The Lunatic Express (17 page)

Fardus and his brothers were enamored of America, so I gave my spiel—that it was hard work there, often cold and lonely, that people worked and worked and sometimes never realized the American dream. Families weren’t close; old people were institutionalized; people lived alone, not like this, in beds squeezed together. I pointed out their garden, their coconuts, their two bedrooms, their family close together. “What more could you want?” I said. “In America,” I said, “it wouldn’t be easy to have this.”

It was wonderful, but awkward and exhausting, too. And I had to leave to catch the ferry back to Dhaka. Fardus insisted on escorting me. The brothers and uncle lined up, I shook their hands, they touched their hearts and we left, this time squeezing into an auto rickshaw with three others and the driver, all touching each other. “I am going to quit the army in January,” Fardus said, as we drank a quick cup of tea at the docks. “I’m going to go to Romania and work as an electrical contractor. I will make seven hundred dollars a month, while here I make seventy dollars a month.”

I said nothing, just nodded and tried to understand, to empathize, and then it was time and we hugged and he waved goodbye as the ferry slid out into the river in the silver light of the late afternoon. But I couldn’t help thinking it was a mistake—of the awful winter in Romania, of Fardus, warm Fardus, far from his family and village and his father’s coffin and brothers and uncles and water pump and coconuts and fresh spicy fish in a cold and grim Romanian apartment working for nothing. How much could he save? What were the chances of being trapped there for years?

The captain invited me into the bridge, which had nothing. No GPS. No radar. Not even a radio. Just a wheel. And then I walked downstairs and lay on a bench, sleepy, full, full of Fardus’s world and Bangladesh and the river and my own loneliness and my failure to go deeper. Again I thought perhaps I should have stayed in Chandpur: a house, try to build a life; no, even then would that be deep enough? The diesels thundered and dusk came and I read Rohinton Mistry’s
A Fine Balance
and men came up to me and stared, and then darkness fell, and I thought of Fardus and his fine balance between hope and despair. We were two hundred feet from the banks, passing old wooden dories and wooden freighters, unlit save for small fires burning on them, each a world unto itself. This river, flowing to other rivers, flowing to the ocean; the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Casamance, all part of one world and all different and all the same. I wanted to look into every boat, every house. I wanted to touch each person, to taste every meal, to open them up and slip into each like a suit of clothes. But I couldn’t. The world was too big. Too diverse. There were too many languages and not enough time; it was easy connecting with people like the families in first class. We had a shared language, technology, worldview. We all loved prosciutto and Picasso and lying on the beach in the sun and sitting with friends in a café. But to pass the days with the poor was something else. I sat up, gazed into the darkness. We slid past a boat with no lights at all, just a black shadow, its gunwales underwater, the dim outlines of figures standing at the stern. The deeper I pushed, the harder it became to know them, the more ignorant, curious and powerless I was. Each was a world unto its own that I could glimpse but never know.

A speeding Blueline bus on Sunday hit a tree in New Delhi, killing a woman and injuring 20 people. The accident happened when the bus went out of control on the Ashok Road in New Delhi. The privately owned Blueline buses, dubbed “killer buses,” caused 120 deaths on the roads of the capital last year and the toll this year has reached 19 so far
.

—Hindustan Times,
March 23, 2008

NINE
What To Do?

C
IGARETTE WRAPPERS
and paan wrappers littered the dirt. Noise, the constant clamor of horns and voices that never stopped in India. Long coils of rope lay on the ground next to the bus, as turbaned men from Rajasthan climbed a ladder with huge boxes balanced on their heads. The roof was already covered in burlap sacks three feet high, and more stuff was being hoisted up every minute. A queen-sized bed with a carved headboard. A sofa. A whole world was up there. Beneath the bus squirmed a man in a white T-shirt, black with grease and oil. The oil pan lay on the ground. We were supposed to be leaving for Patna, the capital of Bihar, in thirty minutes, which didn’t look too likely.

Bihar was India’s poorest state, with an illiteracy rate of nearly 50 percent. It was rife with banditry, murder, suicide, road accidents, and corruption. I thought it might be interesting to take the bus right through its midst.

Avoid traveling through Bihar at night, warned the
Lonely Planet
guide to India.

“My god, why would you take a bus to Patna?” wrote an Indian, when I posted a query about safety and logistics on the guidebook’s Thorn Tree bulletin board.

“You must not take the bus,” said a taxi driver. “The train.”

I wasn’t too worried, though. As a native Washingtonian who felt quite safe when D.C. had the highest murder rate in the U.S., it never surprised me whenever the alleged horrors of a place failed to materialize. Still, I liked to be prepared. Airport security in Kolkata had taken away the knife I’d had since Colombia; I bought a razor-sharp, handmade one from a vendor on the street and had a tailor at an open-fronted shop the size of a telephone booth sew me a sheath that I could strap to my leg. And hailed a taxi for Babughat, one of Kolkata’s bus terminals. Which, of course, wasn’t a terminal at all, but a chaotic, trash-strewn strip of dirt along the Hooghly River lined with buses, each with a sandwich board advertising a destination. Most were served by multiple buses, Patna just one.

It only traveled at night, leaving at 4:00 p.m. for the seventeen-hour journey.

