Episode 51: Nitya Chambers
Nitya Chambers: I remember that feeling of like being claimed in this moment, right? Being claimed by this place. And I remember it with so much affection and so much warmth, these like tiny moments of embrace.
Josh Caldwell: Hello, my atypical daydreamers. Welcome to the podcast. It's episode fifty-one, which also happens to be my age. If you told me in my early twenties that at fifty-one I'd be living in Europe and making podcasts, I probably would have said, what's a podcast? This road trip we call life is full of wild turns and surprises. Now that is the truth. My guest today is Nitya Chambers. She is the Senior Vice President of Content and Executive Editor at Lonely Planet. So many of the stories on this podcast are about setting out in search of new adventures, discovering who we are through adversity. And while those journeys are often filled with excitement and danger and mystery, we can easily overlook the stories about coming home. But today, Nitya takes us to India and the roots of her family, where there is nothing more powerful than being embraced and seen for who you truly are.
Nitya Chambers: One of the most amazing things about travel to me is this notion of holding two things at once. There's a real sense of wherever you go, there you are. If you were in a bad mood when you left, that bad mood is probably not gonna miraculously disappear. Especially in a world where we're all tethered to our phones. There is a limited amount of escape you can do when you're tethered to the world. But I think the second part of it is what I think is always the promise and hope of travel, which is maybe I'm someone different in this other place. And maybe there is going to be some amazing thing I've never experienced before, some backdrop I've never stood against, that is going to make me find a part of myself that has just been dormant my whole life.
Nitya Chambers: The place that has defined this the most to me is really my relationship with India. My parents are Indian immigrants. They came here in the seventies. I came here with them when I was just one year old. And my life has been defined as an American, as someone who grew up in western Pennsylvania in a place where I didn't look like anyone else. I was constantly navigating that identity in the eighties, a time where information hadn't been quite so democratized. So as a child, you're doing a lot of education all the time, explaining what it means to be from another place, what it means to be a different religion. I was raised as a Hindu. And I'm doing that with parents that also don't have a frame of reference for the American life I live every day. They didn't know what it was like to go to school in 1985, where the vegetarian option for pizza was to pull the pepperoni off the pizza. There were details in the world I was navigating that they were unfamiliar with. And they were trying to root me in a place that they were clearly very homesick for.
And I think they were homesick for it, but they were also becoming American themselves. That duality and that relationship with India really has shaped me in so many ways. And I was thinking a lot, in preparation for this conversation, about the first trip I took to India where I was eight years old. I remember the plane ride. I think we took TWA. I remember it's the longest flight I've ever taken. I remember people smoking on the airplane, because you could do that then. And I remember looking out the window. We flew from London to New Delhi, New Delhi to Bombay. And I remember looking out the window and it was dark and I don't know what I thought I was gonna see, but these glimpses of the land, the twinkling lights, looking for some sense of connection. How is this place going to look and feel and be different than the world that I know?
Nitya Chambers: There was no frame of reference for what a streetscape was. There might be a picture of the Taj Mahal, a picture of the Gateway of India, a picture of the Minakshi Temple, but there's not like, this is what the street looks like. This is a video of what you're going to encounter. So at that point, the world I knew was suburban western Pennsylvania. I have such palpable sensory memories of what it felt like to come off that plane. The mixture of air conditioning and diesel and jasmine flowers, they just commingle into this very specific scent that if I smell it today, it catches my heart and holds it. The way the humidity kind of hangs on you, the way the traffic sounds, a cacophony of horns. Lorries and trucks, bicycle horns, autoricksha beeping, which is its own sort of high-pitched, kind of aggressive bark punctuating everything. I have such memories of coming out of the airport, being just enveloped by family, being in a car, jet-lagged but so hyper aware of this world coming to life around me.
Nitya Chambers: The thing that startled me that I didn't even really know to expect was the idea that this was the first time in my life I had never been somewhere where I looked like everybody else. So you're blending in, but at the same time, the same way you can walk out in the place you live and you know if someone is from there or not, the Indian people that live there knew that I was coming from somewhere else. The way that I dress, the way that I talk, maybe the way I did my hair. But for me, not having to carry that otherness, it is a memory that has stayed with me. What it meant to kind of be in a place where you're experiencing that for the first time as a child. What it means to belong, and what it means when you live between worlds, or across them, or you get the privilege of belonging in multiple places.
