Bikash invited me to stay the night, offering me dinner as well. I couldn’t help but laugh—if only all my travels had been so easy.
“Tell me,” I asked. “Are all Bhutanese people this friendly and this happy?”
Bikash replied matter-of-factly, as though I had just asked him if the sun was yellow. “Yes, all are like me. They’re jolly; they’re friendly; they’re good. That’s why this is the Land of Happiness.”
I had been traveling the world seeking and finding kindness. But now, I was in its mecca. In so many ways, I felt like this moment was the pinnacle of my journey. I had found within this little country a dream I didn’t even know I had: to sit by a fire with a laughing stranger, sharing a cup of a tea on a rainy afternoon in a place that felt like the best of home.
Leaving Bhutan, I knew that maybe it was time to create a new idea of home. Not one that fit so tightly I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Maybe it was by reconnecting to this adventure, that I would always be on it. That night, I scrolled through my address book, through all the names and numbers and emails I had collected, knowing that no matter where I went in this world (including the fine city of Los Angeles), those memories, those connections would always be there.
The next morning, I breathed in the clean mountain air, bracing myself for my return to the busy and dirty streets of India. I had fallen in love not just with the external beauty of Bhutan, which was indeed magnificent, but also with the internal beauty of its people—with their faith, their joy, their deep connection not just to each other, but also to the knowledge that we are all only here for a brief and blistering moment. We come to dance and sing and see our hearts get broken over and over again. And then we leave this body behind, the light that lives within us either being extinguished into nothingness, or living on in some other form. Either way, we will never be here in the same time, or the same way, again.
* * *
“Goddamn it!” I yelled, nearly kicking Kindness One in the head, which, for once, wasn’t actually to blame for my frustration. The culture shock of returning to India had hit me hard. Gone was the serenity of Bhutan—adios to happiness and joy.
Just in case you aren’t up on your South Asian geography (as I certainly wasn’t), Calcutta is a massive detour from Bhutan. But I was a man on a mission, and a man on a mission cannot be stopped—even by the perilous roads of India.
I had just been driven off the road by a goat herder and a motorbike filled with people. There must have been at least four adults and two children on that bike. Both Kindness One and I almost careened into a wall, stopping just before we took out the side of someone’s home.
I had spent too many hours on Kindness One. My legs were numb. My jacket was drenched from the vestiges of a monsoon rainstorm. My head hurt. And there I was, freshly arrived in Calcutta, and people were already running me off the road.
After I stopped swearing and the small crowd that had gathered to watch me began to disperse, I remembered why I had come to Calcutta in the first place. If you might remember, I had a bit of a moment in Kosovo with a statue of Mother Teresa and had decided that I would make it to the city she had adopted as her home. I would go to the charity that she founded, and I would hopefully get out of these wet clothes.
I started up Kindness One and tried to maintain my calm as I worked my way across town to meet Mother Teresa. And that’s exactly what I did. Or rather, I was able to visit her tomb. Walking around the mission she founded, I felt again that warmth I had met in Bhutan. I stood in the room where she had made so many changes in this world of ours, where she had experienced a vision of peace that few others had ever seen.
As I was walking out of the house, I stopped to read a letter Mother Theresa had written. In it, she said, “It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.” I stepped back, feeling the weight of her words press down on me.
When I went back out on the crowded street, I was ready again to take on India. I decided to go for a walk and try to find something to nibble on. What I found instead was a man who operated an orphanage for children. Barik was turning a corner when he literally ran into me.
He wobbled his head and apologized, “So sorry, sir.”
“Oh no,” I responded. “That was my fault. I’m just a bit lost.”
Barik stopped and asked, “How so?”
Well, my friend, let me tell you. It didn’t take long for Barik’s story to trump my own. He ran an orphanage for children whose parents had either died or abandoned them to the vagaries of life on the streets of India.
“So many children,” he shrugged. “We try to help, you see.”
I decided that I would see, and followed him back to the orphanage, where I was quickly greeted by dozens of smiling faces. I couldn’t believe how many children there were. They all circled me, laughing and pointing, giggling and hiding as Barik introduced me to the few brave enough to meet this new stranger.
Barik was probably in his early thirties, but there was a light in his eyes that echoed the joy of the children around him. We started playing cricket in the yard, where Barik joined in, right alongside the kids.
“Who helps all these children?” I asked him, in awe of how many orphans lived in this run-down building in the center of town.
Barik stood back from the game as he answered the question, “Local people help. Many people give the children rice, meat, bread, money . . .”
“But what about you?” I asked. “Why did you decide to help the children?”
“I help with many things for them—driving them, teaching school.”
Barik then changed the subject, clearly humbled by his own work. Instead, he asked if I needed a place to stay. “We have apartment for the teachers,” he explained. “You can stay with us.”
