Better Than Fiction 2 (25 page)

Eventually our families would blend to include extended family and good friends, but at first it was just Suna and me traveling on our own. She was easy in the world in a way that I was not, and she made me feel comfortable; in effect, she became my gatekeeper, a conduit into a wider world.

Our first foray together was to Hong Kong, where we signed on to one of the small tours into mainland China, to Guangzhou. It was Suna’s choice because it included a visit to Shamian Island, once a foreign enclave.

When we arrived, our guide told us that Shamian Island had been removed from the tour. Suna objected quickly without raising her voice. The guide said there was nothing he could do about it. Her face took on a look that I would come to recognize:
total determination. Quietly, purposefully, she found one reason after another to bring up the question of Shamian Island. The guide took me aside to ask why my friend was being so insistent.

‘She was born there,’ I told him. ‘Her father was a businessman, and he was President of the Indian Association. During the Japanese Occupation, he was falsely accused of spying for the British. He was arrested and tortured, and he died soon after. On Shamian Island.’

The Chinese guide grew quiet. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘it is a matter of the heart. I myself will take you there.’ And he did. Late that afternoon, I followed Suna as she walked around the gray European-style mansions where the foreign business community had been confined in the years before WWII. Suna had childhood memories of the house, of a bridge over the river where she used to play. The guide and I trailed after her, until she found the once elegant house where she lived with her family and younger sister. It now housed eight families. We invited our guide to tea at a nearby high-rise hotel recently built to attract tourists. He was delighted; Chinese were welcome there only if they were with registered guests… or two foreign women, it would seem.

After that, we found reasons to explore other destinations in various parts of the world, sometimes with effects that would play well in an action movie. We were chased out of Puerto Rico by an impending hurricane; the first available flight landed us in New York City at midnight, in a downpour and without luggage. In Goa, the only available driver had spent the afternoon drinking the local brand of white lightning. In Salt Lake City we had to take shelter in a small opening tucked under the Mormon
Tabernacle when a tornado ripped through.

In Bangkok I was researching a novel that involved drug running, and I hoped to get a look into one of the city’s prisons so I could write convincingly. Suna suggested we ask the hotel’s concierge. Never blinking, he called over a cab driver who studied us for a long minute, then suddenly smiled and said, ‘You ladies want to go to the prison store for shopping.’ He managed to maneuver us into an area where prisoners could meet visitors, all of us guarded by soldiers with rifles.

Yet it is other, smaller moments that linger in my memory, like a sultry day in a cab in Mumbai, stalled in traffic, when a beggar boy suddenly thrust his hand through my open window. I happened to be carrying an orange, and plopped it into his palm. He took it and started to turn away when Suna called him back to ask, ‘What do you say to Auntie?’ A boyish smile appeared, and he looked at me and said, ‘Thank you, Auntie.’

Wherever we went, Suna’s approach was simply to slow down and settle in, to move through exotic places and absorb the culture of a people without making judgements on how they lived. On all our journeys, she saw what was right without denying all that was wrong.

After Rusi retired, he and Suna became a writer-photographer team, and set out on a series of wilderness adventures. Suna added blue jeans and flannel shirts to her wardrobe and they signed on for safaris, river rafting, mountain climbing; they explored the Amazon, the Nile, and the Danube; climbed on the train to Lhasa in Tibet, trekked to Butan’s Tiger’s Nest temple. They gave me a copy of the lavish coffee table book they produced together titled
Journey through Colombo: A Pictorial
Guide to the Gateway of Heavenly Sri Lanka
.

During this period, Ted and I met them in Spain, and the four of us explored the White Villages of the south. One day we took a wrong turn and came upon a small, off-the-track village, one which seemed perfect to return to, maybe spend a month or two together, long enough to settle in.

We never did. Ted died in 2003; some months after, I went to India to be coddled and comforted by what seemed the whole Kanga clan, sisters and cousins and squadrons of relatives and friends.

