The first thing that hits you about India is the smell.
Not spices, like you'd expect. Not incense or curry or flowers. It's smoke. Burning. The Greeks have a word for it—*kafsimon*—the smell of anything on fire. Wood smoke, trash smoke, dung smoke, all layered together into a thick atmospheric presence that seems to rise from the very ground.
I landed in Bombay at one in the morning. The airport was chaos—porters shouting, families reuniting, heat and humidity pressing down despite the late hour. A driver was waiting for me, holding a handwritten sign with my name misspelled.
Puja had arranged it.
I'd met Puja a year earlier in Brazil—on a beach in Florianopolis, both of us drunk and sunburned, dancing to bossa nova at some beach party. She was Indian-American, studying design at Parsons in New York. We'd lost touch after Brazil, and then, impossibly, I'd run into her in an elevator in Manhattan. Just standing there, staring at each other like we'd both seen a ghost.
We'd dated briefly. Then I'd lived with her for a year and a half—as roommates, not lovers, which created its own strange intimacy. When I told her I was going to India, she'd immediately started making calls. Her brother was a Bollywood actor. Her friends were connected. Within a week, she'd arranged for me to stay at her brother's place in Bombay.
The driver loaded my bag into an old Ambassador sedan and we pulled onto the highway.
The road was nearly empty at this hour. Just the occasional truck rumbling past, headlights cutting through the darkness. And then I saw him.
A man standing by a tree in the median. Right in the middle of the highway. Hands pressed together in prayer, facing the tree.
It was one in the morning.
"What's he doing?" I asked the driver.
The driver glanced over, shrugged. "Praying."
"At one in the morning? In the highway median?"
Another shrug. "This is India."
The party at Puja's brother's house was still going when we arrived. Twenty-somethings sprawled across couches, smoking, drinking, music pulsing from expensive speakers. It could have been a loft party in Williamsburg. The only difference was the accents.
I was exhausted. Jet-lagged. I'd been traveling for nearly thirty hours. I made small talk for twenty minutes, then excused myself and crashed on a guest room bed.
The next morning, I woke up to silence. Everyone else was still asleep. I had a train ticket to buy—heading north to Rajasthan—and I needed to get it today.
I slipped out the front door.
Immediately, I realized I had no idea where I was. The driver had picked me up in the dark and brought me here. I didn't know the address. Didn't know the neighborhood. Didn't even know which direction the city center was.
I turned right and started walking.
Within two minutes, the paved road turned to dirt. Corrugated metal shacks appeared on both sides. Children stared at me from doorways. A goat wandered past.
I'd stumbled into a shantytown.
I turned around, headed the opposite direction, and eventually found a main road. Hailed a rickshaw. The driver spoke enough English to understand "travel agency," and fifteen minutes later, I was buying a ticket north.
Easy.
I went to an internet café to check emails. Had lunch at a street stall—some kind of curry wrapped in roti, eaten standing up while trucks roared past. Wandered through a market. Took photos.
And then, two hours later, I reached into my pocket.
My passport was gone.
So was the ticket I'd just bought.
The panic was immediate. Total. The kind that makes your vision tunnel and your hands shake.
I'd had the passport at the internet café—I remembered checking my email, the passport sitting on the desk next to the keyboard. And then lunch. Had I taken it out at lunch? I couldn't remember. The market—had someone pickpocketed me?
I retraced my steps, walking fast, asking vendors if they'd seen anything. No one had. Of course they hadn't. This was Bombay. Ten million people. My passport was gone.
I stood on a street corner, trying to calculate what this meant. The U.S. consulate would be closed until Monday. I'd need to file a police report. Get emergency travel documents. It would take weeks. Maybe a month.
And suddenly, I felt it: the universe telling me I wasn't supposed to be here. That I'd pushed my luck too far. That this whole journey—this whole year of following synchronicities and trusting the path—had been naive magical thinking, and now reality was crashing back down.
I was stranded in India without a passport.
I sat down on the curb and put my head in my hands.
Then I had a thought: *The travel agency.*
Maybe—*maybe*—if I'd dropped it somewhere, and if someone had found it, and if the envelope with the ticket had the travel agency's address on it, and if that person was honest enough to return it—
It was a long chain of ifs.
