The Intangible Jewel of the East

Shopping! For a teeny-bopping tween nothing could be more appealing, especially if that preteen was me: an only child dragged halfway across the world to India. Sure some would react fanatically to my trip in the same manner as my over-zealous social studies teacher, believing it to be a ‘wonderful’, ‘character-building’ experience, considering me to be ‘unbelievably lucky’ to have the ‘life-changing opportunity’ to travel to this ‘jewel’ of the East. But I didn’t feel all that ‘fortunate’. As far as I was concerned, I was dragged into a significantly different time zone, full of staring family members, honking horns, and strange holes-in-the-ground which they wanted me to believe were toilets.
In short, nothing excited me more than my cousin taking me away from the trapping home of mosquito nets and curry spices, and out into the modern world of a shiny, clean, standardly priced Western shopping mall. As we hustled through the bustling dirt stricken streets, I was lost in my own world of blue jeans and air conditioning. Yet all of a sudden a hand jerked me out of my American reverie. Startled, I yelped out in pain of the grip, as I turned around to stare into the bulging eyes of a frail little girl. She had latched onto me as a leech! She kept squealing out indiscernible words in my face as I tried to pull away from her surprising clamp. I began to panic. I had no idea what she was saying, but her wide, wet eyes were shockingly more assertive than I thought even possible for a child of her young years. Yet her dirty face and tattered skirt could only mean one thing: money, or the lack thereof, had made her fearless.
I desperately turned to my cousin, who had made her way back to me and was now barking back commands to my bulging eyed pauper. I was then torn in the middle of, what I now to see as, an eternal conflict. Society, the mall, the glamour, my material joy, tugging me on my right shoulder; while poverty, desperation, and shear hopelessness yanked me on my left. Looking back, I now understand that that begging girl was really hanging on for her dear life, in the truest and plainest form of the words.
Finally the equilibrium broke, and my cousin finally won over, scolding the girl for ‘stepping out of her boundaries’. Then we once again we were off, leaving the girl trailing away in the distance to find another to cling onto. Yet as we trekked on, and as I gently applied hand sanitizer to my slightly reddened wrist, I could not get out of my new reverie, this time not that of a teeny-bopper, but of a global thinker. From my new perspective, those Western blue jeans weren’t so important, and the changing rooms weren’t so alluring. In the end, my fanatical social studies teacher was right after all, my trip to India was to be an ‘unbelievable character building experience’, for after that, I have never looked at the mall, a handshake, or a beggar the same way again.