For the past several years I have stayed closer to home, working with a historian friend on a biography titled
An Atomic Love Story: The Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer’s Life
. Suna and Rusi kept up by phone and email, and there were quick visits when they came to the States to see their children. We never let too much time lapse between conversations.

A few weeks after
An Atomic Love Story
was published, Suna and Rusi called to say they would be coming for a short visit. Happily, they were arriving the day before we were to give a reading at a bookstore, with a party afterwards at a friend’s house. All my kids happened to turn up, as well as many friends the Kangas already knew. The afternoon was sunny and warm, there was standing room only at the bookstore, the party was in a house worthy of those Suna used to cover for a column she wrote called ‘Beautiful Homes’. I have photos of us, taken after most of the guests had left, sitting in a wide circle, my daughter tucked on the arm of the big easy chair Rusi was in. My two sons shared a large bench, Suna and two of my friends were on one sofa. I do not remember the conversation, only the laughter and sense of ease.

The evening before they were to leave, the three of us were
sitting at my kitchen table with cups of tea. Usually there would be a conversation about a next trip, but it didn’t come up. I remember Suna asking if I’d heard from her daughter, Nazneen. I said I hadn’t, but suddenly I could see how weary Suna seemed, and since they had a long travel day ahead of them, I suggested they turn in.

The next morning I saw them to the car, hugged them both goodbye, kissed Suna a second time. I watched until the car turned the corner and was gone, and then I cried.

Fifteen months later, on the 10th of February 2015, Suna’s son, Cyrus, was in town and came to dinner, as he usually did. By then, I knew that Suna had been diagnosed with leukemia three years earlier, and that she had made the decision to reject chemotherapy or any of the other therapies that could prolong her life. She wanted to live fully for the time left to her, she did not want to be treated like an invalid, and so had insisted that only her immediate family know. We were in the kitchen when the call came from Rusi in Singapore. Suna was failing, they were taking her to the hospital. She died five days later, as she had lived: resolute, positive.

The Kangas are Parsis, a religious denomination that came to India from Iran; their prophet is Zoroaster. Suna’s final assignment had been a grant from the National Heritage Board of Singapore to write a book about the Parsis of Singapore, their history, customs, culture, and cuisine. She and I had discussed the research it would take, the excitement of dealing with a historic subject; we spoke of the pleasures of writing non-fiction, the satisfaction of being able to add to a body of knowledge. She worked on the book steadily, and was able to finish half. Parsi
friends will complete it in her honor.

My travels with Suna are over; we won’t be meeting in Rome or Paris, in Hawaii, Hong Kong, or Kuala Lumpur. There will be no more misadventures, no fallen airplane engines in India or random tornadoes in Utah, stories that our children now tell their children. Suna and I covered a wide swath of the world together and in the process we caught our families in a kind of charmed net that pulled us all together, and holds us, with Suna locked in our memories, secure.

And yet, and yet… I cannot quite believe that one day soon she won’t call to tell me that the trip is on, that I should not forget my bathing costume. She would remind me, I am certain, that the gate remains open, just the way she left it.

I
will not say that my traveling days are over. That’s a quitter thought. But I am unlikely to wander as far in the second half of my life as I did in the first. There’s no shame or surprise in that, I suppose; it is a truth shared by many. And yet I find myself turning it into a grievance. I roll home from the opulent grocery store with my one-year-old son in the stroller, his big sister riding the running board like a gangster with a tommy gun. The grocery store provided irrefutable evidence that I live in a bourgeois bubble. Pine nuts are still up around $29/lb, so I bought sunflower seeds instead. I did buy organic pitted prunes for $8/lb. And that was the sale price – it would make my grandma die all over again.

Once I was a wanderer; I traveled widely. Now I have children and a minivan and a mortgage. I have a kingdom of things that need to be cleaned or put back on shelves or put in storage or
filed or given away or repaired or thrown out. There is laundry I can see like a straight line to my grave. There are countertops to be
fifzzted
with spray and wiped with the countertop sponge and then made dirty and
fifzzted
again. Sometimes in the midst of fifzzting I find myself thinking that there is a more exciting place I should be, that I’m missing some more interesting life.

