The Yellow Envelope

by Kim Dinan

  “Yeah, I get that. But what harm would we have done?” People in Nepal and India would never bother with such rules, I thought, feeling nostalgic for the chaos.

  We walked along the covered corridor and looked for a place to park it for the night. My backpack felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. In these conditions I would not get a minute of sleep.

  But then, like a stream in a desert, a miracle appeared. “A food court!” I exclaimed as we walked by a cavernous room lined with restaurant stalls. “Let’s go in there. Maybe it has air conditioning.”

  The food court smelled like fried chicken and, though I did not eat chicken and thought, in fact, that chicken was downright foul, my stomach grumbled at the smell. After I dropped my backpack into a booth, I laid my head down on the table and buried my face in my arms. Given the airport policy with which we were already acquainted, I doubted that we were allowed to loiter in the food court either. But I was willing to push the boundaries until they kicked us out. The teenage employee at the fried chicken shop stared at us from behind a rotating spit of poultry but said nothing. “Let’s sleep in shifts,” I suggested to Brian. “One of us has to stay awake to watch the bags.”

  “You go first. I’m too hungry to sleep.”

  Tossing and turning in the uncomfortable plastic booth, I pulled a sleep mask over my eyes and plugged my ears—my airport sleeping ritual—but my neck screamed and my back ached. Every muscle in my body felt heavy with exhaustion, but sleep eluded me. Finally, I sat up and sighed in surrender.

  “What time is it?”

  Brian looked at his watch. “Almost 3:00 a.m.”

  “Ugh.” I looked up at the chicken stand. It remained open, and the teenage boy was slumped in a chair and scrolling through his phone. Who bought fried chicken at 3:00 a.m.? “I’m going to the bathroom,” I told Brian.

  The ladies room was located down a long hallway lit with florescent bulbs. As I lumbered down it, blinking in the harsh light, I noticed a door, half ajar, with a mound of shoes piled in front of it. A sign above the door said Musholla Room. Inside, a dozen sleeping bodies were curled up on the ground.

  I practically sprinted back to Brian. “I found the sleeping room!”

  “The sleeping room?”

  “Yeah. Follow me.” I began gathering up our bags. “It’s by the bathroom.”

  We added our shoes to the pile outside of the door and tiptoed into the room. Four dim overhead lights cast a weak glow on the sleeping figures before us. A partition split the room in two. In the silence I pointed to a space between two sleeping women large enough to fit us both. “There,” I whispered.

  A woman curled up in the corner of the room raised her head to look at us. She lay it down and then looked up again, eyes bulging, as if she couldn’t believe what she saw. But I was used to the attention that Brian’s bright red beard drew, and I was way too tired to assign much meaning to her wide-eyed staring. We rolled out our sleep sacks, crawled inside, and fell immediately asleep.

  It felt like only ten minutes had passed when my sleepy subconscious registered a sound. A man was singing loudly. How rude, I thought, can’t he see we’re sleeping in here? I pulled my sleep sack over my head and rolled away from the noise. The singing continued. “Damn it,” I grumbled and raised my head to see what the hell was going on.

  The entire side of the room we were sleeping on had cleared of—what I noticed with dawning horror—had been all women. On the other side of the partition a dozen men were kneeling on mats and a man stood among them and called out a prayer. I blinked as the situation fully registered in my mind. The men were praying. We’d fallen asleep in some kind of airport mosque.

  Bubbles of panic burst inside of me as I realized the full extent of our mistake. Not only had Brian broken a religious tradition by sleeping on the side of the room designated for women, and not only had we both, I was sure, defied another religious rule by sleeping next to each other in a prayer room, but now I was the sole woman left in the room occupied by a dozen praying men. I shook Brian awake, frantic. “Brian!” I whispered. “Wake up!”

  “What is it?” he mumbled, and rolled onto his side.

  “Get up now,” I hissed. “We’re sleeping in a prayer room.”

  Brian’s eyes blinked open. “What?”

  “Look!”

  He sat up and looked toward the praying men who were now all on their knees, bent at the waist, kneeling toward mecca.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “Oh shit.”

