by Kim Dinan
I’ve never done anything alone. And I think I will never be content until I do.
The black dots, the waiting.
Then do this thing alone and see how you feel at the end of it.
My eyes processed the words on the screen. She was right. It was not necessary to give up completely. I could take time to do something on my own. Brian could take time alone too. We needed space to see our relationship with clarity, to see if it was worth fighting for, and to gather our strength for whatever lay ahead. I typed:
You’re right. Thank you.
Wendy wrote back:
Hey, I’m due for a vacation. No matter what happens, how about I come to India for a visit when you’re done with your rickshaw ride? We can go on an adventure, just the two of us.
I need that more than you can imagine. And I’m going to hold you to it.
Raising my face from the light of the computer screen, I looked toward the blackness of the sky. The stars were dead, yet the brilliance of what they had been still gave light. Could something be dead and living at the same time?
Thank you, I typed to Wendy. I love you.
You too, she wrote. Miss you tons.
As I began to shut the laptop I saw the dots crawling across the screen. Wendy was typing again.
Kim, one more thing: don’t think that this time apart from Brian will be anything like your life without Brian. Being alone physically is very different than being alone in your heart. Remember that.
• • •
“What time is it?” I asked Brian after we’d dropped our heavy backpacks onto the conveyer belt. He glanced at his wrist and told me the time. We’d arrived at the airport hours earlier than necessary to ensure we’d find a quiet place to call Brian’s family. But we were also there because we didn’t have anywhere else to go. A traveler knows that the airport is always open, even on Christmas Day.
After my talk with Wendy, I’d sat Brian down and asked him if, before making any big decisions, we could take some time apart. Since we’d be separating anyway during the Rickshaw Run we’d agreed to let that physical space serve a much greater purpose. We would take those weeks to ourselves, without feeling greedy or guilty about it, to think through what we truly wanted.
It wasn’t clear to me if I just needed a bit of space or if I would discover that I needed to leave the marriage completely. Could I come into my own in the confines of a relationship? I needed to find out. And I needed to give myself permission to come to any decision that was real and true.
• • •
We settled into a hard plastic row of seats by the duty-free shops, and Brian pulled out the computer. Passengers rolled their luggage behind them down the hollow corridors. Despite the holiday decorations and the carols streaming out of the duty-free shops, the collective mood at the airport was somber. No one wanted to be there. The dividedness among us was palpable. Our bodies were in the cavernous terminals. Our hearts were somewhere else.
Brian still fiddled with the computer and I leaned over to look at the screen. “Are you having a problem with the Internet?” We’d done our research and knew that the Frankfurt airport had free Wi-Fi. But there was a pop-up on the screen. “What’s that say?”
“It says that I need to fill out a form and then they’ll text me the access code to log-on.”
“Oh, no,” I said. We’d been traveling without a phone, relying on email and Skype to communicate with friends and family. We could not receive a text message.
Brian headed off to the information desk to fix the issue and came back minutes later exasperated. “There’s nothing the information desk can do. If we don’t have a phone we can’t receive the text message, and if we can’t receive the text message we can’t get online. End of story.”
“Can the person at the desk use his phone to get our text message?”
“When I asked he refused. He didn’t seem too happy to be stuck working on Christmas.”
I sighed. “Well, let’s walk around. We might be able to find a café or restaurant that has Wi-Fi.”
We took off down the terminal, ducking into every darkly lit airport bar and bright coffee shop that we came across. But everyone told us the same thing. The whole airport connected to the same system, the one that we were unable to access.
Exhausted and annoyed, we resigned ourselves to the fact that we weren’t going to get to talk to Brian’s family after all.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “When we get to India you can send them an email and let them know what happened.”
Brian nodded his head. “I know,” he said, and his voice held so much sadness that it made me want to cry. “I was just really looking forward to it.”
“I know you were.” I felt cracked and helpless and so stupidly far away from home. I wanted to reach out and fix everything: me, us, and that dumb Wi-Fi system. A restaurant sat a few paces away and I pointed to it. “Let’s go in there, drink a beer, and forget that it’s Christmas.”
Our waiter, a man in his early-thirties with wire-rimmed glasses and a nest of blond hair, came up to our table smiling. “Merry Christmas,” he said in English, and the little touch of familiarity made me tear up again.
“Merry Christmas,” we said, and forced smiles on our faces.
“Are you heading home?” he asked us. “If your flight leaves soon you can make it back to America before the day is over.”
My eyes dropped to the table and I shook my head. “No, we’re missing Christmas this year. We’ve been trying to call home from the airport but we can’t log-on to the Wi-Fi.” I paused. “Is there any way of getting past it? Maybe an Internet café or a coffee shop somewhere in the airport that has Internet of their own?”
“Ah, I’m sorry, there’s not,” he said in his thick German accent. I nodded unsurprised.
Our waiter left, and I glanced across the table at Brian. “I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.”
“There were a lot of things I expected about traveling,” said Brian quietly. “But homesickness wasn’t one of them. I can’t believe how hard it is to be away sometimes, especially on days like today.”
