Relay: India is India.

As we bumped along the rutted dirt in a canvas-topped jeep, I bent my neck so I could see this alien place through the front window. We had been in India for three days when we boarded a southbound train from Delhi with Arjun's father, rode through the night, and got off 250 miles away at Banda station. The town was supposedly plagued by dacoits, bandits, after dark. Since we were getting in at 3 a.m., the jeep had to meet us at the station; going to the guest house on foot would have been too dangerous.

And now here I was, sitting cross-legged in the front seat, between Arjun's dad, the gear shift, and the Hindi-speaking driver, trying to define this new country so I could understand what we were doing and how we could possibly fit into the picture we were in.

India is chaos. India is full of extreme dichotomies. India is stuck in the past. India is apocalyptic.

My definitions kept evolving as the week went on. It didn't matter then if every idea was wrong, my reaction to the shock was to come up with something tangible about the country in hopes of finding some sense of stability.

What had seemed immovable at home was in flux in India. My sense of direction was off, my intuition had left me. I could figure out only two things before we left Delhi. One, it was probably not a good idea to touch anything, and two, everything was exactly the opposite of how I perceived it.

We were to spend a week driving between primary schools in 12 " backward" villages in Banda with Radh, Arjun's father, observing one small portion of his six-month educational project. His goal was to organize illiterate mothers and fathers in poor and forgotten villages into a sort of parent-teacher organization, the main objective being to provide a forum where their opinions would be heard and considered.

A part of his weekly visits included classes on such things as health and hygiene, but what he really hoped for was to encourage parents to become more involved, both in their children's education and in the overall workings of the villages.

The task was an ambitious and daunting one. First he had to get there, on roads that breed a level of fear usually associated with poorly maintained carnival rides. Then he had to get the parents to attend the four-hour meetings. Finally, he had to make the whole thing work. The week we spent with him, Arjun and I helped him with one part of that task - getting people to come out for the meetings.

This was the ravined territory referred to as the Indian Badlands and we were probably the only foreigners to pass this way since the polio vaccinators came. No sooner would we pull into a village than a crowd of 20 or 30 people would gather around the jeep, staring. If we kept the canvas flaps closed, they'd walk around to the front to peer through the windows.

Radh, who grew up in India, had said this was a nation of voyeurs. Nothing I experienced in my two months there ever proved him wrong.

I had felt strange about going to these areas just to look. Nobody spoke more than a few words of English and I thought my lack of purpose there would offend them. I quickly found out that I was much more the watched than the watcher. To me, the people were so unusual, so beautiful and strange. But I tried at first to curb my desire to stare. After all, we in America consider that pretty invasive.

I had seen photographs of Indian men and women, read books, and watched movies about India. They, however, had not seen many images of people like Arjun and me and even if they had had a book about Americans, most of them would not have been able to read it. We became the object of ceaseless stares. Children would come up and touch me to see what I felt like, then run to a safe distance to watch us.

Needless to say, the parent meetings had record attendance that week.

In each village we went to, even if we were only dropping somebody off, the headmaster of the school would invite us to have some food and a milky-sweet chai. It was impossible to turn down the hospitality, so, sitting at a school desk in the yard with a crowd of children's eyes upon us, we would pause for a cup of chai.

While Arjun's father oversaw the parent meetings, children and adolescent boys tried to make sense of us with an elaborate sign language made more difficult by the fact that so much of our body language was not cross-cultural. The first question was whether Arjun and I were brother and sister. Anyone who knows us will find this a little laughable. He has dark hair and darkish skin, I have blondish hair and rather pale, olive-ish skin.

Second question was if we were married. We said yes because they wouldn't have understood our connection otherwise.

Though he was a curiosity, I, with my head uncovered, my light hair, my lack of jewelry, and my men's clothing, was a total spectacle. Why no children? If I was married, as I said I was, why didn't I wear a dot on my forehead? Why no saree or nose ring or earrings? I bore none of the Indian signs of femininity, yet I was obviously a woman. I was traveling around the countryside, in my men's clothing, with three Indians and a foreign man, something an Indian woman would never, never do. They didn't know what to make of me.

Because we had very limited means of communication with the villagers, we eventually decided if we were going to be a show, we might as well think up an act. Bad as we were at juggling, we began teaching the kids to juggle, and performed any other tricks we could think of. We began to exchange a trick for a trick, an English song for a Hindi song, a dance for a dance. As disruptive as it may have been to Radh's parent-meetings, we had found some rudimentary way of communicating and sharing without more than a word or two in common.

By the end of the week, word of us had spread around the 100-square-mile district. At the school we visited on the last day, they had a table set up at the head of the class with flower garlands and fruit at each place. A group of school children sang a welcome song in Hindi.

I hadn't managed to define India, but I learned at least that the attention and the hospitality are equally disarming.

No matter how much I had read, no matter how much people had told me about the country, nothing at all could have prepared me for being there, because you filter when you read and once you're there, in the beginning at least, that's impossible.

Before we left the New York airport, I had overheard a man say to his travel companions, "I know I'll come back as something different."

Because of India's reputation as a mecca for pilgrims of all sorts - spiritual seekers, monument buffs, adventurers, and idol-chasers - I wasn't sure what this enthusiastic fellow traveler meant by "come back," but it struck me that whatever it was, he was probably right.

He may have been thinking of the big picture, Hindu style - in the next life he will come back as a woman, or a tree, or maybe even an Indian. Or he may simply have been looking toward his return to America, expecting that India would have changed him.

I didn't go to India looking for enlightenment. I didn't expect to be profoundly changed and I don't know that I am something different now. What I do know is that the rest of the world is a different place after seeing India.

Carissa Katz is a reporter for The Star.