There are many reasons why I shouldn’t do this. For one, no-one likes to talk to people who think they’re supposed to be elsewhere. Then there is that old boulder:
Who cares
? I don’t have enough time and money and freedom to travel to distant and romantic places. Shall I pause here while you find your hankie? Anyway, almost every distraction or obligation I can point to, you could point to also and say,
You chose that one
.

But here is an even more basic problem with my whinging like this. The truth is that I can’t even say for certain that I
want
to travel to distant and romantic places right now. What if I desire less adventure in my life these days? What if some engine that was racing in me twenty years ago now chugs at idle? What should I do with
that
information?

When I was nineteen years old, I spent three months in La Mosquitia. Some know the place as The Mosquito Coast, a stay-away name if ever there was one. But La Mosquitia is a true frontier. It comprises most of eastern Honduras and some of Nicaragua. It is home to the Miskito and the Garifuna people. It is hot and vast and sparsely populated, and in some sense unmapped – satellites cannot look beneath the thick jungle canopy that hides its terrain. Somewhere in its interior likely lies Ciudad Blanca, the lost city of the Incas. Once, pirates hid from warships in the nooks of its sinuous coast; today narcotraffickers do something similar with airstrips and speedboats.

I came to La Mosquitia to work at a Moravian mission
hospital in a town called Ahuas, in Gracias a Dios, the easternmost department of Honduras. There are no roads that will bring you to Ahuas; it can be reached only by air and water.

My arrival must have been semi-comic. The doctors of the Clinica Evangelica Morava – there were three – expected a medical resident to debark from the single-engine plane that landed on the dirt strip. But what they got was a freshly credentialed EMT, a teenager who wanted to be a doctor when he grew up.

Some of the confusion was due to poor communication infrastructure between Ahuas and the outside world. This was 1992; there was only the hospital’s radiophone and mail that arrived irregularly. But the more likely cause was my patron in this arrangement, a dashing and dynamic civil engineer who kept homes in multiple Latin American cities. (His passport was thick with extra pages; he drove an open-top jeep; he knew people
everywhere
, and everyone he met greeted him heartily. I was in awe.) He was an old friend of my father, and had arranged the hospital internship for me as a family favor. I suspect that he may have left the matter of my qualifications somewhat vague.

I had enough sense to be embarrassed by the situation. After a few days during which I could see the hospital staff wondering what to do with me, I presented myself to the chief and offered to go home. Perhaps this impressed him, because after that they did find work for me. I cleaned rooms, I provided childcare for staff and patients, and I assisted the physical therapist, lifting and handling young men who were partially paralyzed as a result of decompression sickness, rubbing oil into their inert limbs. The only commercial industry in La Mosquitia then was diving for lobsters. Most divers received no training in scuba, and many were injured when they dove to depth many
times a day. The hospital operated one of the two hyperbaric chambers in Honduras. That is to say,
I
operated one of the two hyperbaric chambers in Honduras. Spare a thought for the paralyzed Miskito
indígena
who regains consciousness inside of a pressurized cylinder, and who sees outside the Plexiglas a white guy on a gap year, wearing a Knicks cap. To mitigate the glibness of that last sentence I should say also that if the hospital received these men – boys, mostly – soon enough after their injuries, their chances of recovery were very good; I was helping to do something good.

