Better Than Fiction 2 (24 page)

And I had not disappeared into the landscape at all. Sure, the sun had shone all afternoon, the views had been lovely, and, in the end, someone was there to take me back to a bed. But was that my whole adventure? The most dramatic part of the day was when the kid gave me some bottled water for free. Was this going to be the big story from my itinerary-free, Upper West Sider Gone Wild trip to China?

At the hostel I was welcomed back with a crazy shake of the head from the owner.
Foreigners
.

The next week, as scheduled, I flew back to New York to start as assistant map editor at Fodor’s Travel Guides. Punchline, I know. Our sole mission: keep people from getting lost. The desk job suited me. Now and then a few comped trips turned up, plus, occasionally, more exotic gigs such as fact-checking hotel listings on the coast between Georgia and South Carolina. I thrived there, for a while.

In the years since, despite finding many other ways to stray from obvious paths, my travel habits have reverted to their mean: I usually know where I’m going and what’s going to happen next. It may be genetic predisposition or a simple love of the tangible outcome (or that I’m controlling), but the prospect of a mystery outing is not nearly as compelling as reliable geolocation beforehand. Without it, hours would be wasted; we’d miss the key destinations; and we’d eat bad food.

Technology has evolved in lock step with my needs. Well-meaning cell phones, mapping apps, and an entire troposphere streaming ungrammatical reviews by strangers all conspire to keep me from making any improvisational turns. I let them. Picture me in the middle of a forest, holding my phone up to the sky at different angles until I get enough bars to figure out exactly where I am.

I recently asked my partner, ‘Do we ever get lost?’

‘Never,’ he said. ‘You’re too controlling.’

What I like to think he meant is that I plan a good trip, and that this may sometimes come at the price of enduring a carefully orchestrated schedule. What is that price?

I would like to formally apologize to him and to my wayward self who yearned to wander. My father made me this way and, despite the fact that I’m three careers past the Fodor’s gig and living on the other side of the earth, it turns out that I have not come very far.

When we arrived in Buenos Aires last year, I spread out travel guides and maps across the bed. The highest rated tango and steak, etc, were checked against at least one app or website, and later cross-checked with a genuine local. Even though we couldn’t stay awake late enough to see the best of the best tango, my planning kept us from middling steak, and gave us experiences I would consider peak, if not ur. See? Planning pays off.

But then why, when prompted to write about a transformative travel experience, does an uneventful walk more than twenty years ago come so clearly to mind? Was it the inevitability of my rescuer and his rowboat, ready to escort me safely home? Or was it simply the last time I almost got away?

T
he flight from Calcutta was crowded; the sari-clad woman named Suna took a seat up front, while I pushed on down the aisle and found a window seat. My view of India from the air included the Boeing 737’s wing and engine. We were on our way to Bhubaneswar, a city of temples, but would be making a stop at some small outpost in between. After about half an hour, we started our descent.

I watched as the ground came up to meet us, and glanced around to see if anyone else was concerned with what seemed to me to be much too rapid a descent. No-one was. I pulled my seatbelt tight and took a deep breath. Then I looked out the window just in time to see the whole back of the engine fall away.
Dear God, we’re going to crash
. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t breathe. I felt myself go numb, covered my eyes, and waited for the explosion.

We touched down, bounced once or twice, then rolled to a stop. Passengers busied themselves pulling out bags crammed in overhead bins.

‘The engine,’ I croaked to one of the attendants, ‘the engine, part of it fell off.’ The young woman pressed her hands together, fingers up, said, ‘
Namaste
,’ and turned away. I had to do something. I could not get back on this plane without alerting someone to the problem; it would be irresponsible. I waved to Suna. She would know what to do, I was certain of it. I had sat next to her on one of the bus trips that our group had taken; she had grown up in India. She exuded calm.

‘We must go to the pilot and tell him what you saw,’ she said. Action, yes. Without hesitation, with perfect equanimity.

The pilot came out of the cockpit along with the co-pilot. Suna spoke to them; they nodded and suggested we follow them onto the tarmac to inspect the engine.

‘You see?’ the pilot asked. I didn’t see. I looked down the runway, which was surprisingly short, but there was no evidence of the missing piece of engine.

‘Not to worry,’ the co-pilot assured me, but he didn’t say why.

‘Are you certain?’ I asked.

‘I am certain,’ he murmured, god-like. Later, Suna told me he mentioned that English women regularly reported engines falling off. She didn’t know what to make of it and neither did I, so we continued on to the city of temples.

Back home in California, the reporter in me pushed for answers, so I called Boeing to ask what exactly had happened with that errant engine. They obliged: On older versions of the 737 the back of the engine acts as a thrust reverser; the clamshell design allows one part to slide down during landing. It is part of the braking system, often used when a landing strip is short
and requires a fast landing. When I covered my eyes to wait for eternity, I failed to see the clamshell slide back up and lock into place.

I was embarrassed, yes, but mainly what I felt at the time was gratitude to Suna Kanga for being willing to risk standing up with someone who was making a fool of herself.

More than three decades later, I wince when I think about how close I came to missing that meeting with Suna altogether, and so never discovering the gate she would open for me.

The year was 1981, and I was at a loss to know why the Government of India would invite me on a press trip and I did not plan to accept. My family rebelled. Not just my photojournalist husband, who routinely traveled the world on assignments, but our 13-year-old son and daughter as well.
You have to go
, they chimed in.
What could be more exciting?
‘But I’d miss your 11th birthday,’ I told my daughter. She said I could bring her presents.

