love like marriage.

“We love it here.” This is our general response to the frequented question of if we like India. And we do. Every time I say, “we love it,” I feel genuine and not at all like I’m hiding my true feelings. I find this odd though. What exactly do we love about India?

 I brought my concern about what is it we do love about India to Collin, and we couldn’t really come up with anything. I could list off in my mind many, many things that drive me utterly crazy about living in India, but that is all. I could think of the excruciatingly general loudness of this country: the horn blows of traffic, the unnecessarily booming speakers of the movie theaters, the bells, the chimes, the shouts, the yells, the dogs. Everything is so bloody loud here that I wouldn’t be surprised if I have partial hearing loss upon arriving back home in the states. I could think of the nauseating smells of animal urine, people urine, animal defecation, people defecation, trash heaps, rotten food, rotten animals. I could think of seeing men along any road creating those smells by urinating and defecating. I could think of being grabbed by beggars and begging children. I could think of being stared at, of getting cameras not-so-discretely pointed in our direction to get “snaps” of us. I could think of being ripped off everywhere, and not being able to do a thing about it because we are foreigners. I could think of the near-death daily traffic, the rats, the heat, the humidity, plumbing, toilets (or lack of), cold showers, smelly clothes (even after being washed), cockroaches, frizzy hair, prickly heat. I could just go on and on.

But despite all these things, despite feeling utterly helpless about improving our situation to even a degree of what living is like at home in America, we truly love it here.

*

One of the girls had asked me and Collin what it is we love about being married. We couldn’t think of a thing and just shrugged and smiled. She asked us again sometime later, and all we still had nothing of substance to tell her.  So Collin’s answer to why we love India was that it’s the same thing when we were asked what we liked about marriage; we couldn’t think of anything exactly or precisely, and maybe some of the things we were thinking in our heads were entirely negative and would have rather not shared, but honestly and truly we love being married unconditionally. Just like how we love India.