It has been many years since I have been in India, but in a few short weeks I’ll be boarding a flight to return. Return home? It’s strange to say but I can’t escape the reality of it: no, I am not returning home. I will be returning not as a resident immigrant but as a tourist which is a tough pill to swallow…

Thump-thump-thump-thump…crash! Thump-thump-thump-thump…crash! It is hard to write the sound of a monkey running and jumping off your roof into a tree. But sure enough we were in a room on the fourth floor of the hostel as the monkeys playfully leaped off the roof into the branches of the towering pines. Thump-thump-thump-thump…crash!…

Ok, it wasn’t Jeep, it was probably a Toyota Qualis. But it was definitely an adrenaline rush. A few feet and a back window are the closest I ever want to get to a wild bull elephant about to charge.

What would be an ideal weekend getaway for you? Anyone like camping? What if you were offered the chance to go camping in India. Somewhere up in the mountains. You could hike through the pine and eucalyptus trees, or you could swim and kayak in the lake. You could leap off waterfalls into deep dark pools of water and cap it all off with a hot Indian meal and sitting around a fire. Would you do it?

Late for work! I was driving down the street in my rickety, twenty-year-old Honda, visor down to keep the glare from blinding me as I peered through the smudgy windshield. I hunched over a cold bowl of oatmeal using a plastic fork to spear congealed globs into my mouth. I laughed to myself at how pathetic it was…

Three minutes was the expectation in boarding school. Of course, three minute showers were instituted to conserve water in a drought prone area. In times past at my boarding school in the southern mountains of India, there were moments when water supplies were so low that water was brought to the school in large tanks on a horse cart…

Of course, normally such a heatwave would be patiently endured with air conditioning and cold drinks and indoor activity, but unfortunately that was not the case at our school. Built in 1907, the only air conditioning in the building are the window units in the classrooms. So, being a PE teacher (a gym teacher for you uncultured folks) I got to sweat it out in the gym with a couple fans and swarms of sweaty screaming children…

The helicopter blades hummed loudly in my ears, slicing through the headset. I stared blankly ahead. Local landmarks slid by underneath and we swerved to dodge a birthday balloon that rose up in front of us. I held my son’s stuffed lion Raja in my lap, took slow deep breaths to calm my racing heart and mind and prayed silently for the bleeding to stop.

Teeth bared, hair raised, snarling and leaping in and out snapping at each other’s necks the two rival packs of street dogs battled in our front yard and us little boys were about to be trapped in the middle of a literal dogfight…

Every student has a subject they hate in school. What was yours? Chemistry? Math? History? Phys Ed? Maybe it changed over the course of your school years. I might have to say it was French for me. But a close second was swimming in PE. Don’t get me wrong, I loved PE, it was my favorite class of the week all my years in school (and I’m even a PE teacher now!), but every year in the spring when we would begin our swimming unit I was filled with dread.

When the police moved into the compound I thought nothing of it. They didn’t get in the way of our make-believe games and besides, there were always people coming and going anyways. In dusty Jampur, Pakistan, we lived in a walled compound. In it was our house, a couple swing sets, a see-saw, a clinic where my mom worked and the toilet that sat on the opposite side of the compound to our house. There was also a low, one story, one room brick building that served as the church…

When it was quiet you could hear the lamb bleating in its cage on the edge of campus. At night students could hear it stumbling around the tiny inclosure voicing its soft little lamby thoughts into the darkness…baaa…baaa….baaa….but everyone waited for the moment the leopard arrived and they would hear baaa….BAAA….B…and silence. Yikes. Good luck trying to sleep. Thankfully my dorm wasn’t near the cage.

Hearts racing, adrenaline pumping, deep breaths with giggles in between, our little feet pounded the grassy slope as we made our escape. It was the 90s. It was Pakistan. And we were playing a game that only unsupervised children can come up with. Do you like skydiving? Or speeding around on a motorcycle? Paintball or horror movies? Do you love the adrenaline rush? Nothing gives you adrenaline like being charged by a 600 lb water buffalo….

It is odd how it is still so vivid and so raw. I can still taste the sweetness of the honeysuckle nectar on my tongue, I can still feel the hot tears on my cheeks and the ragged breaths in my chest. I can still feel the comforting hand of a future best friend on my shoulder. I can still see my concerned parents’ faces and still hear the librarian’s Indian-accented words of peace in my ears….

I paused slaying make-believe monsters with my brothers in the front yard to look up at him seated calmly on the slope under the sappy pine tree. The hillside rose behind him and ahead, at the other end of the yard, it dove down steeply into the valley. The air was chilly at this time in the evening just as it usually was there in the pine covered foothills of the Himalayas. It was the perfect spot to watch the sunset over the mountains…

…..I wouldn’t say any of us were enthusiastic about what was happening but by this point our team had split into two groups; the complainers and the determined. The complainers had taken up the rear, and their complaining had begun even before the rain….

The eternal photoshoot was difficult for a child my age. Endless combinations of positions and stances for the five of us: standing in front of the camel, camel sitting, camel standing, some of us on the camel…all of this punctuated by “Smile,” “Keep your eyes open!” and….

Was it 1a.m. or 2a.m.? It didn’t really matter. We were suffocating in the claustrophobic midnight heat deep into a Delhi summer. The days were oppressively hot, often touching 100°F and then pushing higher…

We were a jovial bunch and the day had been especially joyous. Constant banter and continuous laughter and chatter rolled across the sand as our gang rode our herd of camels to enjoy a home cooked meal in a village deep in the Thar desert.

It was just after dark as our taxi crawled through traffic into a train station just west of Agra: Tundla Junction. Other than the street lights that lined the entrance to the train station, everything was in darkness. The power was out at the station and travelers bustled around the entrance toting bags and wrapped…