As overwhelming as we may have found it, India did not feel chaotic. There is logic in the power lines, draped over trees and strung to light open-air tin huts that serve as restaurant, teahouse, shoe repair. There is rhythm to the keening calls of shop owners, who follow us down the street asking where we are from, opening their arms to us as though they can change the current of air in which we walk, directing us into their stores. Even the traffic, countless lanes on both sides of the road, stray dogs claiming space with as much righteousness as pedicabs, auto-rickshaws, wildly-colored trucks, horse-drawn carts, families of four stacked onto motorbikes – it moves with an identifiable sensibility, with what must be a kind of order, though it’s not an order that feels natural to me.

I am struck, over and over, by the multitude of stories I am not telling here. I feel unqualified to talk about the extremity of experience in India without the perspective that comes with time and education. My attempts have ranged from reductive to trite; from overzealous study abroad language (“India changed me”) to its opposite (“Thank god I’m done with that). Rather than a light-hearted summary, I think the best I can hope is that writing about India here serves as the beginnings of conversations; that it de-stabilizes my own assumptions enough that I can continue to look at more of the world with fresher eyes.

In a river of traffic on our way to the airport in Jaipur, I felt myself easing back and forth as the car did, a light and firm tug in the poles of my body. Traffic is so often considered emblematic of the wildness of India. But my body knew exactly when it would move, and how. The traffic in India doesn’t move with the desires and vindictiveness of individuals in mind: there is no right-of-way; nothing is personal. It moves, instead, with the patience, the inevitability, and the anonymity of water.