Josh Caldwell: Hey, it's Josh. Hope you're enjoying the podcast. And if so, are you wanting more road stories? Well, good news. I've got you covered. Consider becoming a patron. You'll have access to loads of great bonus stories that there just wasn't time for. And you'll be supporting a truly independent podcast. Find the link in the show notes, and thanks. Now back to the show.
Nitya Chambers: I think there was a connection that was probably instantaneous that I didn't recognize. It was such a privilege to go somewhere and stay in someone's house. We stayed with my grandparents, and with aunts and uncles. It was cramped. I'm sure it was inconvenient to the people that hosted us because we would go for a full summer vacation, all crowded into a one or two-bedroom apartment sometimes. But it was such a privilege to be part of the daily rhythms of a life in another country. What it meant to live in a culture where, certainly at that time with my grandparents, they went to the market almost every day and bought fresh vegetables and then cooked at home. There were vegetable sellers that came through the apartment complex.
I remember one summer, I was in high school, right after I graduated, and I spent the summer by myself with them. It was June. No central air conditioning. So there's balconies and ceramic tiles on the floor and fans, and they had air conditioning in one room and they would turn it on at night and we would all sleep in that room in a row. That was the cooling effort. But during the day you just went about your business.
I remember the day the monsoon started. You could feel it hanging, the rain in the air. It was hot and the air was just getting so thick. And I remember being in my grandparents' apartment at night, around eight or eight-thirty, it was June, and you hear the first crack of thunder. And you could hear people cheering because it was this relief from the heat. And obviously in societies that have an agrarian core, and they lived in a city, not a farm, but the agrarian culture that is so much a part of India's heritage exists through everything.
Nitya Chambers: That sense of the need for rain, what that means for your harvest, what that means for the rhythm of an agricultural society, is just kind of embedded in how everyone lives. And there was just a cheer. I never, it was a real communal moment, right? You were experiencing this weather event together in a way that was experiential. It wasn't like everyone's posting about the storm. It was just in the air. It was outside. It was something you were reacting to. And I can recall sitting on their couch and hearing that and sort of experiencing it like it happened yesterday. And I feel so fortunate.
I think about this when I think about how to give travel experiences to my kids. My parents, it was a priority to them to go see their parents in India. When we prioritize seeing my parents, we're going to western Pennsylvania. We're not crossing the globe. So I think about how much those experiences shaped me and how to give them to my kids. Getting to be part of the rhythm of a place that way is such a special, magical thing.
To go back to what I was saying at the beginning, there is still throughout all of that this sense of who am I and where am I? I remember on that trip, we had gone to a historical site in India and I'd gotten dropped off while someone went to park. There were two lines. One was a foreign passports line, and one was a citizens line. I am a rule-following person. And in India at some of those ticketing lines, it looks official. There might be police. So I get into the foreigners line with a lot of people who didn't look quote Indian, and this policeman is like, what are you doing? And I was like, I'm a US citizen, I'm in the foreigners line. And he's like, no, you go over to that line.
Nitya Chambers: It was so affectionate. He was claiming me in that moment, right? He's like, what are you doing over here? Go to the other line. And I was like, no, no, I'm a US citizen. He was like, go. I remember that feeling of being claimed in this moment. Being claimed by this place. And I remember it with so much affection and so much warmth, these tiny moments of embrace. Funny and joyful, and like a reflection on who am I relative to the place that I'm in.
Josh Caldwell: I want to thank Nitya for sharing her experience. Be sure to visit lonelyplanet.com. Use the code daydream and grab thirty percent off their amazing travel books through the holidays. And while you're at it, sign up for their newsletter or follow them on Instagram. Links in the show notes. Now, if you haven't already, could you take two minutes to rate or review Atypical Daydream wherever you listen? Think of it as your good deed of the day. This podcast is created and produced by me, Josh Caldwell. Music by Visual Aid, my side music project. General support and copywriting by Miranda Caldwell. Thank you for listening, and I hope you come back next time.
