As a foreigner, I was followed in the streets and hassled until the moment I got back on our bus. I felt helpless as I tried to get away from women begging with their babies, from the never-ending crush of people that included the old, the sick, and innumerable children. It was heartbreaking, but it also made me frightened and even angry at times when peddlers wouldn't take no for an answer. Extreme contrasts of wealth and poverty have existed for centuries here, but they are still startling — even mind-boggling — to visitors.
In Delhi, with some others from the yoga group, I walked into a store and met a Sikh, Fateh Birdi, who described himself as a healer. A round, bearded man with a perpetual smile, Fateh uses hammered-metal bowls and a mallet to determine where his patients' chakras — centers of energy — are blocked.
Back home I would have deemed him crazy. But something kept me from walking out. I spent hours that day in Fateh's little shop, drinking tea and talking with him. He offered astonishingly accurate analyses of my past and current relationships, and did the same for my companions. He then placed one of his metal bowls on my head, my solar plexus just below the sternum, and on my stomach. He used the mallet to make the bowl sing and vibrate. It was like being tickled. When I stood up, I felt like I'd had a two-hour massage. He never asked for money; at one point he told me he already feels rich.
On my last day in India, I went to see Mahatma Gandhi's memorial. Others advised me against it; they thought it was unsafe to go alone and warned me that "there was nothing to see." But the simplicity of the place turned out to be the very point.
I found a rickshaw driver who brought me to Raj Ghat, where Gandhi was cremated in 1948 on a river bank in Delhi. I wandered across the flat grassy field that led me to the plain black stone.
I sat down and a breeze picked up. I felt myself internalizing everything I'd seen and felt in India. Until this trip, I had always thought of yoga as exercise and its philosophy as tangential to my busy city life. Now I was beginning to see it as the foundation for a simple, compassionate and joyful existence.
I vowed to maintain my yoga and meditation practice after returning home. I could see what a difference it made in keeping me calm, present, and paying attention to the world around me. There is no better souvenir than that.