Awaken

3Return of the Native

I returned to India on the cusp of adolescence and was soon plunged into the mystery, romance, excesses, subtleties, and brutality of that world. We left the dynamic, materialistic, hedonistic Peyton Place, Mad Men zeitgeist of the United States in the late 1960s and arrived in an India that had one foot in the eighteenth century and the other in the twentieth. Just 22 years removed from its independence from the British Empire and struggling to shed the deep‐seated vestiges of colonialism, India was a place of dizzying contrasts. An intensely patriarchal, misogynistic society that worshipped goddesses and was led by a woman (Indira Gandhi, whom my grandfather routinely referred to as “that raand,” meaning slut or whore). A chaotic centrally planned economy. An ancient civilization that was an infant democracy. A place of high ideals and daily indignities. A country that taught the world the power of nonviolence but where unspeakable atrocities were commonplace. A place where cows were worshipped but countless humans were deemed untouchable. A culture that manifested the depths of spirituality and the heights of superficiality.

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We landed in New Delhi in the middle of night; the crowded airport was chilly and dimly lit with flickering fluorescent tubes. India can feel like a multitiered assault on the senses for even the well‐seasoned traveler. For an 11‐and‐a‐half‐year‐old child, the contrast between the bright modern interiors and sparsely peopled ...