I feel a sense of joy welling up. It spreads from the center of my heart, until my whole chest is warm and softly vibrating. It's like I'm coming home. I remember I had felt something similar when I first came to India.

It was December 6, 1967. I was twenty-three then, and I felt the wonderful winter heat of Bombay bathe my body. My neck and back stretched out and stood tall, and my shoulders came upright from their long-defensive hunch. My chest opened up, feeling unrestricted, and my breathing became deep and relaxed, like I couldn't remember. I loved India, that first week, just for that. Just for the visceral, joyful feeling of coming home to a place within myself that I had long forgotten.

It's still dark outside as the car drops me at the New Delhi train station to take the 7:10 A.M. Shatabdi Express north to Haridwar en route to revisit the Maharishi's ashram. It's a journey of pleasure. I've been in India many times since 1968, visiting family, making films, traveling, exploring. But this is my first visit backóalmost thirty-two years to the dayóto the place where I learned meditation and met the Beatles.

As we pull out of the train station, laborers in soiled clothes unloading baskets of bananas and cashew nuts on the next platform, we slowly move through the city, waking up to a warm sunrise, pink light bathing the houses and roadways in a soft morning glow. Soon, one and two-story houses and factories give way to open fields, where several men squat for a morning pee. Picking up speed as we skim across the vast open plains that lead north and east to the foothills of the Himalayas, the countryside turning yellow in the morning sunlight, we see field after field cultivated with vegetables, grains, and sugarcane, their two-foot-long green leaves fanning out like mop-top haircuts on slender seven-foot stalks.

We zip over bridges, crossing arrow-straight irrigation canals and past small villages that dot the landscape. In the small city of Roorkee a primary school has set its red plastic chairs outside, in neat clumps of twenty to twenty-five, each class studying about ten feet from the next. I love how India lives out-of-doors. We speed by rows of tall eucalyptus trees, through lush banana groves, and past fields semi-submerged in irrigation waters, glistening in the now bright sunlight. Flocks of white herons glide from field to field eating seeds and bugs as the many shades of green dance before my eyes. As a tiny, quaint village of squat, whitewashed houses rushes past, children are flying richly colored saffron, white, and green kites in a field near the tracks. It's good to be back. India was mind-blowing thirty years ago. It is mind-blowing now.

The alluvial plains end suddenly as the foothills, cloaked in deciduous trees, announce the start of the Himalayas and our train slows into the station at Haridwar. A medium-size town, Haridwar sits on the Ganges River and serves as a rail gateway to Rishikesh.

As I step onto the platform a porter is immediately by my side, reaching for my bag. "Porter, sahib?" he asks in a professional but keen tone. He's dressed in traditional porter's clothesóa long-used, faded burgundy-colored turban around his head; a slightly tattered, loose, almost matching cotton top hangs open from his shoulders; an old dirt-brown cotton lungi is wrapped around his waist, pulled up in front and tucked in so he can move quicklyóand he has the official railway porter's curved brass medallion tied around his upper left bicep. He's weathered, strong, about forty-five years old, with the kind of noble face you'd see on a soldier painted in an old Indian miniature. He hoists my overnight bag onto his head and strides off toward the taxi stand outside. I grab my backpack, sling it over one shoulder, and move to stay with him.