by Kim Dinan
But did I want it to work?
It was all so goddamned confusing. I had the urge to run straight into the ocean and swim toward the enormous glow of the moon, to listen to the embryotic swish of the waves, stare up at the stars, and let the salt of the water pound my body until life made sense again.
After taking a sip of my beer I said, “Brian, I had a lot of time to think during all of those hours in the rickshaw. But the truth is, I’m still confused.” I took a deep breath. “I wanted this so badly.” I waved my arm in the air to indicate all of it: travel, freedom, the time and space to craft a life I wanted for myself. “I just assumed once we hit the road I’d be happy and that we’d be happy together. I never even considered that it wouldn’t be that way.” I remembered the anxiety I used to feel back in Portland, how fearful I’d been that my future was already mapped out. I’d thought traveling would change all of that, and it had. But I’d just swapped one set of problems for another.
“But I’m not happier than I was before. Truthfully, I’m less happy. But I also feel closer to living the life that I want. And that confuses me, because if I’m closer to the life I want, shouldn’t I be happier?”
Brian stared off into the black ocean waves and did not respond.
“So much of my unhappiness I’ve blamed on you,” I continued. “Unfairly. During the Rickshaw Run I realized that my unhappiness doesn’t have anything to do with you. I love you, but that’s not what this is about.”
After the Rickshaw Run I’d called my parents from my hotel room to let them know I’d survived. Through the crackling static of Skype my dad had asked, “You’re on a journey of self-discovery, so what have you learned about yourself?”
“Dad!” I’d said. “That’s ridiculous!” His blunt statement had embarrassed me, but he’d been right of course. I was on a journey of self-discovery. In the beginning I hadn’t seen that, but I could see it now.
Breathing deeply once again, I dug my feet deeper into the sand.
“I just need to figure out who I am, Brian, who I am on my own without being defined by you, without relying on you. We’ve been together for so long. I can’t imagine myself without you. And that scares me because I’m afraid that I will never know who I am as an independent human being while we are together.”
When I looked over at him he would not meet my eye. It was such a beautiful evening, so much like the evening when we’d roamed the streets in Buenos Aires, back when things were just beginning to fall apart. Just like then, a large part of me wanted desperately to be content. But a more insistent piece of me kept pushing for the truth.
Brian let me take his hand. “I know this sucks. Maybe I’m asking too much by hoping you’ll stay here and wait while I figure it out. I don’t expect you to wait, if you don’t want to.”
Brian was still watching the ocean. His face remained unreadable.
“The thing is, I feel stuck in so many of my old ways. I want to grow. But I don’t know if that is something that I can do with anyone else, or if the only way I can do it is on my own.”
Brian blinked and turned his head toward mine. “Kim, have I ever asked you to be anyone other than who you are? Have I ever held you back from anything you wanted to do? Have I ever discouraged you from anything? I mean, I’m here, aren’t I? I’m sitting on a beach with you in India because you wanted to see the world. You just got back from driving a rickshaw through the goddamned country. Did you ever think about how that made me feel? How worried I was about you? And how jealous I was too? I would have liked an adventure like that.” Brian shook my hand from his and gripped his beer.
He was angry. Any normal person would be angry. But I was angry too. Because I didn’t want it to be the way it was. I wanted it to be easy. I wanted to be happy. But I’d ignored the truth, and it’d gotten me nowhere. This was the only other option.
“If I could just snap my fingers and have it back the way it used to be I’d do it in a second. But this is something we have to go through, I have to go through, so that, whatever happens, I know I faced it. I need to know that I didn’t just let life happen but that I chose the direction. I just need to Brian. I need to.”
Brian finished his beer and stood up to leave. I looked down at his meal; he hadn’t touched a bite of it. “There’s nothing I can say to that, Kim. You do what you need to do. But don’t forget who you’re dragging through the mud with you.”
• • •
Two weeks later Brian and I caught a taxi to the Goa airport in the early hours of the morning and stood around waiting for Wendy to arrive. She bounded through the exit doors and bellowed, “HELLO,” and I felt myself almost buckle with joy at seeing a familiar face after so many months among a crowd of strangers.
It’d been almost a year since I’d seen Wendy, and I was surprised at how rocked I was by her sudden appearance. In the whirlwind of the last crazy months, it felt like our entire life back home had been washed from the map. But here stood Wendy, flesh and blood, proof that it all still existed. Enfolding her small frame in my arms, I told her how great it was to see her. Then Brian and I ushered her toward our taxi.
The three of us shoved into the back seat. “Hello!” Wendy bellowed again. She tapped at the glass of the window. “Wow! India!
“How are you guys?” She gave me a look that I knew meant, We’ll talk all about that later. “I can’t believe I’m finally here! It’s so good to see you!”
“Put on your seatbelt,” I warned. “And hang on for dear life.” Our driver hit the gas, and the three of us shot backward as our driver sped south toward our temporary home.
An hour later the taxi dropped us in front of the apartment. “Wow, look at this place,” said Wendy as she stepped from the cab to look up at the bright-yellow building. “It’s so, sunshiny.”
I laughed. “Right? Very tropical.”