I thought again of Mother Teresa’s quote as I watched Barik help the children put away their used and broken toys. He put so much love into his giving, offering a committed care to these children, who had little else. And I saw that despite what had happened to them, despite how they came here, the children offered the greatest gift in return: their laughter. As we ate our curry and rice dinner together, seated on the floor, as is Indian tradition, their joy was infectious. They had food before them and friendship around them. They had teachers who loved them—a family of strangers perhaps, but a family nonetheless. After dinner the children lined up to drink water from a fountain. I had learned to always ask in India about the water before drinking it, but this time I moved to get in line before Barik stopped me, “No, water not safe.”
“For me?” I asked.
“Not safe for anyone.”
“But the children are drinking it,” I was confused as I watched a small boy lean forward to sip from the faucet.
“No safe. Children get sick too.”
I found out that it was the only water they had. That even though the children regularly got sick from drinking it, they had no choice.
I went to sleep that night, hearing the children cough in the other room. At one point, a young girl got up and vomited in a trashcan. It quickly erased the memory of their laughter just a few short hours before.
When I awoke, there was no hesitation in my mind. I was going to give back to this man and the children under his care. If ever one gift could affect so many, I knew that the future of these children might be altered by the smallest change in their current lives, just as Barik had already done.
Barik and I walked outside to the courtyard where the kids were having breakfast, and I thanked him for coming to my rescue, “The children have joy in their eyes, and you have given them hope, and that is a wonderful thing.”
I realized that it was hope I saw in Barik’s eyes; it was hope I saw in the eyes of the children. Maybe what we see as childlike innocence is really just that. It is the naiveté of hope. The pure and honest belief that life can and always will get better.
As we get older, so many of us begin to doubt that hope. We prepare for the worst. We worry about losing our jobs, not making enough money. We worry about our mothers and children, and wives and husbands. For me, I worried a lot about Kindness One. And in that great swell of “what if,” we forget about what is.
I explained to Barik that I wanted to offer them a gift. When he told the children, they quickly gathered around. It was my first gift to have an audience of so many and so young.
I had realized while playing with the children the day before that they needed more equipment, so I told him, “The first thing I want to do is I am going to buy lots of sports equipment: footballs, cricket bats, badminton rackets . . . lots of sport things.”
Barik looked at me in disbelief and then translated the good news to the kids. A cry went up as the boys quickly began swinging imaginary bats at the thought of having real ones.
And then I explained the second gift: I wanted to buy them new purifiers for the water so that the children would no longer get sick.
Barik hugged me, and another big cheer came from the kids.
“There’s one last thing,” I said. “When you took me on the tour of the home, you told me about the school and you said to me that you didn’t have many books. For me, books changed my life. As a kid, I used to read all the time. So what I have decided to do is to stock your library with one thousand new books.”
By this time, the kids had surrounded us, jumping up and down and bellowing in excitement. Barik was left speechless. I understood. Because hope lives in us as long as we believe that life can—and will—get better. Even when it seems that our dreams are impossibly far off in the distance, and we don’t know how we’re going to get there, the right person, the right miracle will always appear if we wait for it. You never know: one day a bald man with an English accent might just show up on a yellow motorbike, or a quiet man named Barik will find you sleeping on the streets, and that hope—that bright little flicker of light in your eyes—will be restored.
Chapter Ten
“You can’t run away from trouble. There ain’t no place that far.”
—Uncle Remus
“Are you sure?” I stood in the front office of the orphanage on the phone with Lina. Only the day before, I had been denied a visa for Burma. Before leaving LA, I had attempted to get every possible visa I would need. The only problem was, I ran out of time to get one for Burma. But when I called the Burmese consulate in Washington, DC, they had said not to worry, that I could get the visa while in India. Apparently, they were wrong, or rather, wrong-ish.
You see, some people in India could get them. It just depended where you were and what border you were attempting to cross. It also depended on what time of day it was and who was working that shift. In a country with 1.2 billion people, several hundred languages, and a distorted view of modern management, Indian logistics were famous for their entire lack of logic. And I was slap-bang in the middle of all the chaos.
Which is what led to me calling Lina in the middle of her night, hoping that she could secure something through the Burmese consulate in Washington. Unfortunately, her phone call hadn’t gone so well.
“They said you would have to be here, in person,” she paused before continuing. “Maybe if we were married, it would be different, but since we’re not even related, they said there wasn’t much they could do.”
Ouch (good one, Lina). But as much as it hurt, I knew she was speaking the truth. As I neared the end of my journey, that fateful return home edging closer, I could also feel her beginning to wonder what she was waiting for. I mean, I understood her wanting to get married, and in this instance, it might have even allowed her to secure a Burmese visa (although doubtful) for me, but I also knew, well, quite simply, that I was afraid.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have children or a life partner. Lina and I had been together for a number of years, but we had just moved in with one another only months before this journey. And marriage sounded so . . . permanent.
