The Gift Must Move

(cross posted at https://theyakboard.com/)

In 2019, I traveled to India with my yoga teacher and a group of her yoga students. I think I was seeking enlightenment; that’s what so many yoga programs promise middle-aged women like me. While I have positive memories of that trip — walks along a dusty road to town and admiring the warli art on the concrete walls, getting elaichi from the tiny stand close to town, squashing into auto-rickshaws at the crack of dawn to attend aarti at the temple, visiting a workshop where women were sewing — I left India feeling uncomfortably like a consumer of the experience, rather than a participant. I stopped doing yoga, uneasy with my own practice, feeling like I'd appropriated something that wasn't mine, but not wanting it to devolve merely into exercise, which seemed wrong, too. I’d bought a pair of earrings that I loved during the trip, tear-drop shaped tiger eye, and eventually lost one of them. The loss felt symbolic.

Fast forward seven years. 

I am standing on a walkway along Fateh Sagar Lake in Udaipur, at a "Be the Gift" festival sponsored by Shikshantar, a movement founded to re-think education and provide opportunities for people to participate in social regeneration. I have been tasked with holding a sign that says “Free झप्पी” ("Free Jhappi," or "Free hugs"). I awkwardly wave the sign and smile; many teenaged boys cluster across from me, talking to each other and giggling before shoving each other forward to take turns posing next to me for a picture. I am certain that I'm Instagram-famous within minutes. A few people take me up on the offer of the hug (despite the fact that I had worried about gender conventions and the weirdness of inviting that kind of intimacy). I talk with people about the meaning of money, why we worry about it so much, what we can give each other to make it feel less burdensome. At one point I'm invited to play a game I’d never heard of before called "Beauty and the Beast" that feels a lot like tag but it much more confusing.

I'm on a program with students and a few colleagues, facilitated by Where There Be Dragons, that is intended to provide a context for students to broaden their understanding of community activism, education, and leadership. And I find that I'm experiencing India as a learner, with humility, with curiosity. 

During the ten days we were traveling, we visited with leaders and visionaries (not people with big visions but small, one-person-at-a-time kinds of visions) who were helping the community collaborate to leave their world a little better than they’d found it. We were invited into the homes of our students’ homestay families, where they talked with us about their relatives, cricket, and upcoming weddings, and fed us and poured so many cups of chai. We took walking tours of villages like Delwara and Kotri and cities like Udaipur with people who call those places home, who have seen them change, who are thinking about the impact of development and the ways in which history and culture and class (and caste) shape individual and collective identities. 

Each day, I’d listen to my fellow travelers asking questions, recounting their homestay siblings’ funniest remarks, reflecting on their perspectives on India, education, and what it means to be “doing enough” in this difficult world to help create and nurture positive change. I felt deeply fortunate to be in this space, in this moment. I thought a lot about my own communities, and things we build together just by showing up.

On the last night, we walked down a street in Delhi on the way to Hemanji’s favorite tea shop, a pair of earrings in a small jeweler’s window caught my eye. They were tear drop shaped tiger eyes, like the one I’d lost, but the stone was dangling from a tree of life, a symbol I’ve connected with over the past few years as I’ve tried to be more mindful of things like community and rootedness and mutual growth. It was like a visual representation of the ways in which this trip was both similar to but completely different from the one I’d taken seven years ago.

At the airport in the wee hours of the morning, Neeravji, Tserginji, and Hemantji (our Dragons leaders) stood outside to see us safely towards home. I felt sadder than I expected to feel, like I was leaving people who had become friends, but also grateful to be traveling back with people who were going to keep asking questions and challenging me to be more reflective, too.

It's hard to know where to go from here. But that’s the point, right? To be open, to be curious, to be unable to distill complicated places and people down to a single blog post or photo.

I told the group towards the end of our trip that there’s an anthropologist who says one of the essential qualities of a gift is that it must “move,” that if gifts aren’t passed on, that they lose their tranformative abilities and become just things. This journey was a gift, generously given (the “free jhappi” that people offered to me, the beautiful mehndi that I received at the festival, the boost from Hemantji and the extended hand of Neeravji that helped me get up the mountain), and I hope I can do that gift justice for a long time to come.

*photos don’t include other people because I didn’t ask permission to publish them … not because I was alone in India!! 🙂