India In Review: The Plight of a Brown American in India

Despite it's status as my motherland, I never felt a strong draw to come to India. When I knew I was coming to Asia, I added it to the long list of countries I planned to visit because... you can't go to southeast Asia and not visit India. My original plan was to spend eight days here. I had it all mapped out. A day here, a couple days there, eight in total and then I'd be off. I ended up spending 27. And not because India was that particularly great, honestly. A lot of it had to do with poor planning on my part, and forgetting to take into consideration the amount of time it would take to travel. I mean... India is BIG. Like... really big. Let me put this in perspective for you:

India's outline superimposed on the United States
... and some of Canada... and  some of Mexico (via buzzfeed..com)

This all seems so obvious, but it worth saying aloud. India isn't this singular entity of India like I used to think about it as from half-way around the globe in my comfy San Francisco apartment. The different parts of India are very, very different. And I wanted to make sure I saw all of the things I had originally set out to see, from the north all the way through the south. Which meant I was here for a month. I still didn't see everything. Some places I wish I had spent less time. Other places I still didn't get to see at all. But overall, I'm happy with the way this trip turned out.

A lot of what you hear about India is totally true. There is poverty everywhere. Everywhere. People talk about how in India you can see the extremes of wealth butted up right next to each other. My friend KB explained that the reason you see slums surrounding multi-million dollar homes is because the people that live in those slums are the people who built those mansions, so they live close by out of necessity.

I'm reminded of an episode of The West Wing where Donna goes to visit Gaza and is reporting back to Josh. "When you get... into the streets, what hits you about Gaza isn't the overcrowding or poverty. What strikes you is something else: idleness. The sense of the people waiting but with no expectation. It's hard to convey."

I'll caveat all of this by saying that while I was here for almost a month, my interactions with the locals were almost exclusively limited to transactional encounters: hostel proprietors, shopkeepers, waiters, cab drivers, ice cream guys, and ticket sellers, so that likely is coloring my perspective on the situation. But I saw a lot of people here who don't seem to have a lot to do. I don't even know that "idleness" appropriately captures it. I think "resignation" is better. People seemed resigned to live the hand they've been dealt. Even the shopkeepers sit outside of their shops all day, waiting for the couple of sales they might make in a day and not doing much else beside talking to the shopkeeper next door. I guess it's no different than a lot of places in the U.S. but somehow it feels... sadder because it's in India.

There's also a sense of comradery and intimacy among the people here that you don't see in the U.S. Complete strangers talk to one another as if they've known each other their whole lives. People can sound like they're arguing when really they're just having a normal conversation.

I can imagine that it must be incredibly difficult to be a woman here. Most everything seemed to be done by men. Occasionally there'd be a woman in a position of authority, but they were few and far between. Rape was a topic that was a common occurrence in the news. I honestly don't think it's any worse a problem here than it must be in many other parts of the world, but I think it get's a little more attention here because 1) I think there's a bigger international spotlight on India than there is on a lot of other countries, and 2) India is a lot bigger, so as a sheer numbers game, it happens more often here than in smaller countries, but still makes national/international news. Still, I met plenty of female travelers who told me about how many people they knew were shocked and scared to learn that they were traveling by themselves through India.

The servant class is fascinating to me here. Like in Bangladesh, it's totally normal to have servants and drivers here. While staying with KB, I heard her explaining to one of her servants about how the Earth revolved around the sun. This servant was a teenage girl. It's hard to say how much of her lack of educational opportunities had to do with her being female and how much had to do with her just being part of a lower class, but in either case, it was maddening and saddening to see. Servants don't even really interact with the people the serve, outside of anything transactional. They might talk a little, but not really. They're there to serve, not be friends. It's amazing. Amazing in the "I'm amazed that that's how this works," not amazing in the, "this is awesome!" sense.

