Much like asking Sona to marry me when I didn’t have a job, or any remote interest in the possiblity of attaining one – I was in the middle of an MFA in creative writing program while living with my parents in Fresno (and she still said yes!)- the decision to drop everything and go backpacking through India wasn’t a difficult one. When I asked Sona to get married, all I knew was that it felt right. And that is how I feel about this adventure, despite Sona’s tendencies to overcomplicate everything, from simple recipes, to packing, I knew it would be an adventure that I couldn’t pass up. Sona has great work ethic, which is not a good trait in a traveler. So, when she suggested the act of vagabonding for a couple of months before settling back into reality, I knew I couldn’t pass up my one opportunity to infect her with the travel bug.
We had the whole world at our disposal, but we ultimately decided on India because, well, it’s India. There is no country in the world quite like it and we both think we can speak the North Indian languages of Hindi and Punjabi, relatively well (numbers higher than 10 are a bit tricky though).It is a land of contradictions with its breathtaking beauty, vast areas of ugliness in the sheer level of visible pollution, majestic architecture, squalid tin-roofed make-shift neighborhoods, perilous roads, home to some of the world’s most exciting and dangerous places.
For Sona, it is also about embracing a country that she has never properly explored as an insider. She’s always been on the outside with sheltered 2 week family trips involving lots of shopping, and being shuttled from one relative’s house to the next. The first time I went on my own was when I was 20, as a reward for myself for failing all of my classes at community college. Yes, community college. That trip really made me focus on my studies, perhaps not exactly for the right reasons: I wanted to be done, so I could go travel some more!
The second I graduated with my Bachelors degree, I went gallavanting off to China, and ended up living there for 2 years. I eventually made it back to the United States, but not before backpacking from China into India via Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Tibet, and Nepal. I took the scenic route.
