Over the course of the evening, we figured out who was who: siblings, cousins, in-laws. Sumer or Sonali would point out someone and offer a tidbit of gossip. I was proud of CJ and Sophie for their social adaptability. They spent much of the evening having fun with a flamboyant cousin of the groom. We arrived home after midnight and took a group photo with all of us dressed up. Sumer poured us a nightcap and deconstructed the evening, parsing the politics, the family history, and other peculiarities surrounding the impending wedding.
Katrina had finished her leishmaniasis treatment in Germany. She reported to us that everything had gone as well as possible. Once the doctor cleared her to travel, she and Kati flew to Nepal. The two of them planned to travel through India and Sri Lanka before eventually meeting up with us. We gave Katrina the choice of where that rendezvous would happen. She picked the Republic of Georgia, which meant that we now had an end point for our journey. We would meet Katrina and Kati in Tbilisi, travel together in Georgia, and then head home.
Meanwhile, Sophie’s friend Isabel arrived in Mumbai for her spring break. She spent several days with us at the Shankardass home before flying with our family to the south of India for a beach vacation. India’s southern region is more tropical and slow-paced than the north. We stayed in the city of Kochi at a little resort on a beach at the end of a long dirt road. We rented several little guest cottages, which were arrayed around a green lawn with a big open-aired dining room in the middle. We walked on the beach and swam and rented bicycles to explore the meandering lanes around the resort. Mostly, though, we relaxed. At one point Leah and I looked up from the dining area and spotted CJ on the lawn trying to break open a coconut. He was throwing it against the ground over and over, like some kind of semi-intelligent animal with a toy. “That boy needs some other kids to play with,” Leah said.
Such an opportunity soon presented itself. On one of our walks, we came upon a group of boys and girls roughly CJ’s age, playing cricket. We stopped to watch and the cricket players urged CJ to join them. He batted for a while, and not terribly. And then he bowled (the equivalent of pitching in baseball). This was more unpredictable, though the other kids cheered his modest successes. Leah and I left CJ there: playing pick-up cricket on a small lane in a remote area outside Kochi.
As we relaxed in South India, two very different writing projects were coming to fruition. The first was CJ’s paper on deforestation. Our homeschooling efforts were not always exemplary, but I felt strongly that CJ needed to be able to write decently before he started high school. His outline for the paper was excellent. He and I agreed on a deadline for a rough draft. The second writing project was my novel, for which an end was also in sight. (I came up with the ending while sitting on the sofa in Sumer and Sonali’s Mumbai apartment.) My goal was to have a complete draft before we touched down in Boston, and we now we knew exactly when that would be. Sophie needed to be home to take the SATs on June 3. We booked a flight for all of us from Tbilisi to Boston.
Our one adventure in Kochi featured renting a houseboat to cruise the waterways of the region, which are famously picturesque. The houseboats are essentially floating guesthouses with a small crew, including a chef. Each houseboat has TripAdvisor reviews, just like a hotel or restaurant. Leah studied the reviews and booked a boat for the five of us. Remarkably, chartering our own houseboat fit comfortably in the budget, which was now back on track thanks to low prices in Asia and the Shankardass hospitality. We went to the dock at the appointed time and met the proprietor of our houseboat, who reminded me of the Dev Patel character in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. He proudly showed us around: three staterooms with air-conditioning and a shaded deck with couches and a dining table at the front of the boat. We cast off and began motoring slowly through the channels, listening to Hindi music and watching life on shore go by.
The waterways are narrow, which meant we were near to land but could observe the places we were passing relatively unobtrusively. I sat on the deck shooting photos: men fishing; students walking to school; women washing pans; bicyclists riding on paths parallel to the water—all with the colors of southern India behind them. We ate delicious South Indian meals at the outdoor table, enjoying the cool breeze generated by the steady puttering of our houseboat.
The long trip from Kochi back to Mumbai was less peaceful. It began with a short auto-rickshaw ride to the bus station. From there, we planned to catch an express bus to the train station, where we would board an overnight train to Mumbai. We had spent a relaxing beach holiday together in South India. Now it was time to make the deliberately less relaxing train journey to Mumbai. These were the tickets we had booked a month earlier in Calcutta when the travel agent had advised us repeatedly to fly.
To recap: If everything went well, our journey would be rickshaw, bus, overnight train.
Everything did not go well.
The rickshaw dropped us at the bus station, which was a small open-air building on a busy road. None of the signs were in English, including the lettering on the buses. The temperature was unpleasantly hot, even in the shade. Leah had purchased tickets online for the “super-fast” bus, as opposed to the less direct “fast” bus. Buses were pulling into the station every few minutes. It was not clear how we were going to figure out which one would get us to the rail station. Leah asked an attendant at the information desk for guidance. He told her that our bus would be red and would depart at ten o’clock.
Not long after that, a red bus rolled into the departure area. We rushed to the door of the bus and asked the driver, “Train station?” He nodded yes, and we climbed aboard. There was air-conditioning and space for our luggage, both of which felt like luxuries. The bus left the station on time. Mission accomplished.
