'I find myself stained, breathless, renewed '

As part of an ongoing series, we bring you stories of young Indian Americans who came looking for the Real India and found their real selves instead. Rucha Desai recounts his trip to India.

Rucha Desai works for US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand as a constituent liaison dealing with housing, health care, social security, 9/11 issues as well as coordinating outreach to South Asian communities.

She graduated with honors from Fordham University with a degree in international studies and French.

Desai, who grew up in New Jersey wrote in her prize-winning high school entry for the Cultural Center of India in Ohio, is passionate about writing and dance and says the latter has brought her closer to her roots.

The Bharat Yatra gave her more opportunities to acquaint herself with Indian culture: 

Rajasthan is an illusion. The landscape is one seamless painting, the brushstrokes relentless, converging in the horizon in an unexpected explosion of saris, desert and camels. When I look back on my time in Rajasthan, I can no longer specify one experience, one event, one moment; I surrender to a frieze of images, all soaked in the deep dyes indigenous to the state.

This summer, as I traversed Rajasthan on my yatra, I discovered that art is alive. In fact, I found art forms the very foundation of the state, of the delusions in which we immersed ourselves as part of the Rajasthani fabric.

As we explored the alleys and marketplaces of bustling cities like Jaipur, or the living forts and temples in Jaisalmer, I realised every inch of space was a work of art.

The mundane was constantly recreated as something extraordinary and distinguished. Stories were carved into walls, ideals sewn into saris, legacies painted onto glass windows. Even the starving women on the street seem to exude some sort of vitality, their cheeks sunken, but their eyes bright.

We met a potter on the first afternoon in Mandawa. He was emaciated, except for a bit of flesh in his upper arms; his dark brown feet had cracked and formed a thick exoskeleton of protection.

His translucent skin and crackly voice were testament to his age. Yet, as we surrounded him with our sweating bodies and an air of slight skepticism, derived from an artless reality, we saw his steady hands belie any perception of age or frailty.

With unexpected strength, he delicately crafted a shapeless lump of earth into a pot, a coin holder, a teacup and a diya. He touched the clay with finesse, with expertise, with an intimacy cultivated over years of working with the same earth, which fell comfortably into his enchanting embrace.

In Bikaner, I was once again held captive by the power of art, of creation and revolution. In a reinvention of the notion of performance, a 13-year-old local girl danced on bottles, on swords, on broken glass.

She balanced multiple flaming pots on her head as she twirled, dizzying us as we watched the fire lick and dance in the shadows, battling thousands of shattered rays of light bouncing off her mirrored dress. I sat in a trance, partly in pain, partly in awe. She simultaneously radiated heat, color, speed, rendering the audience inebriated.

This was a transformative experience. It was beyond anything I had conceived for a service-learning trip in India. I not only activated my mind in thinking of ways in which development can be fostered in India but also about how much of local initiatives are bringing up the country. 

I have become cognizant of my own hands and feet since my return. I met so many wholly dependent on their ability to sculpt reality, to conflate truth and myth.

I realise I have allowed myself to fall into a paralysis for the last 22 years; I have never used my hands or feet for creation or for transformation. I have never needed to do anything with my hands, especially, and have thus never cultivated an intimacy with any of my tactile sensibilities.

In Rajasthan, I developed a renewed interest in tangibility, especially in the gift to fashion and refashion this tangibility.

Like one of the vacuous, barren walls, stones, fabrics transformed into a colorful narrative, I now find myself stained, breathless, renewed.

I left Rajasthan with a sense of pride, wonder and ownership for the place (and India at large) forming the basis of my hyphenated identity