Departure, travel, and arrival

Even before setting off to return to India, my mood was distinct from the first journey's excited anticipation.  I was asked repeatedly, "Are you excited to return?  Are you ready?"  A year and a half ago, I would have quickly replied, "Yes!  I am so ready!"  At that point, perhaps who I was then was, indeed, ready.  This time my reply to the question that had been asked and answered before was much more measured.  "Are you excited to return?" Yes and no.  Yes, new adventures await and new friends and teachers are to be met.  No, I am ready to settle down somewhere for longer than a while, rent an apartment, develop common friendships and enjoy the company of my peers.  "Are you ready?"  "Well," I replied walking the streets of New York City, "my experience is about to change completely.  Ready or not, it's on its way."
And the airport--a peculiar mind-bending hub-- and the plane did just that: My world has changed again.  Back to Pune, Maharashtra.  I arrived via taxi at 5:00 A.M. 31 October from Bombay international where my plane landed at 11:30 P.M. 30 October.  I was excited, actually, for the drive to Pune because the Bombay-Pune highway, even at night, is a sight to behold.  Lots of intricately painted, colorful goods carriers traveling at turtle-paced speeds across three-lane roads that wind through the rocky terrain of the Deccan south.  The Deccan is a large plateau in the southwest of India where the region gets its name from.  Like all things Indian, its name is highly practical-- it literally means 'south'.  Around 4:00 A.M. the driver naturally starts to get tired; the car's acceleration and deceleration become more pronounced at increasingly irregular, sporadic intervals, and this is my cue to practice some Hindi.  Luckily, I am fully awake because of the roadside scenery.  My fresh arrival, too, from some different spot under the sun, disorients the waking/dreaming film schedule of the mind's cinema.  Slowly I am syncing into my new spot, and a walk around my old neighborhood yesterday with a friend, Jon, flooded my memory with a fresh familiarity I don't experience on the side of the city I am currently located.  Early this week, I'll move back into my old flat before taking off by train for Mysore, Karnataka.
Until then, I'll be doing bureaucratic things like registering with the police, organizing paperwork to streamline processes like getting a new mobile phone number and internet connectivity in Karnataka, and reading and writing a lot as I attempt to finalize applications for graduate school back in the States.  That process weighs heavily on my mind these days, and I feel over a solid year's productivity attempting to express itself in the space of about a page and half.  It's a slow process of writing, re-writing, re-thinking, re-writing, re-citing, re-clining, and penning again as the fingers' tips patter away on an apple.