I didn’t try to explain to the Government of India that I was not a travel writer, that I wrote articles for magazines about people like a Navy nurse who had been court martialed for protesting the Vietnam War; about the Berkeley schools’ radical new integration plan; about the killing of a young white bus driver in the riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination. I had just published my first historical novel and was about to begin another. Still, my only foray outside of the US had been to London, to interview two survivors of the Holocaust. I tended to write about what was wrong with the world; it seemed to me that travel writing by its nature was expected to cover much that is right, to pay more attention to pleasure than to problems. I asked
myself how I could possibly do that in India, of all places. The answer was: The only way to know is to go.

When I returned, I wrote a story for a travel magazine. It was titled
Interlude in India
, and it began: ‘It had not occurred to me that I would go to India, ever. The Taj Mahal floated in my mind like some shimmering mirage, cold white and dream marble… The India of my mental landscape was monochromatic, brown as the river Ganges, sere and dusty and filled with too many people, too many poor. I didn’t realize how vague was my notion of what I was about to encounter… I am not a traveler by inclination; I should not have come.’

‘The days between New Delhi and Calcutta were spent touring Hindu temples and second-century Jain caves, traveling to ancient forts and holy ghats on the Ganges. Our guides delivered long, sonorous lectures – stories about ancient struggles between the elephant and the crocodile, good and evil, about Mogul emperors and Sikh gurus. In their lyric, embroidered English, the well-versed guides would chant out interminable tales, explaining all the subtle variations in all the myriad religions, until finally I tuned out the words and listened only to the cadence of their voices. And that is when I began to hear India.’

‘I would wake before dawn in my hotel room and lie quietly, waiting for the light. Then, through an air vent came the softest imaginable chanting, drifting up through the air-conditioning system, lulling and beautiful and strange: the morning prayers. In the distance I could see a mosque outlined against the gathering pink of the sunrise. After a while the smell of smoke would drift up and into the room, smoke from a thousand braziers on the street, lit to cook the morning meals.’

‘In India all of life can be viewed on the street – cooking and bathing, hair cutting and sewing and the patting of cow dung into small round cakes to be dried in the sun and used for fuel. In the streets, movement is perpetual. My monochromatic India, all brown and dusty green, was actually alive with movement and color – outrageous, amazing splashes of cerise and jade green and saffron yellow, glittering with silver and gold.’

‘…At the Harmandir Sikh temple people crowded about, curious, as we washed our feet in a trough before covering our heads with saffron-colored scarves so we could enter the temple, where we were taken on a tour that included a visit to the common kitchen where food for a thousand is prepared each day. I don’t know what I expected, certainly not what I saw. Two shadowy stone rooms, dungeon-like, had only a few shafts of light penetrating through narrow windows. Open fires blazed in trenches in the floor. The heat was choking, yet women and children squatted, hour after hour, patting out flat bread on the stone floors. I stood in the suffocating heat and watched a tiny girl, no more than five, methodically slap the bread rounds with a splash of water.’

‘When I came back into the full sun of the plaza, something lurched inside me. I was walking next to a Belgian journalist named Andre, and I was surprised to hear myself tell him, “I feel like crying, but I’m afraid if I start I won’t be able to stop.” He looked at me for a long moment, then he said, “Either you leave India and are so repulsed that you never want to return, or you will have to come back.” After his first trip, he told me, he spent two years reading everything he could find about India. He comes back every chance he gets, he explained, “to try to understand”.’

‘In Calcutta, the women carrying babies high on their breasts
would walk alongside me, chanting a peculiar incantation which might have been memorized for Western women: “Oh mommie,” they droned, “Oh baksheesh, oh baby, no papa, oh Mommie.” But I did not give them baksheesh, and I would not cry for them. If you weep your way through India, if you cannot see beyond the squalor, you will miss the grace and the beauty and the promise.’

‘…From a distance it looks like all the photographs you have ever seen: floating in space, heat waves diffusing its focus. It is not until you pass through the Jilo Khana, the red sandstone gateway, that you really see it: The central tomb of the Begum Mumtaz-i-Mahal, white marble, soaring and brilliant in the midday sun. You run your fingertips over the traceries and arabesques formed by semi-precious stones inlaid in marble. You shade your eyes and peer up at one of the towers, glaring white against a blue sky, a remnant of a past only dimly understood, as well as an astonishing measure of possibilities for this crowded subcontinent.’

It was easier to leave India than to return home. Now that I had seen the slums of Mumbai and the beauty of the Taj Mahal, I understood my massive failure of imagination. I had written: ‘I am not a traveler by inclination; I should not have come.’ India taught me that I had no choice, that I had to find a way to experience the larger world.

On that 1981 press trip, I learned that Suna was the journalist representing Singapore, where she lived with her husband, Rusi, a pilot for Singapore Airlines, and their two teenagers. I watched Suna navigate comfortably, both within the international group of writers and in the chaos that was India at large. In Suna’s
world, everyone got the benefit of the doubt; no one was beyond redemption. There was something completely guileless about her. She could also be formidable, as I was to discover. And she was prolific; her stories appeared in magazines and newspapers in Singapore, Hong Kong, and India.

As it happens, her daughter was considering a college near my home in Northern California. When the family came to check out schools that summer, I invited them to dinner. In the following years, both Kanga kids would choose West Coast colleges, and both would be in and out of our house. Over time, my husband, Ted, would perform the wedding ceremonies for both (using his Internet credentials) and our children would become friends. I ended up recording the story of the ‘crash’ of the Boeing 737 for a travel program on National Public Radio; Suna included it on a tape of stories she put together for her grandchildren, and it became their bedtime story.