Personal space and personal hygiene are also very different here than they are in America. By personal space, I really mean lack thereof. There are no physical boundaries between the people here. When you're waiting in line, the person behind you is always pushing your forward. And not by accident, they are actively pushing you forward, even if there is no place forward for your to move. It's not rude in this culture, it's just how it is. Body odor is also all around you. I never got used to it, but it also wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be in most cases. But sometimes it can almost knock you off your feet. No one here seems to notice.

I ate with my hands more and more as the trip went on. If you've never eaten a full meal with your hands before besides buffalo wings, I highly recommend trying it at least once. You feel connected to your food in a way that you don't get when you're one step removed when using utensils. You get to know your food on a deeper level. The consistency of it. The temperature. The texture. It adds a completely new layer to one's gastronomic experience. If you do try it out, don't be shy. It's not like eating a bag of Cheetos where you try to only use two fingers to minimize the amount of Cheeto dust you have on your hands. You've got to dive right in. Get a little messy. Remember, you're going to wash your hands when you're done anyways, so have at it. Also remember, there's no wrong way to do it.

Certain aspects of the infrastructure are huge problems here as well. Most of the places I went to were one giant trash dump. A story I left out of my experience in Amritsar was when I was killing time before heading out to the Attari border. I bought some ice cream but I held onto the wrapper until I could find a trash can because I refused to contribute to India's pervasive trash problem. I finished the ice cream and went to another shop to buy water. After I purchased the water, I asked the shopkeeper if he knew where I could throw away my trash. In response, he waved his arm out in front of him, gesturing toward the vastness of... the street behind me. Which was already filled with trash. Later that day, I had an almost identical experience after I returned from the border. I was holding onto the plastic water bottle, and one of the friendly locals went out of his way to tell me I should put the bottle behind the tire of a parked car so that it would get crushed.

The train system here is abysmal. First off, the booking system could use a massive overhaul. If I'm in India's shoes, there is no question in my mind that I invest a few million dollars and a few months to hire an IT consulting firm to redesign the flow of train bookings. The payoff in efficiency would be enormous. As a foreigner, it's incredibly difficult to book your own tickets. You're basically forced to go through a third party. It's almost impossible to book a ticket a couple days in advance, you've got to do it way before that. And then there's a limited number of last-minute tickets that become available for purchase at a certain time of day, so there's a mad dash to get them before they're gone. For a significantly higher price. Some train classes you don't have an actual seat, so you have to get their early and rush to get a good place in line so you can guarantee your spot on the train. There's a officer there with a long wooden stick to beat anyone into submission if they're out of line, or trying to cut the line, or get too rowdy. Trains are also perpetually late for what seems to be no good reason.

Sanitation is a disaster. Water is a disaster. Public safety standards are a joke. Construction workers don't wear helmets. They're just guys off the streets who needed jobs.

All of this is to be expected in the third world, but it doesn't have to be like this. And I have to imagine this is changing. I'm sure if I had come here 10 years ago, today it would look completely different. The last time my dad was here was a decade ago. When I was making this trip, he warned me that it would be hard to get cash because there are no ATMs. But of course there are ATMs! They're everywhere! Progress is happening, albeit slowly. I saw this ad in an airport from HSBC and I totally believe the headline is true:

It was a totally unique experience being a brown American in India. It definitely had it's pluses and minuses. On the one hand, if you weren't paying too much attention to how I was dressed, you wouldn't immediately know I was a foreigner. This meant I got hassled on the streets waaaaay less than a lot of the other travelers I met. Fewer people asking me for money or trying to sell me something (though I still had quite a few people doing both). It also got me out of some hairier situations because I could play the dumb foreigner card. On the other hand, once people realized I was a foreigner, I was treated the same, if not worse, than other foreigners. As soon as I opened my mouth to talk, prices became doubled. I got a huge variety of reactions from people when they found out I was American. Some people were in disbelief. I got the question "are you sure you're not from India?" more times than you would think. Other people would get frustrated. Why wasn't I talking to them in Hindi? I know you're from America and you don't know Hindi, but... why don't you know Hindi? I know you don't know Hindi but... why aren't you talking to me in Hindi right now? There were even some twinges of anger or disgust. People's body language and tone of voice were conveying an impression of, "how dare you not speak Hindi right now, stupid American." I also totally caught some people way off guard. When I was exploring Delhi with met my first hostel friend, a white Englishwoman, she would talk to me in her English accent and the people around would look and think "oh, an English tourist." But when I spoke back to her with a strong American accent, those same people would do a total double-take and you could tell were thinking to themselves, "WHAAAAAT!?!?!?!"

