Homeward

From Kanyakumari, it would be a 3 hour train ride north to the city of Trivandrum. From Trivandrum I would catch a flight to Kolkata, where my travels have begun three months before. I arrived in Kolkata at about 8:00pm and had a 6:00am flight the next morning so there wasn't much time to do anything. I checked into my room in Kolkata and sorted through the things in my backpack. I made a pile that consisted of all of my clothes, (except the ones I was wearing) my towel, travel sheet and heavy jacket. These were things I no longer needed.I put these items in a garbage bag and went out into the night. I could have just given them to one of the many street families I saw outside my hotel but for some reason I felt compelled to return to the railway station that I did my volunteer medical work at back in January. I arrived at the station and quickly found a family living under one of the platforms. I approached them with my hefty bag of clothes and handed the clothes out to the woman who appeared to be the mother of the family. This time I didn't think about what the people who I gave the clothes to would do with them because I knew I had no control over that. And I didn't think about how many more people there were that needed clothes or how bad their lives were. I didn't think about the food they didn't have to eat or the wounds they had that needed bandaging. I didn't think about the people lined up outside the door at Mother Teresa's each morning when we would show up and I definitely didn't think about those kids. Or the little girl and her sister. In a few hours I would step onto a plane that would take me from their world to mine and across much more than just an ocean along the way.I knew it would take much more than the 24 hours of flying I had ahead of me to process all of the things I had obtained and lost while in India. The exposure to a new culture, the confrontation with extreme poverty, the weight loss of 25 pounds and the realization that maybe there aren't answers to every question.As I handed out the last of the clothing to the mother of the street family, I took a quick look at the tag on one of my shirts so I could remember the size of it for when I bought a new one back home. And there, right below the "XL" were the words, "Made In India". I guess that Karma thing is right, what goes around does come around.