The Yellow Envelope

by Kim Dinan

  We drove for an hour in darkness before reaching a ramshackle town, too small to appear on our GPS, at the intersection of two dirt roads. A campfire burned, and we could make out the silhouettes of about a half dozen men warming their hands against the cold of the night.

  Sarah spoke up. “Should we stop?”

  “God,” I whispered. “I don’t know.” Scanning the village quickly, I looked for other women, but there were none.

  The men around the fire watched us, unmoving.

  In a lean-to structure near the side of the road a pot of chai burned over an open fire. We decided to stop, order some tea, and discuss our options. A middle-aged man in dusty gray pants and an even dustier gray shirt motioned for us to sit down. Sarah smiled at him and held up three fingers. “Chai, please. Namaste.” The man nodded.

  A single, dangling bulb hung from the ceiling. The exterior walls of the shop were made of woven branches like a child’s forest fort. The front of the structure opened to the road and a strip of corrugated metal hung as a roof.

  Another man, old and skinny, squatted over a low fire, cooking food. The smell of spice and curry made my stomach rumble and I realized that I was starving. The only thing I’d had to eat since leaving Barmer were a few packages of pineapple biscuits that I’d bought for the dogs.

  The man delivered our chai, and I pointed to the food cooking on the fire then drew my hand to my mouth. “Can we eat here?” I asked. The man gave another expressionless nod and shouted something toward the cook.

  We ate in silence, our fingers clinking lightly against the Thali plates as we scooped the food to our mouths with our hands. The meal was delicious, and as the warmth of it hit my stomach, a bone-deep exhaustion consumed me. Wearily, I looked out at where we’d parked Sunny on the side of the road, illuminated in a thin sheath of moonlight. I did not have the energy to climb back in that rickshaw and ride off into the cold, dark desert. Every ounce of me longed to stay exactly where I was, sitting cross-legged on a dusty lounger chair.

  But Sarah broached the topic of sleeping there for the night. “I’ll go talk to him,” she said, standing to make her way across the dirt floor.

  The temperature had dropped near freezing as we pulled our rickshaw behind the man’s shop for safekeeping. We dug around in our backpacks and pulled on all of our warm clothing. The sky above us was a crisp canvas slate. Lesley waddled to the front of the rickshaw and looked down at her padded body. “I have to pee,” she said, and our laughter burst into the quiet night.

  When we returned to the chai stand, the man was laying pads on the thatched recliners we’d just eaten on and heavy blankets for us to sleep under. Standing for a minute, I watched him. He arranged our beds as if he’d been expecting us. But I knew that he did not keep extra bedding just for guests. Somewhere, his family must have been going without.

  Feeling guilty for his help, I considered declining the blankets but did not know how. Then I remembered the man on the bus on the way to Puno who’d given Brian and me his CD and how we accepted his gift in the way that we hoped our yellow envelope gifts would be received. This offering, too, I had to graciously accept. So I caught the man’s eye and smiled. Then I placed my hands together and gave a little bow, trying to convey my thankfulness.

  Uncurling my sleeping bag liner, I burrowed inside it for extra warmth, then pulled the heavy blanket up to my shoulders and the thin fabric of the liner over my face like a veil. Earlier, we had stacked our backpacks on an empty bed that ran parallel to the foot of our beds. From beneath my sleeping bag liner I watched, confused, as the man picked them up and placed them on the floor. Then he sat down on the bed and prepared himself for sleep. He planned to wait out the cold at our feet, I realized with amazement.

  My eyes fluttered closed. Never in my life had I been unsure of where I would sleep for the night. Even on weekend road trips around the Pacific Northwest I’d book hotel rooms weeks in advance, operating under the assumption that if I didn’t stick my hands in things it would all go to hell. Why had I always assumed that life, left to its own devices, would not play out in my favor? Why had I never before trusted that the world might take care of me?