It's been an interesting role reversal being in India. If you look at me from a sociological perspective, it would be fair to say that my race (genetics) is Indian but my ethnicity (culture) is... American. It might seem kind of weird to think of "American" as an ethnicity, but it is. And I really do identify more as American then I would as Indian or Guyanese. So in America, I match ethnically, but looking totally different racially. In India, I match racially, but am totally different ethnically. At home, I often forget that I look totally different than the white kids I hang out with. I remember one time back in high school I was having a conversation about how at lunch the school yard was fairly segregated by race, with "us white kids" on one side of the lunch area, before I realized I had lumped myself in with "us." I guess it's the product of growing up in middle class America constantly surrounded pretty heavily by white people. In India, I often forget that I looked the same as these people. It's hard to convey how weird that it, by the way, not remembering how you look to other people. When I saw Indians in India, my brain thinks "foreigners" which is closely connected to "doesn't look like me."

This was my first time really being surrounded by brown people for an extended period of time. This must be what it's like to be white in America. Which I guess I never really knew because I'm not white. I think the self-image I have of being American is what has made it so hard to identify people who look like me. Which then also feeds into the very confusing mental state of not knowing how much I really should be identifying with this culture. Regardless, I understand India so much better than I ever did before. And I understand a piece of my history so much more than I did before. I think one of the biggest takeaways is that mentally, I need to stop denying that I'm Indian when people ask me where I'm from, and rather embrace the fact that I've got a long, rich history with this country and it's people. I might not know exactly which people or where in this country specifically, but that doesn't really matter.

I grew a lot as a traveler as well. This is my first time traveling outside of the country on my own and I needed to prove to myself that I could do it. And I did. (To some extent. I still knew people in a few places here who helped me out along the way. I think Cambodia will be the real test though. I don't know anyone, don't speak the language, and don't look like the people.) I booked hostels, navigated transportation, made friends, organized my own trips, fed myself, washed clothes, (washed myself!), kept myself relatively healthy, changed money, avoided getting mugged, avoided getting arrested, exposed myself to new cultures and experiences, and became a lot more comfortable with being on my own. I was sick here. A lot. And it rained here. A lot. And I got cheated here. A lot. I could have gone without all three, but I do think they contributed to the sense of "if I can do this, I can do anything" that I'm taking with me from India.

