Travel to Sikkim

 Drivers in India bring to mind a murmuration of starlings, swirling and swooping in a cloud of ever changing complex patterns, flying wingtip to wingtip as if they have a preternatural sense of each other’s whereabouts to avoid colliding.

We left the hotel at 4:15am to make our 8am flight to Bagdogra, and were picked up at the airport by our friend Gyatso Gelek. Five hours of winding mountain roads where the cars played a high speed game of leapfrog, passing on blind turns while dodging potholes and oncoming traffic.There were clusters of buildings made of cement, wood and tin precariously clinging to the space between the road and precipice on the other side where people live and keep shops, along with hundreds of roadside vendors selling identical bags of oranges. Everything for a hundred feet on either side of the road was covered in dust, including the people.

We arrived at the Sikkim Happiness Home where it took about fifteen minutes for May to be surrounded by a flock of little girls who pressed in so close to see her drawings that she could barely move her arm to guide the pen. It’s incredibly beautiful here, but also polluted and sad. Most of the inhabitants- human and animal- seem to be barely subsisting. I love seeing how content the girls in the Happiness Home are. They practically glow in contrast to the rest of the population. Diya, the little girl that we sponsor, was very standoffish at first. I think she felt pressured to receive us warmly and was determined to make her mind up about us on her own terms. It’s like I gave birth to her, with that stubborn independence.