Tutiyapalaiyam

We get used to everything. We get used to all the little details that are often the complete opposite of everything you grew up with to understand as right. We get used to the long hours of introspection in cramped buses and trains and to not having a clue about where we are going to sleep that night. To give a sarcastic laugh towards the first price vendors charge you, despite having no idea of how much the fair price should be, and to get into long negotiations over a 10-rupee (around US$ 0.20) difference. To withstand every difficulty with Spartan endurance.

From time to time, however, the cheer strangeness gets to you, in the most mundane moments, when for one reason or another we suddenly appreciate our own situation more rationally. Last time, that feeling hit me while I was sitting by the (always) open door of a train, legs dangling outside, enjoying the wind and watching the huge palm tree fields of Southern India run in front of my eyes. The train stopped in Tutiyapalaiyam, a little village in the middle of nowhere, in the state of Tamil Nadu, and the small station only had signs and posters written in Tamil – no English anywhere. Suddenly it was with me again – the strangeness. I realized that I was in a train between the cities of Kochi and Chennai, on my way to catch a flight to Sri Lanka – all three of them places I had never planned on visiting in my life before. And that everything around me was written and spoken in a language in which I’d never be able to say “good morning”. And that dozens of people watched me with all the astonishment (and then some) due to the alien presence that was myself in this place. And that I was so many world apart from these people physically, culturally and in every other respect that not even in a million years there I’d be looked at any differently.

This strangeness always brings its inseparable companion – fear. After all, I also realized that I had been hanging loose from a high speed train for the last half hour with no protection whatsoever. That I would not only be unable to say “good morning”, but also “help me”. That I was thousands of miles away from anybody or anything that ever made me feel safe and comfortable. That disease and misfortune could strike me at any moment.

Tutiyapalaiyam is essential to my life, as strangeness and fear always force me to evaluate what I am buying myself with them, and whether the price is right. Four months after stepping out of my door heading for the biggest series of “first times” I’ll probably ever experience, this is a timely reflection.

Travelling, and particularly backpacking, I have learned, is a journey into oneself much more than one towards cities and monuments. It’s time to put to the test all those beautiful notions about yourself, the ones concocted on your comfortable bed or during a luxurious hot shower in your toilet-paper-abundant bathroom. It is learning to face the different as normal, and to respect the profoundly different. It is getting to know a former British business executive turned Hare-Krishna monk 15 years ago during a tourist escapade, feeling his great inner peace and seeing his eyes shining, and understanding that choice makes all the sense in the world to him. It is seeing a mile-long line of pilgrims waiting to touch a cow born with a fifth deformed leg, and immediately thinking on how many things in your own culture and religion would seem equally alien and absurd in the eyes of those same pilgrims.

Backpacking is about being forced to make do away from the pasteurized relationships of western civility – to defend your space, your money, your health, honor and very life alone, with all your weapons and means: with grace, charm, intelligence, resilience, malice, and aggressiveness. In extreme cases, even with violence (though it hasn’t occurred to me, it has to some friends). In my experience, it can be threatening a proto-gangster roughly enough so he won’t call your bluff, or turn a con artist’s scam onto himself and getting a free night in a hotel, or having to spoon a respectable sir in a sleeper bus for 16 hours. In my humble opinion, and should also be apologizing and trying to make things right if you end up, in your blessed ignorance, threatening the respectable sir and spooning the con artist instead.

Spiritually, and especially in India, backpacking is to face dozens of religions, beliefs, rituals and philosophies, and to recognize in each one sparkles of your own truth. And to see, beyond the colorful repertoire of the searchers, a glimpse of the Search that unites us all.

Travelling also taught me to recognize that the universe doesn’t care at all about our meticulously worked out plans, and that it merely gives us the big pieces with which we build the big picture of our lives. To recognize that we can build something beautiful, something clumsy or even throw the pieces away, but it doesn’t change a thing to complain about the pieces given to us or to wish they were different. And ultimately, with that understanding, it has taught me to embrace serendipity, building purposes that inspire instead of plans that frustrate.

Backpacking is a way of turning back to a more primitive way of life – everyday, priority is given to finding food and shelter, then transportation and communications, all of it within your budget, and only then can we think about merriment. And by bringing us back to basics, it also reveals to us the maze of illusions, irrelevance and vanities that takes up so much of our daily lives. And seeing that, to find out more time within our time, and more life within our life. I can easily remember almost all days of these last four months, while only a very few of my previous office years. In that, there are signs, and lessons that have been deeply touching me.

And, of course, travelling is also about the sublime moments of turning your dreams into reality, and to be amazed at the wonders of being alive and the world surrounding us. I find it impossible to really describe my feelings while watching the sunrise over the Himalayas in Darjeeling, or the first morning rays turning the Taj Mahal pink, or crying out of pure beauty under a divinely starry night sky in the Rajasthan tar desert, belly-sliding on the snow for the very first time, climbing up my first peak, or paragliding side-to-side with hawks in Nepal. Gratitude, pride, hunger for life, everything together in one overwhelming feeling of joy.

All in all, travelling has certainly given me more of the world, but, also, it has given me more of myself. I feel stronger, more prepared, more alive. Over anything else, I feel more like me. When Tutiyapalaiyam asked me if it all was worth the strangeness and discomfort, I answered that only without them it wouldn’t be worth it. When it asked me whether it was worth the fear and insecurity, I found out I had discovered within myself the true meaning of that great verse of Fernando Pessoa: “ships are safe while inside the harbor, but they weren’t built for that”.

The trip, of coruse, cannot last forever, and there are those who believe that everything I just described is just a big dream, only possible in an alternate reality, away from “real” life. However, I think that maybe this is indeed the role assigned by Providence to the act of travelling: that of touching our souls in such an intense, profound and indelible way that its marks and memories will compel us to forever seek that fullness in life.

I wish everybody a Tutiyapalaiyam, and I hope each and every one of them is as beautiful as mine.