A Year of Antipodal Observations
đ posted Aug 14, 2025 by Josh Erbđ˘ 2913 words
đˇ #life #travel #india #writing
Ages ago, in 2008, I took a series of planes from Chicago, Illinois to Paris, France. On the final leg of the trip, a British woman sitting next to me read a book called A Year in the Merde and chuckled to herself while I struggled not to panic about the year ahead.
This time last year, my small family and I were on a plane pointed in the direction of Mumbai. We ultimately landed in the early hours of August 16, 2024. We arrived exhausted. All of us pushed to our personal limits. Our dog Myron had been obstinate and refused to pee during the layover in Amsterdam, so when we finally made it through customs and stepped out of the airport it was the first time he had gone since we left DC +26 hours earlier. Delirious and slightly dissociating, my wife and speculated about canine kidney infections as we wrestled our toddler into a car seat that couldn't be properly anchored into the van that picked us up because we couldn't figure out how to tighten the unfamiliar seatbelt design.
These two moments run in interesting parallels in my mind. When I was younger, trapped in a small town and fixated on making it to the world beyond rural Illinois, I never would have expected the winding course my life would take. Leaving Illinois to live as an exchange student was a leap of faith, a step into an unknown and daunting world. Leaving DC was very much the same, only I had accumulated a vast array of experiences and responsibilities in the time between those two flight plans. The opportunities felt the similar, but this risks felt so much higher.
Inexplicably, but inevitably, a year has passed since we first stepped off that plane and into India. Even more surprising, we have found our way into a rhythm of life here.
To mark the year gone by, I want to spend some time articulating the experience so far and cataloging the current state of my impressions. As a result, this is quite a long and winding post. Hope you don't mind, but if you do, don't worry you can close the tab and I'll have some shorter posts up for you later this month or early next.
Sense of Place
India is a country of extremes and contradictions. I'm not the first to say it, but every day of our time here affirms and complicates this understanding.
Mumbai, in my limited experience, is a good entry point for a Westerner into India. It is still a megacity and it still exists within the system of Indian culture and expectations. Undeniably, it is chaotic and overwhelming when you first encounter it. But it is also cosmopolitan enough that you usually aren't the first American that people have seen. You are not by default an object of curiosity when you move through it.
The city is also connected to global economic forces in a way that grant you access to familiar, Western comforts if you want to seek them out, e.g. H&M, pizza, Tim Horton's, KFC, Coldplay, &c. That being said, quotidian life can still challenging in novel ways. It is not, generally, a "walkable" city in the same sense I might use the term â though people are constantly walking everywhere in it. We've traveled a modest amount within Indian, trips deeper into our state (Maharashtra) and down south (Goa & Kerala), and these trips have affirmed this sense that Mumbai sits almost as an intermediate point on a spectrum with the U.S.A. and India on either end.
I have also been struck, during this past year, by the stark contrast between my past experience as a youth exchange student and living abroad as a member of a U.S. Foreign Service household. Youth exchanges, especially ones organized like the Rotary International Youth Exchange, are designed very explicitly to force you into continuous, immersive contact with a non-native culture. Whereas the Foreign Service stations you abroad to serve a particular function of the U.S. Federal Government. The result is, at least for this initial post, that we are relatively insulated from deeper contact with Indian culture. Contact with it, outside of some of our basic needs and functions, is entirely optional. In fact, due to the nature of the job, at certain points accommodations are made for our American expectations[1] and comfort. As a result, after a year of living here I have not learned very much Hindi or Marathi or gotten any better at making sure I'm not accepting things with my left hand or pointing with my finger.
Of course some of this is partly the result of colonial legacy, I haven't had to learn or use much Hindi or Marathi because English is so commonly understood and spoken â even if somewhat begrudgingly. Devanagari has a unique numeral system, but license plates and price tags are all in the Arabic numerals I'm familiar with. After I became more familiar with the Devanagari writing system, I discovered that most of the words I encounter when I'm out and about in the city â typically in commercial areas â are transcribed English words or brand names (ref. Pret Ă Manger).