I listened closely, I took instruction, and soon the doctors let me do more. I helped to deliver babies. I was allowed in the operating room, and then I was allowed to assist: to read numbers off the indicated gauge for the obstetric surgeon as he delivered stillborn twins to save the mother’s life. One night I heard a strange and beautiful sound that went on for hours, and only learned in the morning that it was ritual keening for deceased kin. I traveled into the interior with a visiting dental team; we went up the Rio Patuca in wooden longboats powered by noisy outboards, to visit the villages strung sparsely along the banks of the wide brown river. The dentists examined the mouths of hundreds of children every day; I carried cases of equipment from the boats to the shore. At night we slept on the floors of one-room schoolhouses and I heard the grunts and roars of howler monkeys and, once, the growl of a jaguar. I contracted malaria, and hosted a voracious intestinal parasite. On Sundays, I went to the clapboard church and tried to sing hymns in Miskito, which, luckily, is written phonetically.

Do these count as memories? Even to me, the one who made them, they have the polished quality of an alibi. Through repetition, these anecdotes have become my Official Record
of the events; they’ve lost the fidelity they once had. Because I don’t think the howler monkeys or the unseen jaguar were the important parts. Nor should I pretend that I was the Doogie Howser of tropical medicine. Though I think I was helpful around the hospital, it is unlikely that I was net helpful: The doctors who decided to let me stay were essentially taking on a liability, a keen but unskilled young man who needed to be fed, housed, and kept from death or injury, and who would take more from the place than he would give.

They let me stay because I was up for anything: I was happy to sleep on a floor or carry heavy cases or provide childcare or do whatever else was asked of me. I woke and went to sleep looking only forward. (It’s also likely they let me stay because the dashing civil engineer paid for my room and board.)

I was nineteen and fearless, or blithely unaware of my limitations anyway, and I could have landed in no better place than in Ahuas. Now there is this pining, nostalgia-inclined part of me that wants to mourn the never-coming-backness of that time and place. But then I’m missing the more important point: I was changed by those months in that tiny town on the bend of a slow river on the baking coast of a strange and wild land, maybe in a way that will forever elude my understanding, but also in a way that stays with me always. Ahuas taught me how to be adventurous; Ahuas gave me a hunger for places strange to me. In the years that followed, I fed that hunger with Beirut and Aleppo; the Andes and the Atacama Desert; Catalonia and Amazonia; Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires and Ushuaia, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Dublin and Berlin and Copenhagen and Ephesus; Graceland and Death Valley and that redwood tree you can drive your car through. (Please forgive the list; to some it will seem boastful and luck-laden, to others it will seem paltry
and pedestrian. It is just my list, the one I jumble and mumble to myself when I want the comfort it brings.)

For now, my daily life is humdrum. But this period of staying home is no miscarriage of fate; I know I chose it, and I will choose it again tomorrow. My wife and I will get some work done here. My children like the back yard and their friends down the street. I like the back yard and my friends down the street, and apparently the eight-dollar prunes.

But in blessed moments when the sunlight comes in at a certain angle, when my mind and mood allow it, I can find the thrill in the hum and the surprise in the drum, and the bulk aisle is in its way like a souk, and a city I’ve known for twenty years shows me a strange new face. These moments always surprise me, and for an hour or an afternoon, I am connected to the bravery that turns any trip into a journey. As when I saw my son’s first upright locomotion between the coffee table and the piano bench, or my daughter round a corner on her cheap scooter, poised and concentrating, her rear leg swept high behind her.

The poet James Merrill was interested in this too when he wrote his poem ‘The Thousand and Second Night’. Not in that thing about children and scooters – but in travel and making sense of it. The poem is about Merrill’s trip to Istanbul and how it changed him. Anyway, I think that’s what it’s about; it is a fortress of a poem. Whole pages of it confound me. But sparkling like a gem in the middle is this quatrain:

The past recedes and twinkles, falls asleep.

Fear is unworthy, say the stars by rote;

What destinations have been yours till now

Unworthy, says the leaping prow.

I’ve never been to Istanbul. But I will go one day. The Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia, these await me,
Insha’Allah
. My traveling days are not over, I promise myself. So in this patch of staying put, the stroller will serve as a leaping prow and I will find distant lands in what is close to home. And if at times I dote too much on fading memories of travels past, there is no harm in that. I must only remember that those memories are not travel; they are material. Travel is what’s in front of me.