As our bus navigated the congested road, a ticket taker slowly made his way down the aisle. Leah showed him our tickets, which we had purchased online and printed at our beach hotel. He shook his head in disapproval. At first we thought he was rejecting the e-tickets. Leah explained that we had purchased them on the official transit site. All the while, our “super-fast” bus was plodding along, block after block. This is relevant because the ticket taker eventually made clear to us that we were going “super-fast” on the wrong bus.
We had now traveled seven or eight blocks from the station, and it was past ten o’clock. The ticket taker communicated our problem to the driver, who stopped the bus. The five of us filed out into the street with our packs. It was still oppressively hot, and now we were standing in the sun in the middle of a dusty street. CJ let loose a string of profanity. Once the swearing stopped, he made several suggestions, all of which involved things that we should have done differently in the past. “Let me get a time machine out of my pack,” I said angrily.
Sophie insisted that we take a rickshaw back to the bus station. This was a defensible suggestion given the heat and the distance we needed to travel quickly. But it also presented a problem: The bus to the Kochi rail station had most likely departed and we would need to flag it down in the road. This would be more difficult if we were traveling in the opposite direction in a rickshaw. Instead, we walked fast. With our packs. In the hot sun.
Isabel was a total trooper. She was wheeling a large suitcase but contributed almost nothing to the string of profanity and criticism that was unleashed as we walked briskly toward the station. “We should have gotten on the right bus!” CJ said.
“This sucks,” Sophie added helpfully. After a few blocks, I spotted a red bus coming at us. I stood in the middle of the street and flagged it down. Not to be overly self-congratulatory, but standing in the middle of a busy Indian road to flag down a “super-fast” bus requires a modest amount of courage, or perhaps a touch of heatstroke. I had one, if not both.
The bus stopped. I jumped aboard to confer with the driver, who informed me that this was not the bus to the Kochi rail station. I scurried back into the street and delivered the bad news. “Why isn’t that the right bus?” CJ asked, a question that was simulta
neously deep and ridiculous. We walked on and soon arrived back at the station bathed in sweat and frustration. Leah returned to the information desk and demanded more detailed information from the attendant. He made a phone call and reported back that our bus was running ten minutes late. He also gave us a bus number—an identifying characteristic that would have been helpful the first time, since the numbers were the only things printed on the buses that we could understand.
Our “super-fast” bus pulled into the station and we climbed aboard. The ticket taker confirmed that we were headed to the rail terminal. He even moved some passengers around so the five of us could sit together. The bus windows were open, generating a cool breeze. South India is remarkably green and lush. The views out the window were beautiful, especially the red flowers of the Indian coral trees lining the sides of the road. As our pulses returned to normal and the perspiration dried in the breeze, Leah leaned across the aisle. “That was more fun than the beach resort,” she said. I knew exactly what she meant. There is a rush that comes from plunging into chaos and emerging successful.
I turned to CJ and said, “Tell Isabel that we wanted to give her the real India experience.”
“I think she figured that out on her own,” he replied tartly.
We boarded the train at midday for the eighteen-hour overnight trip to Mumbai. We found our way to our reserved seats in the second-class cabin, which smelled of urine. The only evidence of the air-conditioning was that the windows were sealed shut. Leah and I shared our compartment with a middle-age man who was traveling another thousand miles beyond Mumbai—three days on the train—to visit his family. Sophie, Isabel, and CJ were in a compartment at the end of the car. Each cabin had two bench seats facing each other. There were two more bunks strapped against the wall above our heads. At night, the porter lowered the bunks, creating four beds for sleeping.
The wonder of rail travel anywhere, but especially in India, is that one glides through the countryside, watching whatever is happening in the cities and villages along the way. We stopped at numerous stations, big and small. At each station, some passengers got off, some got on. Vendors rushed on to the train peddling snacks, drinks, tea. They moved quickly through the cars, filling orders, making change, and then getting off before the train departed, or sometimes riding to the next station before getting off and catching a train the other direction.
I like sleeping on trains. As the temperature outside dropped and the cabin cooled down, I drifted off to sleep, enjoying the gentle rocking of the car. This was exactly the overnight train experience I had been hoping for . . . until I was awakened from a deep sleep because of yelling outside our compartment. When I opened the curtain, Sophie was standing in the corridor. “I just threw up, and I don’t know what to do!” she announced loudly. Sophie does hysteria well. By that, I do not mean that she handles hysteria well. I mean that she is really good at being hysterical. She also has a history of vomiting from high places. When she was younger, she and Katrina shared bunk beds; Sophie was on the top. I won’t dwell on the physics, but suffice it to say that getting sick five feet off the floor amplifies the problem.
I walked to the end of the train car to survey the blast site. Sophie had managed to hit just about everything: her bed, the lower bunk, her pack, the floor. Across the hallway, an entire Indian family, including Grandma, had opened their curtain slightly and were peering out. There was no obvious way to clean up the mess. The best idea I could come up with was to use the sheet from my bed. I rushed back to my cabin, pulled the sheet off my bunk, and returned to the accident site, where I began cleaning while Sophie looked on in shock. I did not enlist her in the cleanup for fear that she might get sick again. Soon several railway officials appeared. They had little to offer other than a cardboard box in which I could dispose of the sheet once I was done.
