Moments in between
By Luca Lombardi
Murti, 64 sips chai and sits on one of the three beds in her room at her house in Titram. She shares the room with her sister Roshi, 62, and her son Manjeet, 30. She invites people over to chat over some chai.
As the breeze flowed through my hair, my head sticking out of Suraj’s car window, I felt the warm sun and wondered if I would ever get another moment like this. We had just finished spending some time with Murti and Roshni, not for any particular reason other than spending quality time with them and getting to know more about their lives. Drinking chai out of Murti and Roshni’s tin cups embroidered with floral patterns, I felt at ease. I appreciated that this was not “planned work” for our story or anything, but a moment that contributed toward something else — living an Indian experience.
Some may think that the moments that mattered most throughout this trip were the important interviews, gathering content or being out in the field. Looking back, more than anything I enjoyed “in-between moments” — moments that I spent not necessarily doing anything “important.”
More often than not, we fell into these “in-between moments,” whether waiting for Satish at 6:00 a.m. in the government school’s dark, foggy courtyard, observing students stroll in or sitting in the canteen for hours people-watching. All these moments contributed to a greater understanding of India than any others.
Before the trip, many told us to be aware of “India time.” This meant that if the plan was to leave at 10:00 a.m., it could be on the dot or hours later. This gave me a lot of time to sit around and observe the things that happened around me. The lives that people lived, bustling around me. The man carrying a 50-inch on the back of his moped. The children playing cricket in the dusty field of Harsola’s government school. The women carrying heavy bundles of barsim on their heads back to their buffalo. Many times, I leaned into the observation and questioned myself about where these people were going, what they were doing, when they woke up in the morning, what was their job, etc.
I felt part of the Indian experience in these moments. I put myself in others’ shoes and tried to understand their lives through my perspective as an outsider. I never had felt this feeling before. I started to understand what being a traveler instead of a tourist meant. With every experience, every in-between moment, I got closer to understanding what it meant to be a Kathalite, a Haryanvi — and on the other side of the coin, how people perceived me as a foreigner.
During this month, I learned the importance of patience, downtime and everything that contributed to the in-between moments — whether that was with my team, asking ourselves how long it would take Suraj to ask to eat at the canteen as we looked at people passing by in the street in front of us, or with sources for our stories, learning more about their life and their lore that we knew none of moments before. All these moments contributed to something more meaningful and profound than anything else in my eyes.