50 Things I hadn't done a month ago:
1. Lived out of a backpack for a month straight
2. Worn the same two sets of clothes for a month straight
3. Visited a Hindu temple
4. Took part in a Hindu religious ceremony
5. Walked through the streets barefoot
6. Saw the home of Mother Teresa
7. Went to Victoria Memorial
8. Explored an Indian slum
9. Got a shave
10. Ate a cheese naan
11. Celebrated a birthday by myself
12. Taken a train for 24 hours
13. Used an Asian-style toilet
14. Stayed in a hostel
15. Made hostel friends
16. Ate a Maharaja Mac
17. Used Indian rupees
18. Purchased a foreign phone
19. Rode on the back of a motorbike
20. Visited Jama Masjid
21. Almost got arrested
22. Visited the Red Fort
23. Climbed over a barbed-wire fence. Twice.
24. Got lost in an urban jungle
25. Had the best biryani in New Delhi
26. Rode in an auto (the Indian kind)
27. Meditated in the Lotus Temple
28. Visited the Taj Mahal
29. Learned how hand-crafted rugs, marble work, and tapestries are made
30. Visited Qadian
31. Went to Bahishti Maqbara
32. Visited Hoshiarpur
33. Climbed up the White Minaret
34. Visited the Golden Temple
35. Fell asleep in the Golden Temple
36. Rode in the back of a van with a malfunctioning door
37. Saw the Attari border closing ceremony
38. Went to the premier Indian vacation spot, Goa
39. Befriended an Indian shopkeeper entrepreneur
40. Went to the land of my people (maybe), Kerala
41. Became someone's first international friend
42. Saw a Kathakali show
43. Went to Jewtown
44. Got an Ayurvedic massage
45. Took a 6-hour cab ride
46. Went to an Indian hospital
47. Stood on top of a waterfall
48. Visited the Connemara Tea Factory
49. Went on a spice walk
50. Rode an ELEPHANT

Thank you, India!

How it started

How it ended

I Woke Up In A Temple (Literally, Not Spiritually)

I arrived to chaos. It's Sunday, which means everyone is off today, which means that the Golden Temple is going to be packed, my driver warned. He wasn't kidding.

Amritsar is home to the Harmandir Sahib, commonly referred to as the Golden Temple, a Sikh Gurdwara (a Sikh temple). As per usual, I had done zero research before coming, so I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The one tidbit that I had gleaned from another traveler is that you are able to stay at the Golden Temple, which I thought would be a pretty amazing experience so I didn't book a hostel.

When I got out of the cab, it was so frenetic I didn't even know which way to go. I couldn't even tell where the entrance was (as it turns out, there are four of them so people were walking in all directions to get inside). I found a stand where people could deposit their shoes because you aren't allowed to take them inside. I took mine off and put them in my bag and walked about 10 minutes barefoot on cement, pavement, and some worn-out rugs that has been put out through the streets surrounding the temple. I finally found an entrance and was promptly stopped and scolded in Hindi. But why?! I've already removed my shoes! Through various gestures I discovered that 1) I needed to cover my head and 2) I couldn't bring my bag inside. I asked the guy where I could stay for the night and he sent a boy to take me to the place, about a 3-minute walk away just outside the entrance of the temple.

I finally found the Fountain of Youth!
Err... I mean the Golden Temple.

I put my stuff down inside and came back out to the temple, with my Muslim prayer cap on, which I soon realized made me stick out like a sore thumb because all of the men were either wearing traditional Sikh head-wear, or people who had neglected to bring their own head coverings has been given these orange bandannas.

Before you enter the temple, there's a small man-made stream you have to step through to wash your feet. Once you get inside, all of the floors are stone and marble. There's an outer courtyard surrounding a square lake. In the middle of the lake is the Golden Temple. Which definitely lives up to its name. It's a beautiful, golden, square structure with a dome in the middle. I didn't really know what Sikh gurdwaras looked like before this trip, but I've seen a lot of them now and they all share a common look with a central dome, surrounded by four smaller domes, each with even smaller domes surrounding those, in a fractal-esque way.
The first thing I noticed inside were that there were almost-naked men bathing in the pool. I take it from the signs around the place that this is called the Holy Dip and I assume is a religious act. At each corner of the courtyard are water stations. There's also a huge free kitchen called a Guru Ka Langar serving food (more on that part later).

He's holding his own head!

There are also a few stations relaying a few significant events in Sikh history. I got to one of these stations and saw a huge painting of a man holding his own cut-off head. Whoa. This man was Baba Deep Singh and as legend goes, he was fighting in a battle, got decapitated, then miraculously continued to fight and chased off his enemies (for a colloquial if not slightly vulgar retelling of this story, you can find one here).

