Tales of Love in India and New York

For my first trip to India, my expectations were low. Friends who’d traveled extensively warned me against going there. “You’ll kill someone,” Charlane said. “The first man who grabs your breast—you’ll beat to him to death.” “You’ll see a cab driver not even bother to swerve to avoid hitting a street dog, and you’ll have a nervous breakdown,” my yoga teacher Brenda said. “You’ll get food poisoning and lose too much weight,” Pawan, my doctor who grew up in Delhi, warned. The general consensus was I’d be better off going to France.

But India was calling. Literally. My close friend Gurudharam Kaur Khalsa, formerly Joanie, lived on Yogi Bhajan’s estate in Anandpur Sahib. She was traveling to Rishikesh, where I was to meet her, take yoga classes taught by Americans at the Parmarth Niketan ashram on the Ganges. I told myself I had to go. After all, it’s practically mandatory that everyone who practices yoga make the pilgrimage. I spent the first three weeks in the sweltering late April heat simply grateful I hadn’t killed anyone, lost my mind, or contracted food poisoning.

With Gurudharam as my guide, I took respite from the unrelenting heat by swimming fully clothed in the canals of Anandpur Sahib, because Gurudharam informed me bathing suits are neither graceful nor ladylike and, therefore, wholly inappropriate attire for the holy city. I’m not a strong swimmer under the best of circumstances, and swimming while wearing a salwar kameez is about as much fun as it sounds. Eventually, I sought a different way to escape the heat. I headed to the Indian Himalayas.

It was during the jeep drive up the Kullu-Manali Highway, headed to the town once known as the End of the Habitable World, that I saw the sight that will forever stay etched in my mind as the most profound sight of my trip. This sight was not the man traveling the highway, dressed in a white suit, clutching a briefcase, as he sat atop an elephant. It was not the desolate, dusty plains giving way to lusty emerald deodar and pine forests. It was not the mountains revealing themselves one by one, the faint pink glow of dawn hovering like a ghost behind an enormous silver Himalayan peak.

The sight that left me teary, stirred in me a longing I feel to this day was one I might have missed. It’s one that is infinitesimally tiny compared to the 20,000-foot mountain peaks that surrounded me. In this part of India, bridges across the mighty Beas River are rare. Crossing the river requires ingenuity and a flying fox, which is a cage suspended on a wire, a pulley system that shuttles the cage across the river like clothes on a clothesline . On that drive to Manali, to the End of the Habitable World, Rohtang La (the pass of death), to the gateway to Ladakh and Tibet, this is the sight I remember best: a young couple gingerly stepping into a flying fox, the man’s arm around the woman’s waist, her head tilted onto his shoulder. If then someone asked me to define love, I would have offered up a photo snapped in that moment.

I saw that look of love again last week in New York, riding the 1 train from the Bronx to Port Authority. A man and woman, both beautiful, her with long, light brown hair, not quite straight, but not wavy. He had dark hair, a beard, not a hipster, deliberate beard, but the beard of a man who was too busy to shave for a few days. They sat with their thighs touching, as she continually cupped his face in her hands, kissing his cheek, nose, eyebrows. She kept her hands on his face as she turned his head to her, kissed him lightly on the mouth. Ran her fingers through his tousled hair. Found his neck, kissed him there. The look on his face was something I will always remember. He was passive, not annoyed, yet not responsive. He didn’t look bemused or put out. He looked, simply, like a man who was giving the woman he loved what she needed in that moment. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them.

My first thought was they can’t possibly be Americans. Then I noticed an open travel guide on his lap. I decided they were Spanish, possibly Italian. I made up a story in my head. They’ve been together for years, they’ve traveled everywhere, India, while having the good sense to go Goa or Mumbai, someplace where PDAs would not be considered graceless and crude. Or, maybe Manali, where they hid away amid the thick green forests, crossing the Beas in a flying fox.

I wish I’d had the presence to snap a photo of the couple in the flying fox, of the Spanish/Italian couple on the 1 train. Love is hard to describe with words. Love isn’t always joyous. It’s not always safe. What those couples showed me is that love is the ability to be present with each other, to be still, to be.