But I didn't have any other options.
I found a rickshaw. Gave him the address. Fifteen minutes later, I walked back into the travel agency.
The man behind the desk saw me and jumped out of his chair.
He was holding my passport.
And my ticket.
"You are very lucky man!" he said, grinning. "Very, very lucky! Someone found this on the street. They bring it here. I was waiting for you!"
I stared at him. At the passport in his hand. At the ticket.
"Someone just... brought it back?"
"Yes! Good people, you see? Good people everywhere!"
I took the passport, flipped through it to make sure it was real. My photo stared back at me. All my visas intact.
"Thank you," I said. "Thank you so much."
He waved me off. "This is India. We take care of travelers."
I walked out onto the street in a daze.
All my fears—about India, about theft, about the dangers of traveling alone in the developing world—had evaporated in an instant. Replaced by something I hadn't felt in a long time.
Faith.
Not religious faith. Not faith in any particular god or system. But faith in *people*. In the fundamental decency that exists even in chaos. In the idea that the universe might actually be looking out for me.
Or at the very least, that there are good people everywhere.
I took the train north to Rajasthan.
My mother had a friend there—a jewelry maker, hippie type, who was traveling through India with her eighteen-year-old daughter, Amalia. We'd made vague plans to meet up for dinner.
When I arrived in Jaipur, I hired a cab driver. He was ancient—maybe eighty years old, with a white mustache and kind eyes. He drove me across half the state in an old Ambassador that rattled and wheezed over every pothole.
I found my mother's friend at a guesthouse near the Pink City. Amalia was blonde, American, a little wide-eyed at the intensity of India. I'd known her since she was a kid, which made the whole situation slightly awkward. We were sharing rooms to save money, but there was this weird older-brother dynamic that I couldn't quite navigate.
On New Year's Eve, her mother took us out to the desert.
There are camps out there—tents set up in the middle of nowhere, lit by oil lamps, with musicians playing traditional Rajasthani instruments. We sat on carpets under the stars, eating dal and drinking chai, watching dancers spin in the firelight.
At midnight, someone set off fireworks. They exploded against the vastness of the desert sky, and for a moment, everything felt impossibly vast and impossibly small at the same time.
The next day, Amalia decided to travel with me for a few days. We caught a bus to Jodhpur—the Blue City—and found a guesthouse run by a man named Vishnu.
Vishnu was a Brahmin. The highest caste. He was in his mid-forties, well-educated, spoke perfect English. But there was something conflicted about him—like he wanted desperately to be part of our journey but wasn't sure if it was appropriate. He'd hover near us in the common area, offering tea, telling us about Hindu philosophy and meditation techniques.
Part of me felt like it was a performance. A tourist show. But another part sensed something genuine beneath the awkwardness. Like he was searching for something, too.
One evening, Amalia and I were talking about where to go next.
"We want to see Pushkar," I said.
Vishnu looked up from across the room.
"Pushkar?" he said. "I have never been."
"Never?"
"No. Every Hindu is supposed to go once in their life. To bathe in the lake. But I have not."
He said it with a mixture of shame and longing.
"Come with us," I said.
He blinked. "Come with you?"
"Yeah. Why not? You organize everything. We'll all go together."
He stared at me for a long moment. Then he smiled—a genuine, unguarded smile.
"Yes," he said. "Okay. Yes."
Vishnu had a cousin who ran desert safaris in old World War II jeeps—somehow still functional after sixty years. The cousin showed up the next morning: thick glasses, bushy mustache, buttoned-up shirt. He and Vishnu both had this formal, almost nervous energy, like they were about to do something mildly transgressive.
We piled into the jeep. Vishnu sat up front, clutching a small bag with offerings for the puja. Amalia and I sat in the back, bouncing over dirt roads as we headed west toward Pushkar.
"We take the back way," the cousin said. "Stop in villages. You see real India."
He wasn't kidding.
The first village we stopped in was tiny—maybe fifty houses clustered around a well. As soon as the jeep pulled up, people started emerging from doorways. First a few kids. Then more kids. Then adults.
Within minutes, we were surrounded.
Two or three hundred people, standing in concentric circles, just *staring*.
