So I’m back with an empty notebook. I had not a single urge to pick up a pen while I was there I have tried to write an account of the trip, but it feels so inadequate. I will keep trying though. Maybe poetry will be a better way to capture it, an opportunity to say the unsayable. But it’ll take a long time to filter through. Everything I think of sounds banal or cliched or obvious.

 

So at the risk of saying the obvious, I guess visiting such an extraordinary land of contrasts and ambiguities, of poverty next door to wealth, of squalor next to beauty, did make me re-evaluate my life again. After we came back and I’d spent a weekend at the washing machine, I reminded myself of the women I had seen washing clothes at a pump miles from their villages. Okay, I’m slipping into Western tourist mode and I won’t say any more about that.

 

India:

 

Five people on one motorbike. A pair of oxen so loaded down with hay you couldn’t see their faces. Women carrying giant loads of firewood on their heads. Green terraces of coriander and wheat seen from above. The weathered feet of the people who lived in the villages. The frozen floors of the Hindu temple at Jageshwar that burnt my feet. The taste of sweet lime. Interminable aloo gobi and chapatis. Red saris. Blue heavens. Cows, buffaloes, goats and monkeys. The peaks of the Himalayas glimpsed across a pink haze. Our smallness as we picked our way along ancient paths.

 

Maybe there is more to come. Meanwhile, I’m happy to be home and am more grateful to my trusty washing machine than I can say.