudged me and said "See" as he pointed at the lingam. The priest, dressed in a white dhoti (a cloth wrapped around the waist and between the legs), looked on as I peered at the god. But in spite of my initial feeling of discovery as I stood there, in the end I felt more unsettled than inspired. The temple's dank gloominess and the sound of the rain outside encouraged me to think that humankind, as Freud suggested, constructed grand religious systems out of tangles of unconscious desires and impulses. I didn't find this realization thrilling. 
       

        But when we left the temple, I felt good again. It was dusk. Krishna Kaka and I briefly stood at the ridge's edge in the rain, which had tapered to a drizzle. Below, in the village we'd passed through on the way to the temple, small lights flickered in the huts. The valley looked beautiful: lush and soaked, tantalizingly green. 
       

        During that first trip to India, India often eluded me. I saw reality ‑‑ a coconut, a peasant riding a bicycle down a village path, a stone marker at a rice paddy's edge ‑‑ without actually seeing it. What I saw instead was myself. I turned everything I viewed into part of my own personal melodrama: alienated westerner seeks Exotic Truths in "primitive" country . 
       

        A few nights after the temple visit with Krishna Kaka, I couldn't sleep. I was thinking about Suman who'd recently been experiencing morning sickness. I tossed and turned in bed and thought: I'm going to be a father. Eventually I climbed out of bed, went into the hallway and looked out the window. Fifty yards away: a row of eucalyptus trees rinsed in moonlight. Except for a cricket's occasional chirruping, the night was quiet. I tiptoed down the hall past a corner niche where some miniature religious statues stood on a shelf and a picture of Ramakrishna, a well‑known yogi, hung on the wall. Further down the hall, there was an old battered desk, and a chair. Through the window, moonlight fell on the desktop. I sat at the desk and lit a cigarette. I felt morose. The lingam in the temple on the ridge, Ramakrishna, Jesus bleeding on the cross: they were all, it seemed to me, frail scaffoldings suspended above an endless ocean of human yearning to make sense out of the senseless. With a gloomy feeling of triumph over what I had been taught as a child, I believed the truth of religion was this: that whether in the occident or orient, people rejected reality as they blindly strove to believe in anything that would offset their insecurities and dread of death. Yet knowing this did not make me feel superior. In a rare moment of self‑understanding, I realized that, in spite of my disguise of intellectual independence, I was nostalgic for the naive beliefs I'd held as a child. For years my rebellions had been amateurish dramas performed by a frightened boy in the dark. I acted like I hated superstition, yet I secretly desired the comfort that accompanied blind belief not in something exotic, but in something familiar and simple like the religion of my childhood. Subcontinent deities conceived centuries ago by tribal swarms in tropical jungles were no substitute for what I had left behind. This self‑knowledge ‑‑ i.e., that at heart I was still a culture‑bound North American Christian who hadn't yet come to grips with his past, and whose "rationalism" was therefore a deception ‑‑ shocked and depressed me. My freedom quest was a failure, a sham. At that moment I hated India, projecting onto it all the ugliness I felt within me as the result of not knowing my place in the world or what I was going to do with my life. And now I'm going to be a father! I thought sarcastically. 
       

        But this mood, although powerful and disorienting, didn't completely define my first sojourn in India. My unease was offset by relaxed moments when I looked at my surroundings without imposing my own problems and fantasies on it. Then I saw things and not ideas. Such was my state of mind when I wrote the following notebook lines ‑‑ 
        
        
        First sun, then moon, over the fields. Then sun again. 
        
        
        Morning . . . 
        
        A woman in pink sari grinds pepper balls with mortar and pestle 
        While outside, to the north of the village, 
        A white bull pulls a wooden plow. 
        
        
        Noon . . . 
        
        Men and women dig an irrigation trench along a red dirt road; 
        Nearby, someone stoops over and lifts a grainsack and puts it on his back; 
        With sticks, children scratch pictures in the dust. 
        
        
        Dusk . . . 
        
        A woman named Sohini draws water from the well. On her forearms, there are tattooed designs. 
        Soon, night again and also sister moon. 
        It is Diwali, festival time. Wicks dipped in oil burn in small clay dishes in all the windows. 
        
        
        3 
        
        One evening after a walk, Suman and I visited Maruti, a factory worker from a large peasant family in Hindalga, a nearby village. Maruti lived with his wife in his parents' house. Also dwelling there were his brothers and their families. Their home was a typical peasant's dwelling: a low‑ceilinged structure with hard‑packed dirt floors coated with dried cow dung. Attached to the back of the house was a grain storage area and a bullock stall. It was harvest time and the family was in a good mood. Squatting crosslegged on the floor in a crowded room, we ate kier, a sweet dish made of milk, thin noodles and almonds. Maruti, who was a farmworker as well as a machinist, explained to me the various operations that went into rice and cane growing. His brothers and father also contributed information. All the men in the family worked at least two jobs: tending their own farmplots and hiring themselves out as agricultural laborers to wealthy landowners. Maruti was the only one with an industrial position. As we sat and talked, the evening's get‑together turned into noisy affair. Everyone seemed to be chattering at once. The Diwali festival's spirit was still in the air. Thin big‑eyed children stared at the commotion from shadowy corners. 
        
