India is an in-your-face kind of place. The subcontinent is home to over one billion people, so you’re physically around more people per square foot than you’ve probably ever been before. Indians practice a handful of different major religions and speak over twenty languages, so to say India is diverse and has a lot to offer is a gross understatement. It’s easily the most stimulating and at times overwhelming places I’ve ever been. It’s so fundamentally different from everything I’d ever known to be true; every conception I formed about the world that helped me organize my experiences was turned completely upside down in India.

So instead of holding on so tightly to my American-ness, I forced myself to just give in to India’s whims. I let myself be disoriented, confused and uncomfortable. But eventually the disorientation, confusion and discomfort went away with time and adjustment; it felt more familiar and welcoming. I didn’t have to be Indian, convert to another religion or speak Kannada or Tamil to feel more at home in India—I just found solace in the little things every day that made me feel less like a foreigner. They helped me to create some order in an otherwise chaotic environment. There were a lot of aspects of Indian culture that eventually grew on me, and I was surprised that I actually missed a lot of these little things after I left.

Afternoon tea

In so many cultures tea isn’t just a hot drink—it’s an event. In India, it’s a time of day. The mid-to-late afternoon is reserved for slowing down, taking a break, catching up with friends and family and drinking some masala chai. Just as an aside: Indian tea is so much sweeter than the tea we’re accustomed to here. It’s almost like hot, sugary milk. It was often served in a little metal cup that wasn’t much bigger than a double shot glass, and you could only really hold the thin rim of the cup without scalding your hands on the scorching metal. And no matter how many times I politely refused tea, I was always offered some.

I don’t even like tea—and I like Indian tea even less—but the actual culture surrounding tea drinking was something intriguing. In every way, it completely opposes the Western workaholic culture of efficiency, multitasking and productivity. The idea of just stopping midway through the day, dropping everything and drinking tea is perhaps one of the least appealing ideas I could think of, and honestly, few Americans I think would truly welcome the custom. We always say we want to relax more, but our culture is so fast-paced and multitask-oriented that it’s almost impossible to just sit and take a break.Maybe it was the incessant heat or maybe it was jetlag, but I eventually gave into the slower paced lifestyle. Indian culture isn’t focused as much on how to fit as many activities into one day, but more about making each activity and interaction with others meaningful. Afternoon tea allowed time to sit and appreciate each other’s company; we’d talk about each other’s days, tell stories and listen to others’ stories, laugh and relax. I grew to savor these moments at our internship sites when we would all come together for tea after a long day in the heat.

The noise

India is always loud; and I never realized I’d miss it until I came home. New York is the one they call, “the city that never sleeps”, but I’m pretty convinced India’s the country that never sleeps. Throughout my month abroad we were up at all sorts of weird hours of the day for travel, and without fail at any given hour of the day, a substantial amount of activity was going on. And with all that activity was endless noise. The call to prayer blared through the city at all hours of the day, including at 3am. Cars, motorcycles and rickshaws zoomed through the streets early in the morning and late into the night. I heard a pig being slaughtered at the crack of dawn and dogs fighting in the streets at night. I couldn’t get over the fact that something always seemed to be going on at all hours of the day—and I couldn’t wait to get back to the quiet at home. But coming back to America, everything seems so unnecessarily, eerily quiet; we always seem to be tucked away in our own homes, minding our own business. It felt lonely and odd when I first came back, and I found myself craving the lively, comforting noises of urban India.

The call to prayer

Loud, muffled chanting through a loudspeaker across the city was the first thing I heard when I stepped off the bus with my luggage at 5am. I later learned that this was a call to prayer, something many religions have (I’m pretty sure this one was coming from a mosque down the street). It happened not once a day, but several times, and often in the middle of the night. At any hour of the day or night, the call to prayer invites anyone and everyone to pray. It was certainly a little strange and somewhat annoying for the first week to be woken in the middle of the night with religious chanting. But after a month of living with it, it was weird to think that I’d be coming home to a place without the call to prayer. The last few nights in India I actually got a little sad thinking about not hearing the call to prayer everyday. It had become such a part of my daily life. There was a whole community of people who all followed this call to prayer, and even though I wasn’t one of them, it reminded me that I was part of something, that I wasn’t alone. It was reliable, it was bigger than myself, and oddly enough, it made me feel welcome.

Roofs

Some of the best parts of my experience were getting away from the sometimes-stifling noise of daily life in India. Our building in in the city had roof access all the time and so did several other places we frequented, so I spent a lot of time on roofs. I can’t think of the last time I spent time on a roof in America, but it became such a mundane activity when I was in India. There was nothing more peaceful than hanging out on top of the roof with nothing to do but think, especially at night. There wasn’t usually a whole lot to see from the roof—just a very small temple across the street, the occasional motorcyclist or stray dog and a few bats flying overhead. But it wasn’t really about the view; being up and away from the busyness of the streets put me in a different headspace. The roof was a special, meditative, almost sacred place. When I became incredibly overwhelmed with the daily challenges of being abroad, I found peace on the roof.

When you stay somewhere long enough, it can start to feel like home, but not in the sense that it actually resembles home in any way. We have a much stronger ability to adapt than that for which we give ourselves credit. The world is so much bigger than my preconceived, westernized notions can explain. Sometimes I don’t have any way of making sense of things that are so vastly different from my own reality, but I am so grateful I didn’t let that confine my experiences. I never imagined I would actually miss so many of these little idiosyncrasies.

But we’re all people on this planet—we eat, we believe in stuff, we sing, we dance, we buy stuff, we watch films and TV, we play games and sports, we learn, we make friends, we have families. Finding the common ground in the small stuff demonstrates how we’re not really that different.