  I scrambled out of my sleep sack and balled it in my fist. Brian did the same. We fumbled around, making an extraordinary amount of noise in our haste, hefting our backpacks onto our backs and gathering our day packs in our arms. And then we fled the room, stepping over three praying men, while mumbling, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  Just outside of the door we dug through the pile of shoes to find ours. Grabbing mine, I fled down the hallway, but when I reached the food court I turned to see Brian still bent in front of the door trying to jam his feet into his shoes.

  “Brian!” I hissed. “What are you doing?”

  He looked up at me, half awake.

  “Just pick up your shoes and get out of there!”

  “Oh my God,” Brian said when we’d stepped through the doors of the food court into the soft light of dawn.

  “You slept on the women’s side! We slept next to each other! It was a prayer room!” I blurted, unsure of which embarrassing fact to freak out about first. I buried my face in my hands. “I thought it was a sleeping room. I am such an idiot!”

  Brian dropped his backpack and bent down to tie his shoes. “I cannot believe that just happened.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Oh God, I feel so guilty,” Brian moaned. “I must have made those women feel so uncomfortable.”

  “I know! And can you imagine what the men must have thought when they saw me? Obviously I wasn’t supposed to be there. All of the other women had left.”

  “This would be a good time to have an invisibility cloak,” said Brian, as he slung his backpack onto his shoulders.

  “Hopefully they’ll let us into our terminal now. We need to get as far away from that room as possible.”

  A few hours later we sat at our gate waiting to board our flight to Bali. Brian stared off into the distance, eyes glazed, replaying the events of the morning in his head.

  “The more I think about it the worse it gets,” he said.

  “I know,” I agreed. “I mean, if those men were devout enough to pray at an airport then I’m pretty sure my presence was practically sacrilegious. Why didn’t someone wake us up? Why didn’t one of those women tell us you were on the wrong side of the room?”

  I wanted to melt into the floor. All morning I’d been unable to raise my head and meet anyone’s eye, sure that every single person looking our way had seen our faux pas in the prayer room. I felt both humiliated and guilt-stricken. We hadn’t meant to be disrespectful. I buried my head in my hands again. “And just when I felt like we’d finally figured out this traveling thing.”

  Our flight was announced over the loudspeaker, and Brian and I sheepishly took our place in line. As we inched closer to the jet bridge, I noticed a rectangular plastic box, about waist high, filled halfway with money. A sign said that we could donate our unused foreign currency to a charitable cause. I dug out the few paltry coins left over from our Coca-Cola dinner and dropped it guiltily in the box, wishing I had one hundred dollars to shove in there. It wouldn’t have mattered if I gave our money or yellow envelope money, I just wished I had something, anything, to hand over as penance for our guilt.

  • • •

  Our kamikaze taxi driver jerked down the twisting roads of Bali, hitting the brakes at random for no perceivable reason at all. Brian stared intensely at the windy road we were barreling down, and I silently prayed for him to
hold it together. He’d barfed on buses and in taxis all over the world, and this was the single worst ride we’d experienced. In a gesture of solitude, I patted his knee, and he gave me a quick, pale-faced grimace meant to convey that I should not touch him under any circumstances until we were out of the taxi.

  “Do you think this is payback for the prayer room?” I joked, but he just fixed a laser stare at the road ahead of us and ignored me.

  I turned my head away from him, too nervous to watch his demise. Even I felt like rolling down the window and hurling into the intense green foliage that rushed by outside.

  We drove through village after village of palm trees, rice paddies and roadside shops selling Buddha statues in all shapes and sizes. There was not much break in the development, just shop upon shop hocking woodcarvings and rock carvings and furniture and handicrafts.

  Our taxi driver finally dropped us on the main street of Ubud, the cultural capital of Bali. Other travelers had told us how popular Ubud was with Westerners, but I was still shell-shocked by just how touristy it really was. It seemed like there were spas on every corner, vegetarian restaurants, yoga studios, twenty-dollar T-shirt stands, chakra-readers, and crystal-sellers. It was like a shopping shrine to the New Age, very different than the spiritual Hindu paradise I’d been dreaming about when we bought our tickets in Nepal.