        Such experiences were the high point of my first trip to India. Through them I was exposed to a wide range of personalities and the details of daily life: work routines, family structures, the pressures of economic underdevelopment, the savvy and boisterousness that lay beneath what I had fantasized to be India's unique Areligious" character. Not surprisingly, such experiences also helped me develop a deeper understanding of the roots of Suman's personality, particularly the way her sense of humor constantly hovered between earthy outlandishness and biting sarcasm. 
        
        Gradually I got to know Ai better. Sometimes in the evenings she walked with Suman and me to the top of the Vijaynagar hill. She would relax then and stop at unpredictable moments to stare briefly at a flowering bush, chat with a local peasant woman, or gaze quietly at fields in the distance. During these walks she would often talk to me in halting English about Suman's childhood, Indian customs and any other topic that came into her head. Slowly the first hints of an actual warmth crept into our relationship. She liked my "Philosophical" side and enjoyed probing me about religion and politics. I on the other hand was drawn to her emotional stamina. She was a sad woman with a tendency to withdraw into daydreamy silence, yet in spite of this inwardness she remained remarkably alert to everything around her. Also, there was a manic exuberance about her that I enjoyed. Once when I was feverish for a few days and the medication prescribed by a local doctor hadn't worked, she insisted that I take some homeopathic pills, which I did. Almost immediately my fever rose, I felt energyless, I was stricken with the chills and had to be confined to bed, where Ai sat next to me and spooned a bland rice soup into my mouth. A few hours later my temperature broke and I felt much better. For the next few days whenever she had the opportunity to introduce me to someone, she would say with comical fervor, "My son‑in‑law, he is a good boy, he takes the homeopathic medicine." Yet in spite of such occasional joking, Ai was essentially a meditative woman. Beneath her tough exterior, she had an elegiac view of the world, a sense of the frailty of things, particularly of people's hopes and aspirations. Maybe not surprisingly, this somber view heightened her sense of the beauty and preciousness of small moments. One day not long after my illness I saw Ai behind the house next to a flowering tree near a vegetable patch. Her back was to me. AAi," I said as I approached her. She turned to me and quietly asked, pointing at the tree, "Very pretty, yes?" But her words didn't come as close to expressing what she felt as her eyes did. They were radiant. And her face was utterly relaxed. 
        
        Of course, during that first trip to India I also had to deal with India's massive poverty, as I saw it particularized in Belgaum and the surrounding villages. Streets, bus depots, the train station, all were peopled with beggars. As a white westerner I was a noticeable target and was often accosted by people who survived day to day by wheedling small gifts of cash or food from local residents. Although I gave handouts whenever I had extra money, I soon learned that such gifts did more to ease my conscience as a better‑off westerner than they did to attack India's economic problems, which were structural in nature and part of colonialism's legacy. 
        
        But beggars weren't the only evidence of poverty. Its feel was everywhere: the cramped hovels in which people lived, the stench caused by the absence of sewage systems, the sick whom you found huddled in various public places. In one area of the city, not far from the army cantonment, there was a large hutment colony. It was a squalid place that consisted of rickety abodes and tent‑like structures inhabited by unemployed laborers, many of whom were ex‑tenant farmers who had been uprooted from their land by capital‑intensive farming techniques introduced by the U.S‑designed Green Revolution. The area was crammed with dirt‑smeared children dressed in rags and emaciated men and women with hollow cheeks and anemic eyes. 

        But although the poverty I saw disturbed me, I found a peculiar satisfaction in confronting it for what it was: an example of human suffering on a grand scale. To the extant that I viewed this suffering realistically, I was allowing India to have its own existence, as opposed to projecting onto the country my personal anxieties or western preconceptions about a "mysterious" India ‑‑ i.e., "weird" religions, "primitive" rituals, etc. During my stay I vacillated between these two Indias: the one factual, the other a nervous westerner's hallucination. Fortunately, the real India increasingly overshadowed my make‑believe one. Fissures and cracks developed in my preconceptions. I became less obsessed with the subcontinent's unfamiliar customs and more intrigued by the people, their survival strategies, dignity, work, humor, family dramas, etc. Still, I was willful. 

        One day not long before the end of our visit, Suman and I had a disagreement. I wanted to go for an afternoon walk; she thought we should remain at home. 

        "But we won't be here much longer," I responded. AI want the chance to look around some more." 
        
        "I'd rather spend time with the family," she insisted. 
        
        We stood alone in a corner in a back room of Ai's house. A faded photograph of Suman's bony‑faced father hung in an aged frame on the wall. Suman sank into an angry silence. For awhile, she didn't say anything. Standing near a small table, she idly fingered a piece of jewelry. Her face was tense and drawn, which made her eyes and nose appear bigger. I thought she was testing me by trying to get me to beg her to say something. I refused to give her the satisfaction. I remained quiet. 
        