I walked around half-way and then found a bunch of people waiting in line for something, I wasn't sure what. Much like at Kaligad in Calcutta, I figured if a bunch of people were waiting in line for something, I probably should too. Something I've learned in India is that there's literally no concept of personal space here. People were packed in line like sardines and there's a constant force on your back pushing you forward even though there's no place to go. It was incredibly hot but they had fans blowing mist on the crowd which was an incredibly welcome aspect of the experience.

Waiting in line to get inside the Golden Temple

I waited for about an hour and a half in the line and it eventually led me inside the Golden Temple. There's a footbridge connecting the outer walkway to the Golden Temple in the middle of the lake. There are fish in the lake. Cool. About 5 feet behind me, a dude threw up on the bridge. Gross. I wondered why he didn't do it in the lake but then I figured it was probably because that's supposed to be holy water so that may or may not have been an even bigger faux paus than throwing up on the bridge where a zillion people need to walk across to get inside the temple.

Bridge leading to the Golden Temple

Throughout the courtyard there's a constant sound of music and people chanting in a language I can't understand, which I assume is some sort of prayer. As we entered the temple, everyone bent down and touched the step in front of them. After the steps, I found out where that chanting was coming from. There were a handful of people playing instruments and reciting into microphones. Another couple people were being given gifts of money, food, and some sort of large cloths neatly folded. Occasionally if the gift was big enough (I assume that's the reason), the person would receive something back from the man. I along with everyone else only had a few seconds to take in this scene before being ushered out. However, once outside, you could go upstairs and look down on the whole scene for as long as you wanted. Inside of the Golden Temple it was beautifully decorated with gold and other colors, as well as some painted designs.

After spending a few minutes upstairs, I went to head out but discovered that you could actually go up to the roof too! It was a cool scene up there, though you could see much of the surroundings because the walls were too high to see over.

Not what it looks like from
this photo

As I was walking out of the temple, I saw people bending over to drink some of the water from the lake. This time around I had the good conscience to not drink the water. At the end of the walkway back to the outer path however, they handed everyone a small scoop of some sweet (and incredibly oily) food that I think is called persaud. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to eat it so I held it in my had for about 15 seconds before I saw someone else eating it and figured it was okay to do without offending the thousands of people inside the temple.

One day I dream of holding
my own concert in a gurdwara

Outside of the temple, there were these dude singing (shouting) really loudly and off-key but it was awesome to see and they had a big audience, plus there were some cool instruments.

I walked around the temple a little more then headed out to go to my next destination: the Attari border. Attari is a village in the Amritsar district and the location of a border with Pakistan. Every night there's a big ceremony where they close the gates at the border and I heard it was a sight worth seeing.

Hard to capture, but this was taken from my
seat. In the trunk.

This trip has been filled with a lot of really poor decisions but my choice of transportation to the Attari border was definitely one of the poorest. There are autos you can take for 900 rupees. Or, as a totally sketchy dude told me, I could take his shared van there and pay only 200 rupees. Seemed like a great deal to me, so I told him yes. He was leaving in 30 minutes so I killed some time and then found him again. He told me to follow him, so I did and he led me through a bunch of really sketchy back alleys and then just told me to wait. I asked him where his other passengers were and he gestured behind us at the handful of people also walking in the street who may or may not have just been random strangers who happened to be in the street. After a minute, a van pulls up (luckily those other people actually were passengers). He opens up the back of the van and there are some jerry-rigged seats where he squeezed in 5 people (there was maybe space for 2), myself included. No seat belts. Which is fine, this is India and seat belts aren't really a thing here. But the kicker, my friends, is that the back door to this van, the very same door I was sitting right next to... didn't close. It would stay down, but the latch was broken. Which means that the entire 45-minute ride, I was holding on for dear life and hoping that the driver didn't feel the need to suddenly accelerate and send me flying out the back.

