A Look Back - Molly Bracken

As we came to our final days in India I was still not entirely sure what side of the road you were actually meant to drive on. I’ve never been to a city with such an amazing spirit, even to take a taxi down the road was an adventure in itself. Before I went to India the words poverty and sadness would come to mind when I thought about the place but after living there for three weeks my whole perspective has changed, now I would think colour, fun and freedom.

It’s funny when you live there for that long there are things that you learn to take in your stride, things that shocked us when we arrived. These ranging from keeping all arms and legs inside the tuk tuk (the open-doored three wheeler taxis) when driving up the wrong side of the road into oncoming traffic, to the little children that would come up to you and hold your hand on the streets and beg you for some money for food. Things like this became normal to us.

If I had to describe India in one word it would be ‘contrast’. Driving through the streets you would see the most amazing five star hotels on one side of the road and shantytowns on the other. There is no in between, no happy medium between poverty and wealth and throughout this holiday I think that we have experienced both of these extremes. We stayed on mats on the floor in Sealdah, we slept on wooden tables which we shared with the cockroaches and mosquitoes of Diamond Harbour we had double beds and round the clock room service in the Mayfair in Puri and then back to Sealdah on an overnight train with fifty beds to a cabin and at least two mice, that we knew about.

I remember the first day, we went to a market down the road from the school and walking down that road I felt so scared. There were so many people all around us so much noise so much going on but by the last day I had never felt so safe in a different country as I did there. On one of the first nights we managed to find a stall that sold Cadburys chocolate and we would go on regular visits at nighttime when we were sick of rice and dal, but it was so nice to walk down the street with so much happening and feel like you were perfectly safe.

There wasn’t one moment of the trip that I felt as if I wanted to be home instead of where I was and there is not one minute of it that I would take back. The fun, the fights, the kids, the food, the toilets!! It was definitely a life changing experience and I could see myself back there in a few years time.