        Finally she spoke ‑‑ "You can go out if you want. I'm staying here." Her tone was more relaxed than I had expected. She turned and left the room. 
        
        I went outside, headed up the side of the Vijaynagar hill and then walked in the direction of Belgaum. As I trudged along a rocky path and through crevices and gulleys, I second‑guessed my decision to leave the house. I felt badly for Suman. She was feeling increasingly anxious as our departure date drew closer and I was doing nothing to ease her concerns. Still, I didn't stop my excursion. I needed time to think. 
        
        It was a beautiful sunlit day. About a mile from the house, I stood on a ridge and looked down a steep incline at a group of women washing clothes in a streambed; they hand‑dipped articles of clothing in the water, then rinsed them by beating them against stones. Aimlessly, I continued walking. A mangy dog from the village followed me; his ribs showed. Eventually, feeling lazy, I sat in the grass. Nearby, the dog sniffed the ground as he wandered from one spot to another, inspecting the landscape. Below on the Belgaum road, a man walked beneath a black umbrella. The sunlight was so bright that it seemed to have a texture, a thickness. A bullock cart moved in slow motion along the road. Closer to me, the dog chewed a stick. Flies buzzed in the heat. I sprawled on my back in the grass, closed my eyes. Warm light washed over my body. Behind my closed eyelids, fragments of color floated in different directions, then dissolved into a single color: a warm, sumptuous red. I imagined the dog wandering through this redness in search of something. Then the red color faded and was replaced by a sensual yellow. I loved these imagination tricks. I felt relaxed. The disagreement with Suman, the tensions in her house, my confusions regarding India, all were behind me for the moment. I opened my eyes, stood up and continued my walk across the hilly landscape. Once again, the dog followed me. Eventually I reversed direction and started back toward the house. I took a different route, this time traipsing along the road. I came to a place where there was a cassia tree in bloom. Yellow flowers. 
        
        When I returned to the house, Suman and I went out back. Standing near a clump of foliage, we talked. 
        
        "I can't stand you sometimes," she said. 
        
        "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be so stubborn earlier," I apologized. 
        
        "You're always sorry ‑‑ afterwards," she remarked. 
        
        "Now you're being stubborn." 
        
        "I'm not being stubborn. I'm talking about a problem you have ‑‑ that's what I'm doing." 
                
        She was angry again. "Look, Bob," she continued, "you're goodhearted but you have trouble dealing with differences of opinion. I think it's because you're an only child. You have to loosen up and compromise more. You really do." 
        
        I placed my hands on her shoulders. She started to pull away but didn't. We hugged, a little stiffly. 
        
        That night in bed before going to sleep, we lay silently side by side in the darkness under the mosquito net for a long while. "How is the expectant father feeling these days?" Suman finally asked. 
        
        "Nervous, but I'm adjusting," I answered honestly. "What I worry about isn't how things'll be after the kid is born. It's the pregnancy and the delivery that get me anxious. I want you to be okay." 

        "That's the only thing that bothers me about living outside of India," she said. "I'd feel more comfortable being pregnant and giving birth here. But that's impossible now." 

        "I know." 

        We talked a little while longer, then fell asleep. 

        The next morning after breakfast, we accompanied Suman's mother into the city. After purchasing some household articles in the bazaar, we strolled the Belgaum streets for awhile, then returned home. During a conversation early that afternoon, Ai mentioned to me a book of lectures by Swami Rama Tirtha that she had given to me. "Some his ideas good, but not all," she commented, then criticized an assertion he had made that human beings never really loved things or other people, but merely used love as an excuse for satisfying their own needs. "We not always that bad," she said. Although her statement was intended as a proclamation, her uncertain tone reflected ambivalence. 

        During the last two days of our visit, Suman was unhappy. Although we handled the tension relatively well and had no major arguments, we bickered over a series of small issues. Given the fact that often since our marriage our wills had been like colliding bulldozers, our relative self‑control was a significant accomplishment. Two people, both somewhat unhinged by their backgrounds, and both in search of antidotes for their respective alienations, aren't necessarily the ideal mix for a successful relationship. 

        Yet in spite of our differences, we had become psychologically linked since the previous autumn when we'd first begun our affair. Our insecurities, in combination with a sexual passion that vacillated between elation and moody battles, had caused us to grow emotionally entangled and dependent on each other. This dependence was further cemented by the fact that, whatever other mistakes we might have made in starting our liaison, we'd intuited, at the beginning of our relationship, at least one thing correctly: that in the midst of our passion there resided the seeds of friendship. We actually liked each other ‑‑ for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was a shared rebelliousness. No dispute became so major that it permanently shattered our friendship. This marriage‑friendship, for all its sometimes deranged ups and downs, was to deepen over the years as together we explored, not only our attachment to each other and the two different cultures from which we had sprung, but also the meaning of political struggle in the modern world.