Did settling down mean that I would be also, well, just, settling? Not for Lina—she was the love of my life—but rather for that cookie-cutter existence I had been trying to deny ever since my first dreams of escaping “real” life had emerged. I couldn’t help but wonder if making the ultimate commitment might turn into that oak-filled London office? Would I find myself staring out the window of my relationship, wondering if I had exchanged my dreams just because I was following the path that everyone else expected me to? Even demanded.
“You can still do both,” Lina had told me during one of our last conversations before I left LA, and as I sat on the other end of that line in the front office of an orphanage, I wondered again whether I could honestly keep this adventure going and still have my emergency contact back at home. Was that being true to myself or was that just being selfish?
“I’ll figure something out,” I replied confidently, but I knew Lina could hear the fear in my voice. What the hell was I going to figure out?
Since Calcutta was a port city, I thought of trying to bypass Burma by boat. I took out my laptop and fired off an email to my shipping company contacts. And then I went out for a long walk around Calcutta. I felt trapped. It felt like the frenzied streets were closing in on me. It reminded me of when I was a kid at school, the classroom too small, the other kids too loud, my heart beating too fast, and my legs just wanting to run home as fast as I could. But then home was no more comforting. I arrived there only wanting to run back to school—never happy except for that time in between.
I stopped walking. And it felt like the whole of Calcutta stopped with me. Mother Teresa once said, “Love begins by taking care of the closest ones—the ones at home.” For so long, I had run from home thinking that my job in life was to be done somewhere else. That in the “somewhere else” I would be happy. Home was the unhappy place, and the open road was the happy one. But if I looked back at the last few months, my greatest joys hadn’t come from asking people for help, or from that great unending road. No, they had come when I was connecting with others. When I found communion. When I discovered a place within me that was safe and gentle and filled with hope—that soft, quiet space called “home.”
And suddenly, it was as if all the gifts materialized before me. I realized they weren’t just about helping people to fulfill their dreams. In most of the cases, they were about helping people reconnect to their homes. Whether it was giving a home to Tony in Pittsburgh, or helping Bekim save his farm in Montenegro, or offering Dheeru a better home in Delhi, the gifts were just as much about where we come from as where we’re going.
Maybe it was time for me to start connecting in a new way to mine. Maybe that was the difference between feeling trapped and getting to have my cake and eat it too. Because why on earth would I buy a cake if I wasn’t planning to eat it? Though it was so easy for me to connect with someone I barely knew, it was time I started connecting with the people I loved. As the final legs of my journey began to appear before me, I knew that, as much as I wanted that freedom to run, the freedom to follow my dreams, I also wanted to know that someone had my back while doing it. But more importantly, I also wanted them to know that I had theirs.
I got back to the orphanage and checked my emails. One of my amazing shipping contacts had come through—the company would be able to provide me space on a ship heading to Thailand in three days. I had three days in Calcutta, and then I would be on my way east. I felt like I was in a Jason Bourne movie. As I soon found out, getting from Burma into Thailand might have been impossible anyway. Something to do with a drug war and a closed border. Although overcoming these obstacles might have been a small feat for Bourne, Logothetis was a bit more cautious.
* * *
To a certain extent, we all dream of paradise—that place of small-moving kindnesses, with white sandy beaches and the warm waters lapping against our knees. Before even arriving in Thailand, I
had it pictured in perfect detail. I thought that, between the tourists visiting from across the world and the plethora of hotels that might be interested in hosting a man on a mission, paradise would soon be mine.
Paradise was not mine. In fact, paradise was a brutal wake-up call. I rode to the seaside resort of Pattaya to try my luck, only to discover two things. One, most Thais do not speak English, which makes sense since they live in Thailand. Second, being a tourist without money created great cause for suspicion.
I went into a Western-looking hotel to ask for help, and before I knew it, the receptionist was picking up the phone to call the police. I wasn’t sure if she was concerned that I had run out of money or that I was simply deranged, but either way, I decided it was better not to tangle with the local authorities in order to find out.
Like in India, the locals were confused by a Westerner with no money. I realized that in paradise, most tourists come to spend cash on food and hotels, not ask for free meals and a night’s stay. I decided to change my target population, and began to ask foreigners, or falung as they are called in Thailand, for help. Finally, a friendly German stopped long enough to listen to me.
“No problem,” he replied. “I’ll take my daughter to school, and then I get you.”
Sounded great to me, but as the minutes clicked by and Cornelius failed to return, I realized that my new friend had decided against helping his fellow European comrade.
Prior to arriving in Thailand, really the only major knowledge I had of it was drawn from the Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Beach. Not a real reliable source, I know. But still, I remembered that endless cerulean water, the hint that heaven could exist on earth, and if you’ve ever seen the movie, the reality that really scary shit can happen in foreign lands, especially in dingy hostel rooms! I decided to leave that part out of my fantasy of Thailand, and had headed to the beach instead.
The Kindness Diaries: One Man's Quest to Ignite Goodwill and Transform Lives Around the World Page 15