Jeb woke in the middle of the night asking to crawl into my bed. In the morning I wondered what woke him. He told me that he had a nightmare about a cobra snake that was chasing both of us. With a smirk he said, “you were crying and screaming, Mom…but I wasn’t.”
“Oh, really…” I smiled too. “Do you remember the story I told you of my encounter with a cobra snake in India?”
He doesn’t, so I proceed to recount my reptilian initiation into the land of saints and sadhus while Jeb sips his smoothie.
I tell him how I’d been traveling in India alone and taken a Trekker to Rishikesh. As soon as the driver stopped to let passengers out, I felt a nudge on my arm. I looked down to see a basket pressing into me and inside was a snake slowly moving beneath coins and bills. A woman was holding the basket and she bumped it into my arm again, further agitating the snake as she hissed at me, “Cobra!” All of the Indians in the Trekker tossed coins in her basket and I did as well.
Jeb liked the story. Though he went on to discuss the potentials of having a cobra as a pet – once it was trained, of course.
Without realizing it, I was recounting my snake tale to Jeb while wearing the shirt I’d had tailor-made in Mussoorie on that very trip. I had spent 8 days in that little-known hill station before heading for Rishikesh. I’d walked for miles in Mussoorie, exploring the narrow streets that led up and down rolling terrain – the foothills of the Himalayas.
After dropping Jeb at school, my shirt and I walked the outer rim of Crater Hill. The sky was overcast and the winds whipped off the ocean streaming up the asphalt corridor that leads to the hilltop. The gusts, the chill, the shirt, the hills. India was in the air.
India still shapes me, even though I left that land nine years ago. There, I was lost, found, abandoned and embraced. Here, that place still bears gifts to me: my son, a lover, stories, saints.
India mysteriously weaves through my life. Challenging me to be stronger. Calling me to trust more deeply. Asking me to love more truly. I may never return there but I feel it in the wind. Sense its essence in the fabric of my shirt.