The other unmistakable variable in this equation is the ubiquity of technology, which has developed substantially since I was 18 years old. Ride hailing apps, like Uber and Ola, mean I don't have to flag down or haggle with cab drivers that might try to mark up the fare when they see my complexion. India has an abundance of delivery services, so if I want food or groceries or fresh milk set at my doorstep in the morning, all I have to do is open an app and tap a button. Even services that aren't well established online have a WhatsApp number that I can message and ask to send me something, whether its a subscription or a printed copy of a manuscript.
In India, if you have the money, there is an entire army of gig workers or jobbers at the ready to meet your every whim. Often times within minutes. There is so little friction. So little need to leave the house and interact with the world outside. And then when I do, any risks of misunderstanding or discomfort can be addressed beforehand. Everything is easier, then, but the opportunities to experience, learn, or grow all diminish as a result.
Of course, I might be oversimplifying to a degree. One of the great challenges of this past years has been learning to accept that I might never be comfortable with certain aspects about our time here.
First, as a friend here said a few months after arrival, living in India on an American salary (or savings) is "cosplaying as rich." And this is a thought I keep coming back to. By mere virtue of our presence and its context, we are near the top of a large social and economic pyramid. We live a few kilometers away from Dharavi, but we can also take a 15 minute Uber ride and eat sushi next to a Bollywood celebrity. It's a weird bundle of contradictions, and it's hard not to wallow in the knowledge that my mere presence legitimizes or enforces this social disparity that I benefit from.
It's also something that constantly creeps into the mundane moments of life here. When our apartment building's water reserves run low for whatever reason, they hook up a water tanker truck to the system to make sure supply can keep up with the demand. You can always tell when this happens because water from the faucets will suddenly have a very distinct fungal or metallic smell. Sometimes I detect the smell when I am under the shower. I usually sigh and finish up a bit faster. But this impulse is inevitably followed by the knowledge that a large portion of the population here has limited access to clean water, and a very large portion of them only have access through this same system of water tankers that come to their residential areas once a week.
Second, there is the environment, or nature and all its consequences. We're just coming out of our first full monsoon season here. I've learned that during the long runs of gray, rainy conditions, if I'm not careful I develop whatever the monsoon version of seasonal affective disorder is. I mope around, I can see no good in anything, I think that maybe it would be better for us all if the world just suddenly ended. I have a similar reaction in the winter months when pollution descends on the city and sits heavy.[2]
I won't dwell too long on these points. But one final thing worth noting is that since we've been here we can't help but notice that we are constantly sick. Even more than when my son first started daycare in DC. I think this is partly just a feature of living in such a densely populated city. I can't leave the house without coming into contact with hundreds of people. If I were a 19th century doctor, I would probably just chalk it up to my delicate Western constitution.
Despite these things, there are some aspects of life where a newfound sense of comfort has genuinely surprised me. For one thing, while the incessant presence of other people in very large numbers was initially incredibly jarring, it now feels fairly commonplace. The apartment complex we live in probably has twice as many people in it as the town I spent most of my childhood in, and that doesn't give me much pause anymore. Auto-rickshaw rides which felt like a dangerous novelty are now just a cheap and fast way to get anywhere that's 10 to 15 minutes away. I've even learned to lean into the expectations around high touch customer service. When I'm at a shop and someone hovers and asks questions, I tell them what I'm looking for and am more open to their suggestions. I have the sense that going back home I will feel like the staff at grocery, book, or apparel stores are ignoring me.
At this point in this meandering and complicated experience, there are also things that I have truly come to appreciate. A fresh dosa with chutney and sambar for breakfast. A well made cold coffee. A good vada pav with chutney and green pepper. I also love that Mumbai is a city with two distinct personalities, the one you see during the day and the more lively one you only see if you're out and about after dark.
At the end of all this, I would also be doing a disservice if I didn't mention the impression that India as a concept makes on you when you're able to see it from more than one angle. India as a country is improbable, it almost beggars belief. When you cross state lines in India you encounter different languages, writing systems, cuisines, political ideologies, and on and on. I hadn't realized just how striking this was until we traveled down to Kerala and everything was written in Malayalam and I read that the ruling political party was CPI(M). In many ways, India makes more sense as a federation of unique, independent nations rather than a single country made up of states. Nevertheless, there's no mistaking the unified national identity you find wherever you go. I know I have a tendency to over embellish, but in some ways I think it's a geopolitical miracle that the national body is able to cohere this way.