We were always the outsiders, the foreigners, struggling to grasp the language and the tiny nuances of each culture we found ourselves in. Even on easy days, traveling could be isolating. Now, not even the one solid thing we had, each other, was certain anymore. I gave him a sad smile. “I know.”
Our waiter returned a few minutes later with our beers, gigantic steins brimming with a heavy lager. He set them down in front of us.
“You know what?” he said as he stooped to mop up the beer that had sloshed from our glasses. “I should have thought of this before. I’m not going to use my free minutes today. You can use my password code to call your family.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and scrolled through the screen, reading his access code to us.
“Are you sure you don’t need it?” asked Brian.
“Oh, no, I don’t need it today,” he said and winked at us. “Merry Christmas.”
Across the table my mother-in-law’s voice came through the speaker, and Brian’s face instantly lifted. From the sound of it, the Christmas gathering at my in-laws’ house was in full swing. The distant bustle of their holiday party spilled out into the foreign airport, and my heart swelled with the sounds of home.
After taking a sip of beer, I scooted my chair around the table next to Brian. Our nieces and nephews ran laps around the Christmas tree, and aunts and uncles stood in the kitchen eating cookies and talking with each other. They looked up and waved as Brian’s sister walked the screen by them. “Hi Brian and Kim,” they called toward the computer. “Merry Christmas.”
We talked until our time ran out, and then we were swept through the whole scene again to say our good-byes.
“I love you, sweetie,” Brian’s mom said through the screen.
“I love you too, mom,” Brian replied, his voice cracking just a little.
“Merry Christmas and stay safe. Take care of each other.”
Brian glanced up at me. He didn’t even try to hide the pain. “We will mom, we miss you. Merry Christmas.”
Afterward we sat in silence for a minute, sipping our beers.
“I really needed that,” Brian said eventually.
When I looked up at him, his eyes were weary. “I know you did. I did too.”
Our waiter approached, and we thanked him. “It means a lot to us that we could make that call,” I told him.
He smiled. “It’s no problem at all. It is hard being away from family on Christmas.”
When we settled the bill, I pulled out the yellow envelope money and left an enormous tip. Brian and I didn’t discuss it; I just tucked the money in the checkbook and told him what I’d done. For once I didn’t overthink it, didn’t worry about how it might be received. Instead, as I set the yellow envelope gift down on the table, I said a silent thank you. The kind waiter had given us something that we needed more than anything: a little piece of home. It is the small kindnesses, so ripe and available yet so rarely exchanged, that turn ordinary interactions into miracles.
An hour later I handed my ticket to the man at the gate before boarding the plane that would take us to India. He flipped through my passport to find my VISA.
“When was your first time in India?” he asked.
“I’ve never been.”
He slapped my passport shut and looked up with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “Enjoy your stay.”
Other travelers had warned us that India either cracks you open or kicks you aside. To survive India one had to embrace it for what it was: an incredible, beautiful, hideous cauldron of humanity as stripped and exposed as a skinned deer. If we tried to control our experiences in India, if we tried to make sense of the chaos, we’d hate it. In order to love it we’d have to accept it just as it is.
In five days Brian and I were diverging. I’d climb into a rickshaw with two women I’d never met before to drive the length of India on some of the world’s deadliest roads. Brian would board a southbound train to God knows where. We’d agreed to meet up after the rickshaw race, hopeful that the distance between us would give us the clarity we needed to make sense of our relationship. And yet we had no guarantee that the other person would be there at the end of the Rickshaw Run. We’d given each other the freedom to do whatever needed to be done. Brian might decide to get on a plane home tomorrow, so might I.
Many hours later, we touched down in a wholly different world. India was a country that would shock and transform us, though we didn’t know that yet.
India
Chapter 9
Brian and I touched down at the Indira Gandhi International Airport and caught a taxi to the Delhi Train station. I stared out the window as we drove through the streets, surprised by the relatively light traffic and lack of chaos. We’d been so intimidated by India that, upon landing, we’d sat in the corner of the airport for hours, delaying our departure until the last minute possible. We’d heard stories of travelers being swarmed and harassed and scammed by touts the second they walked outside, but when we finally left the airport, Delhi felt no different than any other major city.
At the train station there were people everywhere, standing in crowds, sleeping in rows against the station walls, and hanging out of the windows of the trains as they arrived and departed. Everything smelled of urine and body odor and spices. We’d reserved two sleeper bunks on an overnight train to Jaisalmer, an ancient fort town southwest of Delhi, where the Rickshaw Run would begin. We wandered through the mass of people until we found our platform and took a seat on a metal bench to wait for our train.
Shoving my backpack between my knees, I watched as a man dressed like he’d stepped off the set of That ’70s Show hosed down the train tracks. He used the force of the water to push garbage from one side of the tracks to the other. Another man stood across from him and did the same thing. It was like watching a strange version of air hockey. The garbage passed back and forth between them, for what purpose I did not know.
Brian nudged me. “Kim, check it out.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw that at least two-dozen young Indian men had gathered around us in a semi-circle. When I looked up at them they jumped back in unison like they’d touched an electric fence.
I turned to Brian. “What the hell?”
