Dupatta Swings
By Sonali Bhandari
In the summers, I would always spend it with my little brother and two older cousins. We would wait for the moment my oldest cousin Shiv finally got sprung from whatever enrichment class or study camp had claimed him that week. We'd pile into the car, pick him up, and race back to my house. With our Dadaji with us, the five of us became our own little world.
We didn't need anything beyond its walls. We raided every closet for dupattas and tied them to the upstairs railing so we could swing down like we were in the jungle. We stuffed ourselves into sleeping bags and launched down the staircase, over and over until someone got hurt and Dadaji had to clean a wound. Shiv would create extremely elaborate scavenger hunts that wound through every room, every drawer, every corner. Pokémon and Dragon Ball Z played on the TV in the background, but we were always half-living in our own imagined world.
Looking back, I understand now what I couldn't have named then: I was free. We were suburban kids, our mobility limited. But free inside. Free to follow any idea the moment it arrived. As I got older, that freedom quietly contracted. I started taking enrichment classes like Shiv. Math drills replaced dupatta swings. I started learning that productivity is more important than play.
When I got to college, I met classmates who had spent their summers backpacking through mountain ranges, learning to read trails and weather, building fires, sleeping under open sky. They moved through the natural world like they belonged to it because, in many ways, they did. Their families had been rooted in this land for generations. They had been handed that belonging early, shaped by it, confident in it. I was envious in a way that surprised me. Not jealous of their things, but of that feeling, the particular aliveness that comes from knowing where you are on the earth. I wanted it badly enough that I started chasing it however I could: wilderness classes, camping trips, immersion programs. I was trying to learn a language I'd never been taught. It wasn't until I went to India that something shifted. Standing on that land, my family's land, land that held my history in ways I was only beginning to understand, I felt it. That rootedness. That belonging.
Camp Banyan is the summer I never had but spent my whole life craving. It's the place where the outdoors becomes a mirror, where you move through the natural world and find yourself moving through yourself at the same time. Where young people are handed back the freedom I felt in those summers with my brother and cousins: the freedom to follow any idea, to be fully present, to discover what they're made of when no one is telling them who to be.