Sense of Purpose
Turning from observation to introspection, the move to India also coincided with my first break from the consulting and tech industry in more than a decade. If you follow this blog, you know that I've been taking this opportunity to focus more earnestly on my writing practice with the goal of publishing when the opportunity is presented.
Results on this front have been mixed. I've only managed to publish two pieces and neither of them were the fiction I've been focusing the majority of my efforts on. Why is this? For one thing, I overestimated the speed with which fiction publishing moves. In many ways, you have to accept that when you write something, regardless of how urgent or timely it feels, if it is published it will not be read by a broader audience for at least four to five months, and this seems to be the best case scenario for an established writer, let alone an unknown one.
The market for fiction is also so saturated with stories and ambitious voices and so dismally funded, that having no recognizable bylines or any dependable connections means it's hard to stand out in the submission pile. I've chipped away at these shortcomings in various ways over the year. But I begrudgingly admit that it's not something you can build over night. I worry sometimes that I've spent too much of my career high on the fumes of the tech industry's speed and immediate gratification.
At the end of the day, I am writing these stories primarily for the joy of creating. I am a writer and a novelist, though I may never have the ISBNs to prove it. As Allen Ginsberg would say, "All these books are published in heaven." Still a comforting thought for those of us who toil away in obscurity.
Despite the length and depth of the previous section on India, one thing I have learned this past year is that living outside your home country and culture helps give you the perspective necessary to scrutinize it. With both my manuscripts, but particularly my second one, I've felt the space to breathe, analyze, and diagnose things about my American setting and characters which had previously eluded me. Maybe it's perspective, or maybe it's the unique luxury of time and focus that present circumstances have allowed.
Finally, and hopefully succinctly because writing about writing too often becomes an ouroboric subject, self-sustaining and infinite, when I was working a full time job the most difficult thing about writing fiction was finding the time in between all of the life that was constantly happening. Now that I have time, on the other hand, I find that the most difficult thing is the immense loneliness and self-doubt that are inherent in large uncertain projects. I'm inventing people, worlds, and situations that may never amount to more than a little lie I've scribbled down for my own entertainment.
At the end of the day, I can't deny that this past year has been an incredible gift. I don't take it for granted by any means. I know that many writers have achieved far more with far less than this. At this point, I have a few final goals I'd like to finish up with my in progress fiction, but, barring any big breaks or unexpected query responses, in all likelihood I will be rejoining the more structured workforce in the next few months.
On the Horizon
When I first moved to DC way back in 2014, I told my girlfriend at the time that I would tolerate living there for maybe three years at most. I was convinced that Chicago had more and better things to offer. We proceeded to live in DC for a decade, adopt a dog, get married, and have a son. You could say that planning out the future is not necessarily a strong suit of mine.
But the Foreign Service is a massive socially organizing machine, and it proactively splits your life up into discrete, ready-made chunks. We've already been assigned our next post. So even though we still have fourteen more months left in Mumbai, I know that we'll be in Mexico City by Spring of 2027. I'm ambivalent about having a new, next place already in view. In some sense it dilutes the immediacy of our remaining time in India. Nurtures the temptation to ignore what's in front of us and to fantasize about what's to come. But I can say that I'm glad to know that we'll eventually be back in the Western Hemisphere and it won't be so hard to coordinate phone calls with family or plan visits back to the U.S.
Of course, the skeptic in me is constantly wary of any sort of certainty about the future. If you had asked me in 2008 or early 2024 where I would be in one year, my answers would have been laughably inaccurate.[3]
I will never get over the fact that our Mumbai apartment has a garbage disposal. An object which I have only ever understood or experienced within the American context, and which my Polish in-laws still consider to be an insane and impractical appliance.
I wrote more about this over in AQ-AĂŻe and Lost in the Haze.
I won't even mention 2019, the most extreme example of this tendency.
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