Behind us, a herd of dusty water buffalo were lumbering down the road toward an open field where they grazed each morning. Their rough and wrinkled skin looked prehistoric; their horns curled from the side of their heads like hooks.
“These are our neighbors,” I said, and fanned my hands at them. “Try not to get in their way.” Then I pointed to a red moped parked in front of our building. “That’s our scooter. Brian rented it so that we can drive to the nearby beaches.” From beneath a palm tree, a black and white dog, curled between two other dogs, raised her head and barked. “And that is Sheera. The other two are Stewie and Juan.”
“How do you know their names?”
“I don’t. But we’ve grown pretty fond of these little guys, so we named them.” I walked up to Sheera and scratched behind her ear. “They spend all day sleeping beneath this tree. We use Michele and Glenn’s yellow envelope money to feed them.” Wendy nodded. She knew all about the yellow envelope, had run dozens of miles with me my final week in Portland listening as I daydreamed aloud about all of the ways we might give the money away.
That afternoon, after Wendy had settled in, we plotted out a whirlwind tour of India. Since I was still trying to refuel from the Rickshaw Run, I would have been content to spend the three weeks of her visit lounging on the couch watching movies on my laptop. But Wendy had not flown all the way to India to stare at the white walls of my apartment. So two days later we were back at the airport to catch a flight to Delhi.
A crowd gathered at our departure gate. The swarm of bodies stood hip-to-hip and elbowed for position to board our plane. Wendy and I held back and watched the madness from a distance. “I’m so confused,” she said and looked down at her boarding pass. “We’ve got assigned seats, what’s the rush to get on the plane?”
I laughed and shrugged my shoulders. “I have wondered that many times. One thing I’ve learned is to try not to apply Western logic to Eastern thinking. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.”
Onboard I tracked down my seat. A large man sat near the aisle
in my row, and I scooted past him, folded myself next to the window, and stole a glance in his direction. He wore florescent hipster sunglasses, a long, embroidered sherwani jacket that looked like it’d been bedazzled by an over-sugared ten-year-old, and rings on all of his fingers. His long, straight hair hung down past his shoulders, and he was huge, easily six-foot-five with a body as big as a linebacker. He looked like a Bollywood star.
After shoving my bag beneath the seat in front of me, I dug out my Kindle and began to read. But the in-flight announcements came on, and I switched my Kindle off again. The man, seeing an opportunity for conversation, turned and introduced himself.
“Are you from America?” he asked.
“Yes. Are you from India?”
“Mumbai.” He ran his giant fingers elegantly through his hair. “I am a devotional singer. I travel all over India, and sometimes internationally, performing.”
“Are you traveling to a performance now?”
He shook his head purposefully. “No.” I waited for him to continue but he said nothing more.
Our plane rose. Outside of the window a layer of cloud swallowed up the thick green jungle below. When we emerged, the sky was blue, the ground a memory below us. Flying was not my forte, but I always loved the moment when the plane broke through the gray into a perfect, sunny sky. Back in Portland I’d think of it often during the endless days of winter rain. Somewhere up there, I’d tell myself, the sun is shining, and the sky is as blue as it is in early autumn.
Removing my journal from my carry-on bag, I began writing, trying to sort through my thoughts about Brian. It was so much easier for me to comb through my issues when we had physical distance between us. I’d grown tired of living in a state of upheaval. I wanted a resolution to this mess, so I’d write until some kind of truth popped through.
The devotional singer leaned over in his seat and began to read my scribbling. Shooting a look at him I snapped my journal shut. He held his hands out in front of him, inspecting his rings. “Tell me,” he said. “What do you think God is?”
Bringing up God was the Indian equivalent of asking someone back home what he or she did for a living, and it no longer surprised me when Indians wanted to talk philosophically. I shifted in my seat so that I could face him. “What do I think God is? That’s a complicated question, don’t you think?”
“No, I think it is very simple. God is vibrations. God is emotions. Whenever you feel something you are not far from God.”
“Huh,” I said. “Well if that is the case I’ve been very close to God lately.”
He smiled, pleased to hear it. “Now, let me ask you. What is religion?”
A beat of time passed and then he continued without waiting for an answer.
“I am Hindu, but what is that? I do not believe in caste, religion, or money. I believe in soul. The soul is what I believe in.”
Remembering the conversation I’d had with Carver way back in Peru, I told him, “Me too. I believe in the soul.”
Our plane began to bump with turbulence, and I gripped the armrests. The devotional singer looked unfazed. He turned toward me again and changed topics. “How old do you think I am?” He removed his sunglasses and folded them into his enormous hand.
“Thirty-eight?” I guessed.
“No, I am thirty.”
“Oh,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m really bad at guessing ages. How old do you think I am?”
He stared at me. “I think you are between forty and forty-five.”
Wincing, I instinctively touched at the corners of my eyes where the slightest of wrinkles was beginning to form. “No, I’m thirty-one. Wow, you think I look forty-five?”
He stared me squarely in the face. “I’m sorry. I did not mean to hurt you. Sometimes I am wrong.”