  We slung our backpacks onto our backs and walked the side streets, stopping at guesthouses to check availability, but they were all full.

  “There isn’t a free guesthouse in all of Ubud,” Brian said after our sixth failed attempt.

  “Dammit, I know.” I stopped in the middle of the street to readjust my backpack. Walking in tropical weather with a forty pound potato sack strapped to my back never failed to put me in a crappy mood. And to top it off, I still wore my winter clothes from Kathmandu. “What should we do?” I was so hungry and hot and exhausted that I just wanted to sit down on the curb and refuse to go one step farther like a toddler throwing a tantrum.

  Just then a motorcycle weaved by us and skidded to a stop fifty feet beyond. An old woman sat sidesaddle on the back of it. “You need guesthouse?” she yelled.

  “Yes!” we yelled back in unison.

  Brian shot me a look that said, how the hell did that happen? I shrugged my shoulders and laughed. After my experience on the Rickshaw Run I’d begun to rely on the serendipitous nature of these things.

  The woman hopped off the motorcycle, and it sped away like her only intention had been to find us.

  “Did we interrupt you?” I asked, and when she didn’t understand I said, “Were you going somewhere?”

  She flapped her hand to wave off the question. “To temple. I go later.”

  She motioned for us to follow her. She could not have been more than five feet tall and her flip-flops slapped on the pavement as she wound her way through the walled alleyways back to her guesthouse.

  When we reached her home she showed us a room with a queen-sized bed covered in mosquito netting, a bathroom, a sink, and a lopsided ceiling fan to circulate the heavy air. A patio off the room faced a dense, buzzing jungle. We accepted the room and threw our bags down on the floor. My cotton shirt dripped with sweat. “Where can we buy food?” I asked, nearly desperate with hunger.

  “Food? You relax. I make you something.”

  “You will? Thank you so much.”

  She waved her hand my way again. “No problem.”

  Ten minutes later she returned with two perfect omelets. I devoured mine in less than five bites. Then Brian flipped the switch for the overhead fan. As it creaked to life we crawled into bed and slept for sixteen hours straight.

  • • •

  The following day we hit the streets of Ubud determined to find out why everyone loved Bali. We walked the windy streets over to the main stretch of town filled with restaurants, juice shops, and jewelry stores. It felt like everyone was trying to sell us something. Taxi drivers yelled out a nonstop prattle of “TAXI TAXI TAXI TAXI. YOU NEED TAXIIIII?”

  Ubud had a split personality. Nearly every home had intricate stone temples in their front yards where locals prayed and left offerings first thing in the morning. When I’d stepped onto the patio of our own guesthouse upon waking, I’d seen that the guesthouse owner had placed a tray of delicate flowers and burning incense near our door. Businesses also placed offerings, colorful flowers and fruit wrapped in palm leaves, in front of their shops each day. The temples and offerings were beautiful and evoked a sense of holiness. Yet at the same time, walking down the streets felt like one big hustle as we fought off a constant barrage of pushy taxi drivers and restaurant and shop owners. I felt like a blinking dollar sign with legs and a passport.

  Near the edge of town, where development trickled into rice paddies, we ducked into a restaurant to escape a particularly persistent taxi driver who had stalked us for blocks trying to sell us a tour. We slumped into a table under a ceiling fan, and I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, trying to quell the growing frustration I felt at the entire island population.

  A petite woman with dark hair to her shoulders and wrists the size of bird bones approached and took our order. “From Australia?” she asked.

  “No, America.”

  “Oh! Far away!” she exclaimed. “Honeymoon?”

  Brian and I chuckled. “No, we’ve been married for six years.”

  “Long time!” she exclaimed again. “You have kids?”

  “Nope,” said Brian at the same time I piped, “Not yet!”

  She looked from Brian to me. “Sound like you need discuss!” She laughed at herself. “What you do? For money?” I smiled awkwardly and looked at Brian. He snickered at her directness.

  “I’m a writer,” I said.

