I’ve been gone from Hyderabad now for an entire week…

Sometimes I feel that I am just on a short vacation away from home—that soon I will be back in SIP guesthouse, back in class, back in the thick of the Hyderabad socialites. More often though, I am struck with the reality that it has ended. Good-byes are not my forte, and I’ll forgo my feelings on leaving the city that was my home for four months, lest I get teary-eyed for the hundredth time…Fortunately for me, my last few days were so jam packed with finishing up final papers, taking exams, and packing up my life, that I didn’t have time to get sad until I hugged the seven or eight friends who took me to the airport good-bye.

Since then, I have left the heat of the south for northern India (though I can’t really say it’s any cooler here in Varanasi where I currently am than in Andhra Pradesh); I met my dad in Delhi and we began a whole new kind of adventure. We began in Sikkim, a small mountain state bordered by Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan, which is basically the arm connecting NE India to the rest of the country. We drove from West Bengal up and up and up into the mountains, and after a small passport mishap, we finally reached Sikkim’s capital, Gangtok.

I woke up to see the Himalayas framed like a masterpiece in my window—Kanchenjunga peak presiding over the lesser, greener mountains was clear as day at 5:30 in the morning and faded gradually as the sun and the haze took over. In the early morning I walked a path along the ridge of a mountain through a forest alive as much with the prayer hangs hung from every branch as with the pine trees that comprised it. I went by Tata to the other side of the valley—to Rumtek—to stay at a Buddhist monastery.

I fell asleep to the sound of rain and woke up at the edge of the world—fog had rolled into the valley and there was no difference between the fog lying along the gorge’s riverbed and the clouds. Everything beyond the ridge on which the guesthouse was perched seemed to fall away into an apocalypse of whiteness; white noise. I visited the monastery, the monks in their red and saffron—just as you would imagine young Tibetan Buddhist ‘priestlets’ to be, except for their cell phones and walkmans and watches. There was rain all afternoon—the kind of rain where all I could do was wrap myself in a blanket, order chai, and sit by the open window reading—a cold rain, a kind of rain I have missed greatly. That night I went to the monastery and sat for an hour of prayer, the dim lights and bewitching chants truly brought me away from my reality; it could have been any century, I could have been any person.

I saw the earth fall away 1,000 feet just two inches from the car wheel under my window. In Sikkim the earth falls away like that without end, but it also continues without end as well. If ever you feel the need to truly comprehend the magnitude of this earth, take a helicopter through the mountains of Sikkim and see the hugeness of the mountains, not just in their individual height and slope, but in their endlessness and how they are scattered with the never-ending tiny farms of the people who live in the clouds.

Now I am in Varanasi, formerly Benares, the Hindu holy city. We caught the train here literally by 30 seconds, and rode it for 19 hours. This morning I was up at five, and on a boat in the Ganges by 6. We were rowed the length of the city’s waterfront and back—the city of Shiva’s birth, the oldest city in the world according to Hindu mythology. All along the river are the ghats—steps giving way to the water—where people bathe, pray, give offerings, and burn bodies. I saw stacks of burning logs, bodies inside, being cremated before having their ashes scattered into the holy Ganga. In the old city behind the ghats, the streets are narrow and crooked and there is a temple attached to every house. I’m not a religious person, but I can feel something down by the Ganga—the spirit of the people, of the religion, of the nation?

Tomorrow we will go to the city where the Buddha gave his first teachings. Tonight we will ride the river again and see it in the dark light of dusk instead of the dark light of dawn.