Author: pschare2

The flight that I took to India landed in Delhi at around 8am, and for some unthought reason I had booked a connecting flight to Lucknow at 7pm. There would seem to be only a few situations where an eleven-hour layover is advisable, mine that day not being among them. When I stepped off a moving walkway near a decisive turn in the long unembellished arrival hallway, I was stopped by a man with a badge who asked for my passport and ticket. He thumbed from one to the other before handing both to someone standing behind a desk near the wall. This was a random COVID screening: I got in line. The passengers ahead of me one by one told their unwritten details to a man copying it down in black ink, organized rows filling up one below another in a register book. Immediately I felt the weight of this book’s thin ruled paper and the faint font of its headings. A smattering of the register books I had seen my name appear in the last time I was in India appeared in my mind: these had been authored and kept by security guards and hotel receptionists and schoolteachers. 

They told me I would get the result of my PCR test in five hours. Briefly carried by the momentum of getting through the final steps of arrival, I passed immigration and found my checked bag at the carousel, making my way through customs before realizing that I didn’t have a downloaded or printed copy of my booking confirmation for the second flight. I stood in what felt like a very narrow hallway between the secure area of the airport and the exit doors. My phone was still on airplane mode and I didn’t see any free Wi-Fi networks. I sat for almost an hour with a group of passengers who had missed their connecting flight: a woman with a loudspeaker was calling their names one by one. I eventually decided to make my way into the city by metro and go to the hotel I had stayed in the last time I was in Delhi: I could use their Wi-Fi and maybe reserve a room for a few hours to nap and shower. Following signs to the metro, I descended into the station and waited in line for a ticket. Once I found my way onto an inbound train, I stood near a door and held on to a support bar. Someone approached me and smiled cautiously as she peeled a cloth headrest cover off the back of my sweater: I saw the name of the airline on it and I realized I must have had this thing hanging off my back for the past two or three hours. Cringing, I thanked her and shook my head, feeling stupid. I eventually connected to a network at one of the metro stations and, after downloading my booking confirmation, changed my mind about the hotel and went back to the airport to wait there.

At the moment that this stranger peeled the headrest cover off my sweater I felt particularly lost and unprepared. I think it struck me then in some incipient way, and even more so now when I reflect on it, that solo travel is always some kind of a fiction, that you are of course always traveling with other people, even if you don’t know them. That maybe my feeling of being lost had more to do with a misperception that I needed to get through this long travel day on my own. This fiction of being required (or even able) to do things “on your own” of course being something that is culturally informed. The whole experience feels in retrospect like a useful metaphor in some way, that we carry around these markers without knowing they’re attached to us, that it takes someone else to let us know what we’re tagged with. Our attention is necessarily drawn to the explicit registrations of our most recognizable markers, our names in books and on tickets and in passports, but there is a whole simultaneous realm of these markers that we might not even notice unless someone lets us know.

Hello from Lucknow, capital city of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (literally “the Northern Region”). My name is Peter. I am currently a M.A. student in Notre Dame’s Italian Studies program, and I have come to Lucknow to study Persian, a language used for administration and poetry in courts across the subcontinent at least as early as the eleventh century CE. I am interested in literary translations between Persian and Italian as well as portrayals of Sikandar/Alessandro (Alexander the Great) in South Asian and Italian literature. I intended to complete this post a week before my language program began, and I began writing it then, but I have regrettably ended up completing it at the close of my first full week of language classes. I have edited the tenses of material from earlier drafts to avoid confusion.

As my travel to India approached, I felt quite unprepared. Most prominent was the unresolved question of my visa (I shipped my passport to the consulate nine weeks before my program started and received it back, stamped with a visa, three days before I left the country). It had furthermore been a long time since I had practiced my Hindi/Urdu. And it felt difficult to reflect very deeply on the approaching language program amid a muddle of those matters that always turn out to be more absorbing than they first seem (moving out of my apartment, storing my stuff, visiting family and friends in different cities, booking the plane tickets I couldn’t buy until I was sure the visa would arrive, etc).

On top of that, I wasn’t sure exactly what kind of concrete things I would find on the other side of the funding abstract I had made about my summer language program. I knew the basics, that I am learning Persian in order to better read the juxtaposition of Italian and Persian literature as it becomes visible in specific translations. But as for what exactly that means, and to what extent it is convincing, things are a little less than sure. As I continue to think through this question after a full week of the program, I have a better sense of possible threads, including this whole notion of looking at literary representations of Alexander on the two far sides of his once-empire. But this is hardly satisfying, and coherence awaits.  

And then there is the question of how this study of Persian relates to the place that I am going. Few people in Lucknow speak Persian. It is not a language that will get you very far in any of those small and consequential interactions with strangers that city life always requires. I must admit that I was somewhat embarrassingly drawn to this evident separation of the language from the place, this necessity of engaging with an unfamiliar vernacular which is nonetheless not the object of study per se. If it poses a separation between what one studies and the environment one finds oneself outside of the classroom, this program perhaps makes clear a separation that was always there to begin with. That is, the question of how exactly the study in the classroom relates to the world around it is perhaps always worth asking.