To the average American – no, make that almost any American – India is incomprehensible.

From the teeming free-for-all of honking, beeping traffic in its cities, to the copious numbers who sleep on sidewalks, to bazaar-frantic markets with their cacophony of sounds, smells and visual impressions. People tramp in every direction, beggars tap insistently at your car window, and hawkers accost you everywhere. It seems a distant memory when you pass through placid country villages, where life seems primitive, a throwback to an earlier century, when people lived in huts and simply off the land.

But India is India, and no matter where you are, the unexpected is to be expected. An elephant lumbers in the slow lane on the road to Delhi airport, while cows recline in the medium strip. Oxen pull carts while the occasional camel manages a heavy load. Monkeys and even dancing bears are on leashes, ready for the tourist photo op. And just as you’re wondering why they’ve put mothballs in the sink, your beer arrives in a teapot.

Everything – just everything – is perplexing.

Perhaps the most challenging of all are the slums. They roll out for unbroken acres, corrugated sheets of metal assembled like so many playing cards, cheek-to-jowl in haphazard array, dirt pathways winding through. I’m told they have electricity and their own city councils, and I can see for myself tidy schoolchildren emerging in clusters, their uniforms impeccable, girl’s braids perfect, boy’s hair precision-cut. And why not? Open-air barbershops are everywhere, yet humans create waste, and that fact is undeniable.

There’s just so much I don’t understand. In airports, going through security, I find myself guided to a separate women’s line. It’s the same as the males, except I must enter a booth with curtains to be wanded down by a female in guard’s clothing. It’s like any airport in the world, but why must this ritual for women be kept from public view?

In the end, being driven to the airport in the dark of night, passing body after body, deep in slumber on the sidewalks, my friend tells me a story which begins to make sense.

Many years before she volunteered at a home for the blind, one in which young Indian boys lived through grade school and beyond. Each had a clean room and clean clothes, medical attention and three meals a day, more then they could ever expect their families to provide. Some would go home only once a year, while others went home all the time. One boy in particular loved going home and toward the end of each week would grow excited with anticipation. He couldn’t wait to go. And one day he invited my friend to come have tea with his family.

He told her the street and to look for the fourth lamppost on the left. She said, “There must be house number or a name.” “Oh, no,” he said, “The fourth lamppost on the left.” Sure enough. That’s where his family lived. It’s there that she came to understand the boy’s excitement. His parents loved him so dearly, that he loved to go home.

Eventually, the boy grew up and went on to university, but my friend continued to watch the lamppost. Then one day, she saw that the family had moved. Which is a good thing. In India, when a son succeeds, the fortunes of the entire family rise.

Still, it’s hard to imagine growing up blind on a Bombay sidewalk, cars and motorcycles inches from your head, the incessant honking, people all around you cooking their meals and doing everything that humans do, and yet loving it completely, because you were there with those you loved and who also loved you.

Overwhelmed by the sights which are India, it was good to remember: Sometimes we must close our eyes to see.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.