  It seemed a million years ago since we’d left Jaisalmer, but it was only yesterday. It seemed two million years ago that my life was coming apart in South America, but it had only been a week. And my life back in Portland, where I owned a house and worked in a cubicle, where Michele had passed the yellow envelope across the table to me? It felt as though that life had never existed at all. An eon might have transpired in the few days since Brian and I landed in Delhi. I’d lived a lot of years walking down the wrong roads, and those days had compacted like the folds of an accordion, into an inch of time. Now everything expanded. My life was wailing like a beautiful prayer, the moments stretching into hours, the days to years. I could see now that it was possible to live a long life poorly, or a short life well, and that at any moment one might shift their position and, after years of hibernation, decide to crawl out of the den and live.

  The morning dawned gray and cold as snow. The three of us folded our blankets and walked to the front of the chai shop to order a thermos of tea. Out on the dirt street a litter of yellow puppies tumbled over each other. Lesley and I fed them pineapple biscuits and they nipped at our heels for more.

  Sarah paid the man for the chai and food with our collective pot of money and headed out to our rickshaw. I followed closely behind. “I’m going to give him some yellow envelope money,” I told her.

  She hoisted her backpack onto the rack atop the rickshaw and turned to frown a little. “I wouldn’t. I tried to give him extra money when I paid for our meal, and he wouldn’t take it. I’m worried I might have offended him.”

  It was my biggest fear when it came to giving away the yellow envelope money. In the United States I intrinsically understood our culture of giving. I knew when it was appropriate to give, what to say while giving, and how much was acceptable. But outside of my own culture, the rules were different.

  “It’s tricky,” I said, thinking of the couple with the cow in Ecuador, the man on the bus in Peru. “I guess I won’t then.”

  We climbed into Sunny, optimistic that she would start. Lesley turned the ignition, and miraculously it sputtered to life. We pulled onto the street, leaned out of the rickshaw and waved, shouting thank you as we drove away. The man stood in the street and watched us go.

  Chapter 10

  Driving through India with two women I’d never met before was strange. We barely knew each other, yet we’d been thrown together into an intense and physically intimate situation. During the day, we sat for hours in the rickshaw, close enough to touch. At night we shared beds. We talked about ourselves a bit, but we also existed in our own silos. And while on some level I hoped that we would become the best of friends, chatting like we’d known each other forever through a one thousand five hundred-mile, girls-only road trip, I was equally okay when it became evident that it would not be that way.

  Because Sarah and Lesley had both explored India extensively, at times I felt like a child traveling with her parents. Few things ruffled Lesley’s feathers, so I adopted her laid-back attitude. Sarah naturally took control, so I sat back and let her make decisions. For the first time since my trip began, I could simply exist without feeling like it was necessary to stay on my toes or worry about making decisions that would please Brian. I really and truly stopped overthinking it. It was glorious.

  We arrived in Udaipur, a beautiful tourist town sometimes referred to as the “Venice of the East” or, less dramatically, the “City of Lakes,” hoping to find a guesthouse and settle down for sixteen whole hours after four days of driving on India’s maniacal roads.

  Somehow I managed to weave us through the dense city traffic, winding along single-lane alleyways best suited for pedestrians and cows. We ended up at a lakeside overlook with a view of the Lake Palace,
a sprawling luxury hotel plopped on its own private island. It was stunning, but it’s not like we could sleep there.

  So we flagged down a rickshaw driver and asked him to lead us to a more affordable guesthouse. He nodded enthusiastically and then took off like his ass was on fire. I chased after him, driving much too fast in order to keep up.

  Which is how I hit a motorcycle. A parked motorcycle. Sunny made a terrible crunching sound as she scraped against the bike. When I realized what had happened I hit the brakes, blocking traffic, and screamed “Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.” My mind flashed to a scene from the novel Shantaram where a driver responsible for a traffic accident was promptly pulled from his vehicle and beaten.

