The six-hour ride from Delhi to Puskar, in eastern Rajasthan, had been jarring, my first exposure to the "functional anarchy," as someone once said, that is India. Leaving the capital, with its thickly polluted air and dusty, clogged streets, my driver and I traveled along bumpy highways, at times with the pavement missing.

Hordes of people along the roadside, with scores of small impoverished villages dotting the landscape. Whole shanty towns of families living under no more than low-hanging plastic sheets strung across scavenged wood. Garbage strewn about everywhere, clogging open trenches. Hindu religious men, dressed only in loincloths and turbans and caked in human ash, begging. Noisy towns of filth, naked children, skinny dogs -- and of course the cows -- with life lived in the open.

In India, I was to learn, driving is a near-contact sport. Lane discipline is optional. Overstuffed trucks and spewing, rickety buses compete with cars and scooters, some with whole, unhelmeted families clinging to each other. Passing can be a terrifying experience, seemingly an endless game of chicken. All the while, horns are blaring -- indeed, honking in an integral part of driving in India. It seems to have taken the place of common sense.

And yet, there are gleaming modern factories and new housing estates, with their billboards offering luxury living. Beautiful bejeweled women, with their finely made and colorful saris. Restaurants with strung lights blinking and Hindi music blaring. Internet cafes. Mobile phones for all. Smiling kids in doorways yelling to me, "Hey mister."

India is beguiling in its contrasts and mystery. It refuses to give its visitor the satisfaction of understanding. The more of it you see, the more questions you have about this vast country of 1.2 billion, standing at the crossroads between the modern and the ancient, between long-simmering sectarian conflict and unbridled optimism for the future. India is a young country, independent only since the British caved in to the nationalist movement in 1947. Some 50 percent of its population is under the age of 25. But its collective soul reaches back millennia.

Many Indians I met are proud of their country and its remarkable growth in recent decades. They point to the integration of spirituality into daily life, to resilience in the aftermath of war and social unrest, to the country's breathtaking demographic diversity and to the growing influence of its corporations around the world. They cherish their Bangalore billionaires, Bollywood pop stars and cricket players. There is a strong culture of entrepreneurship, and faith. One Indian, a teacher, told me that he saw the country as shining the pathway for the world to follow.

I had come here, just a few weeks before the Mumbai attacks, to visit my oldest daughter, Abbie, there on a gap year between high school and university.

I had also come, truth be told, to take respite, if only for a few weeks, from the pallor of this fall's economic meltdown.

I wanted to rediscover again the call of the road.

WHEN I WAS ABOUT ABBIE'S AGE, I, too had taken a gap year, traveling rough through sub-Saharan and North Africa, an experience that hugely impacted my subsequent life. I wanted to share with my daughter that sensation of adventure and wonder.

Abbie's Indian experience began last June, shortly after her graduation. She had arranged to be hired as an assistant teacher at a boarding school in Indore, the commercial center of Madya Pradesh. She had lived on campus, working in the primary grades in the morning and taking Hindi lessons in the afternoon.

The school, Daly College, is one of India's most prestigious. It was founded in the 1880s, originally to educate the sons of the region's royalty. In the 1940s, admission was to open to any young man whose family could manage the fees. Later it went co-ed.

Today, its well-manicured 119-acre campus, dominated by a magnificent white marbled, domed building and hosting both a Hindu temple and Muslim mosque, is an oasis in the otherwise dirty and bustling Indore. Its crisply uniformed student body, all Indian with the exception of a few exchange students, are drawn from professional households. They are among tomorrow's elite.

Despite the tranquil and welcoming environment, Abbie had by late summer grown inpatient with the cloistered routine. She decided to strike out on her own. She had traveled internationally before, but never solo. This was to be her quest, with the agenda to be set by whim and spontaneous encounter.

Her budget was set at $20 per day, enough for food, low-end guesthouse accommodations and third-class rail and bus tickets. But her real asset was the one that all travelers going rough must have -- confidence. She was restless in her desire to see and learn, and knew that she had the strength and fortitude to make her way. Young, bold and energetic, she was ready to take on India.

IN AN E-MAIL HOME FROM ONE of her first stops, Abbie answered her self-directed question of why she had decided to leave Daly. She wrote of waiting at a bus station, "leaning against a wall in the hot sun, surrounded by trash and feces, trying not to return the stares of all the men," pondering her decision.

"Why do I choose to travel alone? Why do I leave the comforts of home? Why do I subject myself to this? I knew the answer, of course, but there is a difference between knowing something and feeling something. I knew that I need to expand my world and my mind on a constant basis; I knew that I need to challenge everything I believe by temporarily substituting different realities; I knew that I need to meet as many of my fellow human beings as possible to learn what it really means to be human; I knew that I have to experience the problems of modernity before I can hope to fix them; I knew that I need to practice living every day as if it were a lifetime and every minute as if it is important."