“The smell will come!” one of the railway guys began exclaiming over and over. He had a valid point. On the other hand, it was not clear what I was supposed to do about it. The other railway official asked me for a hundred and fifty rupees, about two dollars, to cover the cost of the sheet that I was now using to mop up. He was an earnest guy who I assume was responsible for ensuring that all sheets were accounted for at the end of the journey. Still, his timing could have been better. I was on my hands and knees cleaning up vomit. Also, we were on a moving train, so it was unlikely that I would escape without paying for the despoiled sheet. He was insistent, so I paused the cleanup effort and offered him a five-hundred-rupee note. He did not have change. “Smaller bills?” he asked.
“That’s the smallest I have,” I said. “I promise I will pay later.”
I cleaned up the mess more successfully than I had thought possible at the outset. Sophie was grateful for the effort. I was wise enough to ask only three more times why she did not make it to the bathroom. Remarkably, the cabin did not smell bad—or at least no worse than before the incident. In the morning, the railroad official appeared in my cabin, once again looking for his one hundred and fifty rupees. The fundamental barrier to payment had not changed: I still did not have anything smaller than a five-hundred-rupee note, and he still could not break it. We found a food vendor in the corridor who produced an impressive wad of cash and made change for my five hundred. I paid the railway official, who gave me a receipt, making me the official owner of a vomit-covered Indian Railways sheet—now wedged in a box in a trash bin at the end of the corridor.
The next day Isabel would fly back to the U.S.; the rest of us would head to Dubai. Isabel’s large suitcase presented an opportunity to send some things back with her that we would not need for the balance of the trip. Isabel was amenable to packing whatever would fit. However, I once again found myself facing an intransigent gatekeeper: Sophie, who had positioned herself as the arbiter of what Isabel would or would not carry. Nothing would go in Isabel’s (large, not full) suitcase without Sophie’s approval.
I had learned a few things about my children over the last eight months. Sophie was going to reject about half of what I proposed to send with Isabel, regardless of whether that was two tiny handkerchiefs or a volume of encyclopedias. She did not care what was going in Isabel’s suitcase. She cared about exercising power by screening some things out. Thus, I would have to use strategery: ask Isabel to pack twice as much stuff as I wanted her to take.
I went into our bedroom and gathered up the things I wanted to send home—plus some bulky items for Sophie to reject during the inevitable negotiation: a brick-sized book on the history of Africa, my rain jacket, a large water bottle. As predicted, Sophie said no to the Africa book and the water bottle. Now I just needed her to reject my rain jacket, which I would need in Europe, and the parenting experts would be teaching this maneuver as a case study for years to come.
“Okay, the rest is fine,” Sophie said.
“All of it?” I said in surprise.
“There’s plenty of room,” Isabel offered.
“What about the rain jacket?” I asked solicitously. “Isn’t that too much?”
“It’s fine,” Sophie said. “We can just wad it up.”
Somehow I needed to claw my raincoat back from the suitcase without exposing my grand strategy. It was like one of those heist movies—the elaborate plan had gone off-track, and now my next move, an improvisation, would determine the success or failure of the mission. “Does it rain a lot in Europe in the spring?” I asked.
Isabel and Sophie looked at each other. “Probably, if it’s like home,” Sophie said. “Maybe you should take the jacket.”
“Do you think?” I said skeptically. If I was going to get that jacket back, it had to be Sophie’s idea.
“Definitely,” Sophie said, pulling the jacket from the suitcase and handing it to me. Isabel nodded in agreement. “How could you think you wouldn’t need a rain jacket in Europe?” Sophie asked, exchanging a glance with Isabel that suggested I was a complete moron.
Sophie was pleased with her gatekeeper role. Isabel was headi
ng home healthy after a great India experience. And, for a brief but glorious moment, I had figured out the teenage brain.
Chapter 17
Heading to Hanover
I had not shaved in some time; my Indian haircut was not growing out well. Then I spilled coffee down the front of my shirt. CJ walked out of his bedroom, took one look at me, and said, “Dad, you look like a homeless guy.”
THE INCIDENT BEGAN INNOCUOUSLY at a train station on Dubai’s shimmering metro system. CJ noticed that when he rubbed his shoes on the surface of the floor in the station he could gather static electricity. After he shuffled around for a while, he could give someone a small shock. As we waited for the train, CJ repeatedly shocked me. After I became bored with his antics, he shocked Sophie, who warned him angrily that he needed her consent to shock her. CJ argued that he did not. We boarded a train, at which point Sophie declared, “It’s always crucial to get someone’s consent.”
CJ missed this subtle turn in the conversation. “Not if it’s someone I know,” he answered.
Sophie pounced. “That’s rape!” she declared.
We Came, We Saw, We Left Page 25