How easily those words flowed from his lips. Had I ever apologized so directly, so sincerely, to anyone in my life?
“Don’t worry about it,” I muttered, and touched the corners of my eyes again.
Directing my attention back to my journal, I laid my arm across the page to keep the devotional singer from reading it. A half hour later, the flight attendant delivered boxed lunches to us, and I opened mine and scanned the contents. Vegetarian. God bless India.
The singer picked up his sandwich and offered half to me, saying, “I think you have had hard times recently.”
Surprised by his gesture, I turned down his sandwich but ignored his remark.
He pointed to my journal. “May I show you something?”
“In my notebook?”
“Yes, I must write something down for you.”
Flipping to an empty page, I handed it to him. He nodded toward my pen. “I need that too.” I slid it across my tray table. He pinched it between his enormous fingers, then bent over my journal and wrote GOD IS NOWHERE.
“What does this say?” he asked.
Was this some kind of joke? Glancing behind me, I checked to see if I was being filmed by an Indian version of Punk’d, but no one was watching. “It says God is nowhere.”
“No!” he exclaimed. “Look again.”
My eyes scanned the paper again. “It definitely says God is nowhere.”
He picked up the pen again and drew a line through the last word. GOD IS NOW | HERE. “You see,” he said, and tapped his finger on the page. “It says God is now here. God is always here; it is just a matter of looking.”
“Ah,” I said. “Very clever.”
“No, not clever, just true. Kim,” he continued. “Challenges are from God. They are a test from God. We can’t learn and become without challenges.”
Had I told him my name? I scanned my clothes, my journal, and the bag at my feet to see if my name was visible, but it wasn’t.
“Are you a teacher?” I asked him.
“Oh noooo.” He drew out the ‘o’ in a long breath. “There is only one teacher. The rest of us are students.” He looked at me and stroked his long hair; the sunlight streamed through the window and glinted off of the rings on his fingers. “All is written,” he said. “God planned to put me in this seat next to you.”
• • •
The Taj Express train deposited Wendy and I in Agra. We shrugged off the touts pushing taxi rides and Taj Mahal tours and stepped into a small restaurant outside the western gate of India’s most famous landmark. I was quieter than usual, replaying my conversation with the devotional singer. How did he know my name?
We sat down at a table near the window. After ordering a banana lassi, I stared out at the street scene. Cows wandered aimlessly down the dusty alleyways and people on foot, in rickshaws, and on motorcycles zipped around them. I adored the reverence that Indians had for cows. How odd, I thought, the things we assign meaning to; something mundane to one person was holy to another.
Inside the restaurant, a group of Indian women were gathering at a table across from us. The flash of their colorful saris caught my eye, and I looked up at them. They were giggling at us.
Looking down at my shirt, I felt self-conscious. That morning I’d dressed in the nicest thing I owned, a hand-beaded tunic that I’d bought from a textile shop back in Barmer while Lesley, Sarah, and I were waiting for the mechanic to finish work on our rickshaw. Were the women making fun of me? A white woman in an Indian kameez, how funny! I blushed at the thought and wished I’d dressed in my Western clothes.
“So,” said Wendy. “How are you feeling?”
My head dropped into my hands. “I am so confused,” I told her. “I love Brian. But I’m not sure if I can become who I need to become unless I’m on my own.”
Wendy took a sip of her lassi. “All right,” she said, “then let me ask you this. Who do you need to become?”
“I—” I stopped to think about it. Who did I need to become? I began to speak again, and then stopped. “God,” I said finally. “I have n
o idea.”
My eyes were drawn back to the table of women. One of them stared at me. She smiled and called out, and I shifted in my chair, annoyed. I did not want to engage in yet another conversation with a stranger while I tried to sort through the biggest crisis of my life.
But she held my gaze and beamed the brightest smile. She had dark eyes, deep pools that danced like light on water, and I could see that she radiated a maternal kindness.
From across the room the woman spoke to me again and I cocked my head to the side like a dog. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I don’t know what you said.”
A girl sitting across from her spoke up. “That is my mother. She is speaking to you in Punjabi. We are from Punjab.”
“Oh,” I nodded distractedly. “Hello.”
“My mother just loves you. She is saying hello to you in our language.”
I repeated it back, the word. The woman laughed, and the rest of the table laughed with her.
Turning my attention back out the window, I watched a young boy chase a bicycle tire down the street, desperate for some uninterrupted time to think through my thoughts. Wendy’s question stomped through my brain. Who did I need to become? Who did I need to become?
From the corner of my eye, I watched the woman rise and approach our table. I shot a look at Wendy. Was she going to ask us for money? Try to sell us a tour? As I muttered a tentative hello, the woman reached down and cupped her hands around my chin like you might do to a child. She said to me slowly in lilted English, her palms warm against the cool of my cheeks, “You make me so happy.” Hap-E! The end of the word pronounced in an upswing, like a celebration.
Shocked by her touch, I stared right into her eyes. She stared back deeply into mine. “You make me so hap-e!” she said again.
And then she turned and walked away. My hand rose to my chin and I stared at the space next to our table that the woman had just occupied. My heart pounded, and tears welled in my eyes.