An early and extended stop for Abbie was in Varanasi, a 19-hour solo train ride east from her previous encampment. Through an online social networking site for travelers, Couch Surfing, she met both Indians and Westerners living in the city, and celebrated Divali, the most important of India's many holidays, with some of them.

She also met a Hindi teacher and studied the language daily. That was to pay off in subsequent weeks as Abbie bargained with rickshaw drivers and dealt with sometimes haughty clerks in train stations.

As her travels unfolded, it turned out that she was not alone all that much. Backpackers have a way of meeting up in hostels and cafes. They form spontaneous groups, traveling for a few days or weeks together, and in the process make lifelong impressions. They tell stories about their home countries and share perspectives about the world. Those stories become the basis for a deeper understanding of how others live and, importantly for us, how others view America. One learns quickly that others often see us in a drastically different light than we do -- and this year, just how global Obama fever truly has been.

SO WHEN I FINALLY ARRIVED in Puskar, I was not surprised to find that Abbie had joined a traveling posse. Three 20-something Israelis, two men and a woman, all having completed their mandatory military service. An Irish couple in their 30s who had ridden the Dublin property boom to its top, cashed out and decided to spend some years traveling before, they hoped, opening an orphanage in India. They had been on the hippie trail for about two years, traveling through Southeast Asia.

Abbie had been in Puskar for a few days, traveling there on the back of a motorcycle driven by one of the Israelis. This was the season for the annual Puskar Fair, held each autumn during a full moon and attracting hundreds of thousands.

The fair is part camel market, part holy pilgrimage. Indeed, the lake in Puskar is among Hinduism's holiest spots, one of three bodies of water said to have sprung up when Lord Brahma dropped a lotus from his hand onto the Earth. Devout Hindus are to bathe in the Puskar lake at least once in their lives. Alcohol and meat are officially banned, though clandestinely available.

At nightfall, Abbie and I sat on the ghats (stone steps) that surround the lake and watched the bathers in the polluted water. Thousands bustled around, placing flowers on the water's surface and saying their prayers. Thousands more scurried about on the city's streets above. Merchants hawked their elegant fabrics from Kashmir. Groups hovered around stands selling chai, the sweet, spiced tea that is a national addiction in India. And the cows roamed freely.

In the two weeks that followed, Abbie and I crisscrossed Rajasthan, physically the largest of India's states, about the size of Germany. Rajasthan, created only after independence, is the traditional India, once home to hundreds of royal families -- the most senior of which were headed by maharajas -- and a complicated, interwoven web of alliances and fiefdoms. Much of it is arid, dominated by the Great Indian (Thar) Dessert.

I did splurge a bit, hiring a driver for some days. But we also traveled with the people, by bus and train, usually the only Westerners on board. My daughter, with her Hindi and street smarts, led the way.

On one such overnight train ride, I awoke in our packed third-class bunk car to find one of my cabin mates, a Muslim man, saying his morning prayers, genuflecting presumably toward Mecca. He was just inches from me, yet paid no attention. I wondered if he knew, or cared, that I was an American and all that might signify in his world.

We stayed on a farm, outside of Kota, run by an English woman. We attended a Jain wedding, a multiday affair with elaborate ceremonies and buffets of vegetarian food. We visited great forts built by past rulers, including the spectacular Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, and took a boat ride to the floating palace on Lake Pichola, in Udaipur.

RELUCTANTLY, THE TIME CAME for me to return home to the realities of my middle-age life. I left my daughter in Maheshwar, the site of another palace-turned-hotel, Ahilya Fort, high above the sacred Narmada River.

That morning I had risen early to watch the sunrise from the fort's ramparts and looked down to see villagers bathing and washing their clothes in the river. Abbie earlier had met the local, American-educated prince, who with a previous wife had founded a charity that seeks to support the area's peasant weavers and provide a marketing channel for their products.

We had traveled to Maheshwar in part to visit the compound of a guru who lived outside of the town, and to participate in its agnihotra, a nightly ritual there that involves prayers and burning of dried cow dung.

I kissed my daughter and wished her well. Abbie stayed in Maheshwar, later traveling with an American friend north into the Himalayas. I began the journey back to Delhi with trepidation, not only for the overnight train ride I would undertake alone, but also for what awaited back home and the economic ills that have befallen us.

That night, as I sat on the train, I thought of my daughter and this complicated country. Both are robust and eager. The unfolding momentum of history now belongs to them -- as it should.

I felt somehow that I was returning to an old, diminished place, one that will have to share its fate with the vast new country that is so difficult to understand.