The children were in the front rows, wide-eyed and giggling. The adults stood further back, arms crossed, watching with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. None of them had seen white people before. We were a spectacle. A circus.
Vishnu and his cousin pretended like this was totally normal. They bought water from a stand. Drank slowly. Looked at the sunset. Made small talk.
All while two hundred pairs of eyes watched our every move.
Amalia leaned over to me. "This is insane."
"Yeah."
"Do we just... stand here?"
"I guess so."
We stood there. Drinking water. Watching the sunset. Being watched.
Eventually, Vishnu decided we'd had enough cultural exchange. We climbed back into the jeep and drove on.
Pushkar appeared just after dawn.
The lake was perfectly round—unnaturally round, like someone had carved a circle into the earth with a compass. Ghats descended to the water's edge on all sides, lined with temples and ashrams. The water itself was still, glassy, reflecting the sky.
According to Hindu mythology, this was where Brahma—the creator god—was born. He rose from the back of a turtle, sitting on a lotus flower, and from that moment, the universe began.
Every Hindu is supposed to visit Pushkar at least once in their lifetime. To bathe in the lake. To perform a puja.
Vishnu stood at the edge of the water, staring out across the lake. He looked like a man standing at the threshold of something profound.
"I am forty-five years old," he said quietly. "And I have never been here."
"Well," I said. "You're here now."
The puja ceremony was simple.
We sat with a holy man at the water's edge. He chanted in Sanskrit, waving incense over us. We repeated words we didn't understand. He tied red threads around our wrists. We made offerings—flowers, coins—and then we waded into the lake.
The water was cold. Clean. It felt ancient, somehow. Like every person who'd ever bathed here had left some trace of themselves in it.
Vishnu dunked his head under, came up sputtering and laughing.
For the first time since I'd met him, he looked free.
That afternoon, I met a group of Rajasthani locals sitting by the ghats. They invited me to sit. Offered me water—the first gesture of desert hospitality. You always offer water before anything else. Even before you say hello.
Then one of them pulled out a small bottle.
"Opium," he said.
He dissolved a few drops in water and handed it to me.
I'd read about this—the tradition of offering opium as a gesture of peace. A way of saying: *We're all friends here. Relax.*
I drank it. It tasted bitter, earthy. Within minutes, I felt a warmth spreading through my chest, a softness at the edges of my vision.
We sat there for hours, talking in broken English and Hindi, watching pilgrims bathe in the lake.
At some point, one of the guys pulled out a small packet.
"Brown sugar," he said.
I'd heard the term before. It was opiate slang—somewhere between raw opium and refined heroin. "Opium is the milk," he explained. "Heroin is the cheese. Brown sugar is the yogurt."
He pulled out a piece of aluminum foil, folded it into a V-shape, and placed a small brown crystal inside. Then he lit it from below. The crystal melted, releasing a thin trail of smoke.
"Chasing the dragon," he said, handing me a straw.
I hesitated. This was further than I'd ever gone. Further than I'd planned to go.
But I was here. In Pushkar. At the birthplace of the universe. Surrounded by strangers who'd welcomed me like family.
I leaned over and inhaled.
The smoke hit my lungs and everything went soft. Warm. The edges of the world blurred. I lay back on the stone ghat and stared up at the sky.
Somewhere above me, a bird was circling.
Somewhere below me, people were praying.
And somewhere in between, I was just... floating.
Later that night, back at the guesthouse, I wrote in my journal.
I thought about the passport. About the stranger who'd returned it. About Vishnu, finally making his pilgrimage after forty-five years. About the villagers who'd stared at us like we were beings from another planet. About the opium and the lake and the mythology of creation.
And I realized something.
Faith isn't about believing in a specific god or system. It's about trusting that the world is fundamentally good. That even in chaos, there's an order. That even in strangeness, there's kindness.
The passport could have been stolen. But it wasn't.
Vishnu could have stayed home. But he didn't.
The villagers could have been hostile. But they weren't.
India had given me back my faith.
Not in religion. Not in any grand cosmic plan.
But in people.
In the simple, inexplicable fact that there are good people everywhere, doing good things, for no other reason than because it's the right thing to do.
And maybe that's enough.
Maybe that's all the faith you need.