  Cussing, I sat in the driver’s seat and waited for an angry mob to descend. Sarah jumped from the rickshaw to check the damage and returned with the news that the accident had sounded worse than it actually was. The motorcycle looked fine, she assured me, and our rickshaw was undamaged too.

  So I drove away. Quickly. Because not only had I just crashed a bright-orange rickshaw into somebody’s motorcycle, but I’d done so without carrying my International driver’s license or my Oregon driver’s license, both of which I’d managed to leave in Brian’s backpack before we parted ways in Jaisalmer.

  The rickshaw driver paused ahead of me, and I caught up to him again, screaming for him to slow down before I killed myself, my teammates, someone else or, God forbid, a cow. My hands held the wheel in a white-knuckled death grip, and my heart slammed into my breastbone from the pure stress of it all.

  Finally, the rickshaw driver pulled into a claustrophobic alley and pointed to a two-story guesthouse with a blue door. We nodded thank you, abandoned Sunny on the side of the road, and carried our bags to our room. Forty-five minutes later, Sarah remembered that we hadn’t paid the driver for his time. She ran outside to find him leaning against his rickshaw, chatting on his phone, completely unbothered by the wait.

  In the shower I unsuccessfully tried to scrub the funk and road grease from my arms and face. After changing into clean clothes, I wandered over to a coffee shop across the street where Sarah and Lesley had already claimed a table.

  Thoughts of Brian preoccupied me. He’d emailed to say that after I’d left him in Jaisalmer he’d gone on a camel safari into the desert, and it’d given him a lot of time to think. But he hadn’t elaborated on what that meant.

  I missed him. It felt good to miss him. The truth of what he’d said in Argentina became clear to me. He couldn’t be the person I wanted him to be because no one could be that person. The real problem was that I wasn’t the person I wanted to be.

  But I was becoming her. I was proud that I’d had the guts to follow my heart and take this trip. And though it was brutally hard, I was also proud that Brian and I were no longer ignoring the problems that plagued us. But what if Brian discovered something different? What if time and distance helped him to see that I’d been unfair and unpredictable for far too long and life was easier without me?

  A strong feeling told me that I didn’t want to lose Brian. But an even stronger part of me was okay with any outcome. The thing I cared about most was that whatever happened in the future was real and true.

  From across the table Lesley spoke and pulled me from my thoughts. “You know what? Driving in India is a metaphor for life.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Well, as we are well aware, driving here is just crazy. There are rickshaws, cars, buses, bicycles, motorbikes, people, dogs, and cows in the street.”

  “Don’t forget the elephants and camels,” said Sarah.

  “And elephants and camels too. It’s the biggest headache trying to keep up with it all. The traffic flows in a million directions; it seems impenetrable, but then, somehow, a little spot opens up, and we make it through.”

  • • •

  A few hours later Sarah realized she couldn’t find her phone. Losing an expensive phone is a pity under any circumstance, but a flat-out emergency given our current state. We’d been using the GPS on that phone to find our way around India. Without it, we were pretty sure we’d end up in Pakistan or, at the very least, crying on the side of the road as we tried to navigate the chaotic madness of every Indian city.

  We tore through our bags and hotel room and scoured the rick, but the phone had disappeared.

  “The only thing I can think is that the phone fell off of my lap when I got out to check the damage on that motorcycle.” Sarah said.

  It sounded probable. Lesley suggested we return to the scene of the crime. “Maybe the phone’s still there?” she said.

  “I’ll go with you,” I told her, but a voice inside my head quipped: There’s not a chance in hell we’ll find that phone.

  We retraced our route through the alleyways, dodging the same crazy traffic on foot that we’d encountered hours before in the rickshaw. I was weary about returning to the accident scene but even wearier about driving another one thousand two hundred miles without GPS. Back in Portland, I’d often get lost driving to Wendy’s house even though I’d been there a hundred times. To put it mildly, I was navigationally challenged. Without the help of modern technology, I’d be useless driving to Kerala.