Safe and sound at the Attari border

We arrived at the border in one piece, thankfully. It's about a 10-minute walk from where the buses drop you off and where you enter the border crossing area. The place was already packed with people, but luckily there's a special entrance for foreigners and VIPs. So being the VIP that I am, I got to skip the big line and went to a section with a much better view than most others had.
The venue is basically a stadium surrounding a street, The street leads to the border gate. As far as I could tell, the same setup exists on the Pakistan side.
I arrived in the stadium to a huge, nationalistic party! Everyone was so happy and cheering for India and there was this electric feeling in the air. There was loud Hindi music blaring, and then  the ladies section was invited into the street for a dance party. This went on for about 20 or 30 minutes before the actual ceremony began.

Ain't no party like and Indian border partayyyy!

To say that this ceremony was ridiculous in a total understatement. This is the most absurd official state ceremony I've ever seen in my life. I wish I had produced this video which, although satrical in nature, pretty accurately captures what happened during the 20-minute ceremony. There were lots of funny hats, high kicks, and proud Indians cheering for the country. All the while, you could hear the echo of the same happening on the Pakistani side, who had equally funny hats and high kicks. I kid you not, at one point the guards from both sides approach the gate and actually flex in front of each other.

The winner of Mr. India
is awarded a white track
suit and made to MC
this ceremony until his
death or the dissolution
of the border. It's India's
highest honor.

The ceremony is MC'd by this dude wearing a white track suit. Need I say more?

Are you staring at my plume?

When the ceremony was done, I I climbed back inside the van of death for my ride home. We were 
dropped off on the roof of a parking lot, which seemed fitting.

When I got back to Amritsar around 8:30pm I headed back to the Golden Temple to grab a meal there. What I experienced next was one of the most awe-inspiringly efficiently meal services I've ever seen. As I walked in, I was handed one-by-one a tin plate, a cup, and some silverware, and ushered into a giant hall. Everyone was seated in very neat rows. I sat cross-legged and there were people walking up and down the aisles, each with a different food item. If you wanted roti, you held out your hands and the would drop one in. If you wanted anything else, you held up your plate and then would ladle it into one of the plate's compartments. The food was again simple, but wonderful. It even included dessert. You could have as much food as you want, but you're supposed to eat everything you take. As people finish, they get up and leave, and as a whole section is cleared, some volunteers come by and mop up the section. They start seating people from one end of the room and work their way to the back of the room. Once they've filled the back, they start over at the front, which is now already empty of people, cleaned, and ready for the next batch of hungry folks. As I was taking my dishes out, one of the volunteers asked me how it was and then told me that the kitchen never closes - they do this 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Whaaaaaat?!

YUM

After exiting, I sorted my dishes into various bins and then watched in awe the procession of people who cleaned them and got the ready to be used again. For the plates, first they were banged into a bin to get the extra food off, then tossed over to a giant pot of water to be cleaned, then neatly stacked at the end.

Golden Temple at night

With a full belly, I walked around the temple a little more. The air was pleasantly warm and I decided to lie down next to the water. The stone floor was hard but I didn't mind. I was looking up at the night sky, with the temple structures scattered throughout my periphery, music and chanting happening in the background, and it was so... peaceful. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours. I woke up to an alarm I had set for myself to go get into my auto and get to the airport. I was so disoriented when I woke up, I was literally stumbling out of the temple. On my way out, I passed by hundreds of other people spending the night at the temple. Stone floor is more comfortable than I thought, I guess. I made back, gathered up my things, gave some donations to the temple hostel as well as the temple kitchen, found an auto, and made my way to the airport, headed to Goa.

No blanket. No pillow. No problem.

Qadian and Your Islam History Lesson of the Day

Ahmadiyya Gate, which reads:
"Love For All Hatred For None",
the slogan of the Ahmadiyya community

My train was only an hour late to Amritsar, which isn't bad I think. Everyone here seems to expect things to be late so no one gets mad when it actually happens. I'm headed straight to Qadian for a few days and will be back to check out Amritsar afterward. I was picked up at the platform by a missionary here who sent me with a driver to Qadian. Neither of them really spoke much English, but we were able to get by.