  Our waitress grinned widely. “Oh, Eat, Pray, Love!” she cried. “You write about my shop!”

  Smiling, I said, “Maybe.”

  Her restaurant was blissfully empty, and I would gladly face intrusive questions about my personal life if it meant I could escape, even temporarily, the harassment that awaited us just beyond the doors.

  The waitress returned with a tray of drinks and set it down in the middle of our table. “This one for me,” she said, and held up a smoothie. She leaned toward us and sipped from her straw. “Tomorrow,” she said, more of a demand than a request, “you come to my house. We have new temple. We have party for temple.”

  Oh God, I thought, not her too. I threw a look at Brian, hoping that he’d bat down her advances.

  He looked back at me and raised his eyebrows. What should we do?

  I shook my head no.

  “Uh, I don’t know,” he finally said. “I think we might be busy tomorrow.”

  She threw her head back and laughed like that was the most hilarious thing she’d ever heard. “No, no. Trust me. This better!”

  Brian requested the bill and she handed it over. “My nephew Nyoman pick you up tomorrow. Eleven in the morning.” She gave the address of the local supermarket and waved as we walked out the door, cheerfully ignoring the fact that we’d not actually agreed to go.

  “What happened in there?” I asked Brian as we walked back to our guesthouse. “Did we just agree to go to our waitress’s house tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Do you think we should go?”

  “Do you?”

  Positioning my body away from the busy road, I stopped walking and squinted up into the sunlight toward him. “I don’t know…”

  “We should go,” Brian said, making up his mind. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, we could do something culturally and religiously insensitive and offend her entire family like we did in the Musholla Room.”

  Brian laughed. “No! We learned from our mistake. Let’s go. When will we get a chance like this again?”

&n
bsp; He was right. “Okay, let’s do it.” I slipped my hand in his, and we retreated to our guesthouse for the rest of the day.

  Chapter 17

  The next morning, we stood in the parking lot of the supermarket waiting for Nyoman to pick us up. It dawned on me as we scanned the crowd looking for someone who looked like they were looking for someone, that the whole undertaking was completely stupid. We had no idea what Nyoman looked like or what kind of car he drove or if our waitress had even been serious.

  “This is a bad idea,” I said to Brian as 11:00 a.m. slid into 11:15, and there was still no sign of Nyoman. “We should get out of here. At least we tried.”

  But at that moment, a tattooed, long-haired man screeched his white minivan to a halt right in front of us and leaned his head out of the window.

  “Nyoman?” I asked.

  “Uh, yeah, I’m Nyoman,” said Nyoman. He looked like the kind of dude that might pierce the navel of your underaged best friend in a back alley or steal your Honda Civic, and I hesitated for a second. He reached into the back seat and pushed the door open. “Get in.”

  Nyoman sped through the busy streets of Ubud, past the restaurant where we’d met the waitress, and into the open countryside beyond. Ten minutes later he turned off the paved road onto a dirt driveway. “We’re here,” he said. “I’ve got clothes for you to wear inside the temple.” The doors of the minivan popped open behind me.

  We climbed out of the van, and Nyoman handed us each a sarong and a sash to tie around our waists. He plunked a headdress down on Brian’s head and then walked off in the direction of the waitress’s house. It took a second for us to realize that we were supposed to follow him.

  Once inside our waitress greeted us. “You here!” she smiled.

  “We here!” I said. “Thank you for inviting us.”

  A beautiful child offered us peanuts and some kind of mushed vegetable wrapped in a banana leaf. Briefly, I looked down to accept it, and when I raised my head again, our waitress had disappeared into the crowd.

  We entered a courtyard between three small buildings. A row of plastic red chairs lined the entryway like spectators along a parade route. The whole place smelled of incense, and the sound of banging drums and dinging xylophones filled the air. Underneath a thatched roof of dried palm leaves a concrete temple blazed the color of fire, and elaborate carvings that looked like dragon’s breath were etched around the window frames. In the center of the courtyard, two traditional Balinese dancers dressed in colorful costumes and bug-eyed masks stomped a wild, entrancing dance beneath the open sky.