Returning from India, the brain is a bit befuddled, a bit of soul-lag, a bit of weirdness: the cab I caught this morning driven by a Sikh man and yet it was a yellow cab, not an Ambassador car, with a working meter. Weird. So there are some adjustments going on. I am, however, also beginning the teaching semester, half-a-brain down and half-a-soul still in transit across the ocean. I'm telling you, we need to go back to ships. Jet travel is great but it messes with the balance of the universe too much.
In this half-baked light, I note simply that in one class I have a student named Aarthi and in the other a student named Pooja. Both names describe different forms of worship. This strikes me as balanced, from the doubled vowels to the visions of lamps and ghee and offerings along the Ganges each evokes. Not the people necessarily, but their listing on my course roster. Worship itself moving among us, elbowing Old Testament figures and Korean emperors for space on my class lists. Maybe I've been reading too much magical realism lately, but it makes me happy to witness this conjunction.
Welcome to the new semester.
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