  Luckily, Lesley did not suffer from the same condition. Somehow she managed to lead us back to the location of my hit-and-run. We searched the area where we suspected the phone had gone missing, but no phone, smashed or otherwise, graced the shit-strewn street.

  Because really, even if the phone had slipped out of the rickshaw, what were the chances it had survived the fall? And even if it had survived the fall, what were the chances that it was just lying on the ground waiting for us to find it? And if someone else had found it, how would they track us down to return it? Besides, the phone was worth four hundred dollars, more money than many of the locals made in a month. Finding that phone was like finding gold.

  But just to cover our bases, we asked a few of the nearby shopkeepers if anyone had turned in a phone. They all shook their heads no. By the time we reached the third shop I knew we were wasting our time.

  “Has anyone turned a phone in to you?” Lesley asked. “We lost it this morning.”

  “No, no, not to me,” said the shopkeeper. “Were you here earlier, in an orange rickshaw?”

  “Yes, we were,” I said with a bit of skepticism. It felt a little too good to be true.

  He pointed across the street. “Go, to the police station; someone put a phone there.”

  Swiveling at the waist, I glanced at a crumbling, nondescript building. “That’s the police station?”

  “Yes, that’s it,” the man said, wagging his head up and down.

  Lesley shrugged. “It’s worth a shot.”

  Inside the station, six policemen eyed us. We stood in the doorway feeling awkward and out of place. Finally, a man seated behind a desk spoke up. “What is your purpose here?” he asked. Lesley launched into our story, explaining about the phone.

  The men listened, expressionless, and then spoke to each other in Hindi. “Is it a Motorola phone?” asked the stone-faced deskman.

  We nodded, hardly believing it possible. “Yes, it’s black.”

  “Go to the room next door,” barked the deskman.

  Next door we sat in two metal chairs while Lesley explained the whole story again. Again, we were asked to describe the phone. Again, the officers discussed among themselves in Hindi. Again, we were sent next door, back to where we’d come from.

  “Why does it seem like they don’t want to give us the phone?” whispered Lesley.

  Fear thumped against my ribs like a caged gorilla. I knew why. I’d hit a motorcycle and driven away. The shopkeeper witnessed my crime and reported it to the police. Now I’d stumbled obliviously right into their trap. No one had our phone. This was a ploy to arrest me.

  Back in the first room the men made phone calls
and talked in hushed voices to each other. Lesley and I sat in silence, our hands folded neatly in our laps while I calculated my next move. It was probably too late to escape, but maybe I could bribe them?

  The door to the station opened and two serious-looking policemen entered holding hands, an Indian expression of friendship that never failed to disarm me. Those are the men that they’ve sent to arrest me, I thought. Following the two men with my eyes, I barely noticed the tiny old man in a brown sweater that trailed behind them. Lesley nudged me and pointed to the old man. In his hand he held Sarah’s phone.

  “Oh my God,” I said to Lesley. “I cannot believe it.”

  Lesley smiled like she’d expected it all along. “Another miracle upon miracle from the people of India,” she said.

  The old man handed the phone to us, and we hopped up out of our chairs. Then the whole room of sober-faced policemen erupted into cheers. They clapped and smiled and wobbled their heads like we’d just walked into our surprise birthday party. Lesley and I blushed and thanked the old man over and over again. He just nodded at us, smiling.

  We headed back to our guesthouse, the phone clutched in my hand. Bells chimed from a nearby temple, and a call to prayer echoed over the city. Something inside of me vibrated like a thrummed string. I was still a free woman, getting freer by the day.

  Back at the coffee shop we relayed the story to Sarah. While telling her about the old man who’d found her phone it dawned on me that I should have given him some yellow envelope money. In the moment, I’d been so consumed by my own deluded thoughts of jail time that I hadn’t even thought of it.