Here's your Islam history lesson for the day. Qadian is a really important city to people of my particular sect of Islam: Ahmadiyyat. The sect was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who was born in and lived in Qadian, so this city is basically the hometown of Ahmadiyyat. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad claimed to be a reformer of Islam; he didn't bring any new laws, only reviving what the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) had already brought to the people. Ahmadis across the world are heavily persecuted by other Muslim sects. At the heart of this persecution is that all Muslims believe that Muhammad (pbuh) is the "seal of the prophets," meaning that no prophets would come after him. Ahmadis interpret that to mean that no law-bearing prophets would come after Muhammad (pbuh). But since Ahmadis still believe in Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as a prophet, other Muslims consider this blasphemous and Ahmadis are considered by both Sunnis and Shias (the two major sects of Islam) to be non-Muslims. As a result, in Muslim countries like Pakistan, Ahmadis cannot openly practice Islam while also calling themselves Ahmadis without risking jail and/or death. That is to say, the persecution of Ahmadis is actually part of the law in these places.

Baitul Zikr mosque, Qadian

Qadian is a relatively small city tucked away in the north of India, in the state of Punjab and very close to Kashmir. Ahmadis from all over the world come to visit Qadian because of it's historical significance. I'm staying for free at the mosque's guest house here, which is conveniently a two-minute walk away from the mosque itself. I'm also being provided all of my meals and pretty much anything else I need. My room is air conditioned which is awesome because it's SO hot here (like everywhere else in India I've been).

When I got to my room I got settled and thought to myself that it's pretty amazing to be here, but I really wish my dad was here. I know Qadian is important, but beyond that, I don't really know what I should be doing here. It would have been nice to have dad to show me around and explain things.

The call to prayer happened soon thereafter to I walked over to the mosque to say prayers. When I returned, there were some people staying in the room next to mine. They looked really familiar and when I walked up to them one of them said my name and it turns out it was my old friend AC from my mosque in Philadelphia! (We used to live in Philadelphia before moving to California, so my family has a lot of ties to that community.) AC was in Qadian with his parents for a couple days. It just so happens that they were taking a trip to Hoshiarpur (another important city for Ahmadis that I had planned on seeing while I was in Qadian) so they invited me to come along with them. I was so happy to have them there as my surrogate family.

Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission in Hoshiarpur
with my friend AC

Hoshiarpur is about a 90-minute drive southeast of Qadian. It's significant because it's the place where Mirza Ghulam Ahmad went on a retreat of sorts and where he is said to have received an important revelation from God. In Hoshiarpur we saw the room where he stayed for his retreat. It's tucked away in a random street. There's a small sign adorning the entryway but other than that, there's nothing else that would belie the significance of this place to people who didn't already know. When we took pictures in front of it, the people across the street were definitely looking at us wondering what was going on. After saying some prayers there (this will be a common theme throughout my Qadian trip) we headed back. As soon as we started driving, it began to pour rain. When it was coming down the hardest, a tree fell on the road no more than 20 feet in front of us. Luckily we were able to sneak around it along with the 20 or so other felled trees in our path.

The man who was driving us turned out to be the superintendent of Jammiah, which is the Ahmadi missionary training school. He took us to visit the school, and it was there that I found out that the head of my local mosque in LA had actually funded the building of this school! A few people earlier in the day had mentioned his name and I thought nothing of it, but now I totally get it. He's kind of a big deal here. He has built a mosque here as well so basically all of the Ahmadis here know who he is. Afterward, the superintendent took us to his house and gave us tea and cookies. It was incredibly generous of him to spend the day showing us around.

Back at the guest house, I had dinner with AC's family and then AC took me around the mosque to show me all of the historically significant things. He knows a LOT. He's been here a few times but he's also an incredibly devout Ahmadi. I guess I won't be so lost here after all.