“It’s like we’re animals in a zoo.”
“Say something to them,” I whispered.
Brian turned to the group and gave them a wide smile, exposing his teeth from beneath his bushy red beard. “Hello.”
The men erupted in laughter and wiggled their heads.
Brian looked back at me and raised his eyebrows. His eyes were so wide they looked cartoonish. “They’re just watching us,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Let’s just act natural and pretend they’re not here,” I offered. Pulling my Kindle from my backpack, I began reading, trying to ignore the forty-eight eyeballs that watched my every move.
A few minutes later our train pulled into the station. “Finally,” Brian said, letting out a hiss of air. “I don’t think I’ve ever gotten so much attention in my life.”
Slapping the leather cover of my Kindle shut, I ignored our audience, picked up my backpack, and followed Brian as he pushed his way onto the train.
We found our assigned sleeper bunks, and I crawled into the bottom one and drew the curtain. It was dirty—everything in India seemed to have a film of dust on it—but I pulled out my sleep sack and made myself comfortable. Almost immediately Brian began snoring above me. I tried to let the knocking of the train lull me to sleep, but my mind wouldn’t calm. A flutter rose in my chest. We were in India.
In my little bunk I laid in silence listening to the cockroaches scuttle across the floor and reading long into the night, leaving only to go to the bathroom to relieve myself through a hole in the bottom of the train, a process that for some reason delighted me. In my journal I marked our arrival. So, I’ve made it to India, I wrote, but then scratched out the sentence to revise it. We’ve made it to India. It is us, together, who have made it here.
Many hours later our train stopped in the ancient desert city of Jaisalmer. Weary-eyed from the long journey, strung-out yet wide-awake, we stepped onto the train platform. Scanning the crowd, I spotted two bohemian women amidst the sea of brown faces and recognized them as my Rickshaw Run teammates. I waved my arms above my head, and a look of recognition illuminated them.
“Hi, honey,” Lesley said in a charming Irish accent when I approached. “Nice to meet you in person, finally.”
“Nice to meet you too.”
Sarah smiled and leaned in to hug me. “Well, here we are,” she proclaimed, dropping her hands to her sides. “I suppose we best get on with it.”
• • •
Brian and I decided that he would stay in Jaisalmer until my departure on the Rickshaw Run. I craved my freedom and wished he would go, but I also clung to him and wanted him to stay. Existing in this emotional in-between was torture for both of us.
I felt massively guilty about sending Brian into India alone. There were certain things that he did not seem capable of doing on his own, and traveling India solo was one of them. But it had been his choice. He could have flown back to the states for a visit. He could have asked someone to join him abroad. He could have done anything he wanted, but he had decided to travel India on his own. He’d made his own plans, and I tried to let that fact absolve me of my guilt.
Lesley, Sarah, and I spent the days leading up to the Rickshaw Run test-driving the rick, and we discovered quite quickly that we were in trouble. For one thing, our rickshaw was prone to breakdowns. During our test-driving sessions we’d be puttering right along and then, inexplicably, our rick would sputte
r and die. Brian, who was very handy mechanically, tinkered around under the hood. Other rickshaw runners took a look too. But no one could figure out the cause of the breakdowns.
The other thing was, Indians drove on the left-hand side of the road. Lesley was Irish and Sarah Australian, two left-driving countries, but I drove on the right. Though I adapted to left-hand driving quickly, when encountering roundabouts, which seemed to be everywhere in lieu of stoplights, I’d panic over the manic merging—it felt like swan diving into a tank of hungry sharks—and inevitably enter the wrong way, straight into oncoming traffic. To my surprise, no one on the road seemed to think it out of the ordinary, but my teammates would scream, “WRONG WAY! WRONG WAY!” from the backseat of our crappy little coffin on wheels.
The eve of the Rickshaw Run was also the eve of the new year. Brian and I and my Rickshaw Run teammates gathered at the Jaisalmer Palace for the kickoff party. At midnight, the pulsing lights and blaring music suddenly cut out, and the grounds of the palace were engulfed in darkness. From the field behind us fireworks began to explode. Lesley clinked the green glass of her beer bottle to mine. “To our first full year of freedom,” she said.
Brian leaned over and kissed me. “I love you,” he whispered.
Pulling my head back I squeezed his hand. “I love you too.” Right then and there I decided that my New Year’s resolution would be to live the first rule of the yellow envelope: don’t overthink it. As Michele had suggested in her letter, I would listen to my soul and allow myself to be guided by the things that made me come alive. I sat back in my chair and watched the colorful blasts illuminate the sky, and I allowed myself to be happy without wondering what might come next. Many hours later when we walked back to our hotel under a pinprick of stars, I felt on the very verge of something big and true.
The following morning, the first day of 2013, seventy pimped-out rickshaws pulled away from the starting line at the Jaisalmer Palace and into the city streets, blasting music and honking horns. Looking up at the smoggy sky I said a little prayer. Please, don’t let us die. Then I thought of all of the painful stages between alive and dead and revised my prayer. Please, no accidents and no injuries. I took a deep breath. And if at all possible, no breakdowns either.