But no worries! Ranjit Pandit clapped me on the back, said he was the driver, and we’d be on the road by 4:30 p.m. Even better, the bus had cramped berths over the seats in place of the luggage racks, and I booked one.

The assistant driver squatted on the ground and had the whites of his eyes washed. The professional eye cleaner waved his hands theatrically like a magician, swept a black chopstick through his oily and dusty hair, and scraped the sticks, covered in charcoal and hair grease, across the driver’s eyeballs. He waved his hands. The driver blinked, his eyes tearing. More flourishes. The eye cleaner twirled a swab of cotton around the tip of the chopstick, dipped it in a glass bottle, and swabbed that across both glistening, bloodshot orbs. It looked horrendous.

At five the horn sounded; miraculously the engine was back together. We all piled in and lurched through Kolkata traffic as the sun dropped, the window at my berth open, babies screaming, my stomach cramping for the first time on my journey. The air was acrid, smelling of diesel and exhaust and shit, a layer of grit and dust streaming in and covering me. The city looked like it had been scooped up into a big cup, shaken violently for a decade, and then dumped on the ground.

In the end, though, I had no complaints about my journey to Patna. The bus was full, the aisles taken by fifty-kilo bags of rice. The knife was unnecessary. I was, as usual, in a cocoon of generosity and watching eyes. Ranjit handed me a down pillow covered in red velvet; the wind (and dust) streamed in from the open window at my shoulder; we stopped every three hours for a break—twenty-five men standing (or squatting) in a line like some grotesque Roman fountain. The first stop almost made me retch. We stood in a line next to roadside stalls, a trillion insects flying and buzzing in the lights, pissing into a trench that had years of plastic water bottles, plastic wrappers, toilet paper, and reeked of shit and piss. Then I remembered doing the same thing in Peru, in the rain as we descended toward Puerto Maldonado, and I laughed; around the globe right at this very minute, probably, were lines of men and women pissing in mountains and on highways and in jungles next to battered buses.

This journey to Patna and back was Ranjit’s life. He was thirty-six, earned 300 rupees (US$6.00) for each trip, seven days a week. I asked him where he lived. “Here,” he said, patting the bunk across from mine, which he shared with his co-driver. It was a telling answer, for he had a wife and two sons in Kolkata. He saw them between morning and afternoon departures, but the bus to Patna was where he lived. “But you must come back to Kolkata and call me and bring your family,” he said, writing his cell-phone number in my notebook.

We watched three Bollywood films on the twenty-inch TV bolted to the door between driver and passenger sections. “The hero!” Ranjit said, pointing to the hero. “That man,” he said, “is about to get slashed with knives.” A band of circling motorcyclists slashed the actor with knives. Then everyone broke out in song and dance, the lovers flitting among palm trees as the bus honked and inched past bullock carts and tractors. Ranjit knew every scene; he’d watched them all an untold number of times. But he delighted in them all the same, could barely take his eyes off the screen. The romance, the singing, the sudden outbreaks of violence, the family struggles and redemption, were formulaic, yes, but they spoke so clearly to Ranjit’s soul that there was something comforting and amazing about it. Popular American films were all about alienation and individuality; even in romantic comedies the lovers existed almost in a vacuum rather than in the big Indian family.

We pulled into Patna at 10:00 a.m. I was so covered in dirt, I looked like Pigpen. But an elephant was walking down the street, and the city was a dynamic jumble of brokenness and blacktop covered in sand and cows munching in piles of garbage.

I didn’t linger, though. It felt like I’d been on the road for a long time, moving constantly, barely a conversation with a native English speaker. I felt tough, road-hardened, able to endure anything and eat anything and talk to anyone. But there was a price: I was aching for connection; my family felt far away in time and space, and being already separated from Lindsey didn’t help. E-mails were becoming more rudimentary, perfunctory. As for friends, e-mails from them had been slowly trailing off. I was just out there. Somewhere. I did have friends in New Delhi, though, and Thanksgiving was approaching; I was eager to get there. The Majhdad Express left at eight that night, and the train station was a carnival of all India: a couple with two monkeys on ropes, women with gold toe rings and silver anklets, wrapped in brilliant purple and saffron and sky blue. A man with his hands and forearms chopped off shook the stubs in my face. A small boy lay huddled on newspapers. A blind man led by a blind wife stumbled along with a tin cup. I sat on a concrete bench, squeezed between two men. Another came up, thrust his hips and shoulders against me, wedged himself in. A man with only one eye and a little girl in bare feet came over, pushed my shoulder with his hand, then pried them both in. We were completely squished together. It was beautiful and ugly and full of life, but also otherness, an otherness I couldn’t hope to pierce. And the more I was in the middle of it, the lonelier I felt, the loneliness of the crowd exposing my solitude. I was like a walking ghost, a presence among the throngs, but unnoticed, unseen by them, too.

It got worse on the train. My plank was three tiers up, removed, swarming with mosquitoes. We rattled and roared and shook through the night, a cold wind chilling me to the bone and covering me with Mother India’s omnipresent gritty dust. I passed the long night in a fetal position. Shivering. But a few hours later I was showered and shaved and deep in a sofa within the comfort of my friends’ silent and spotless New Delhi apartment.

T
HINGS HAPPEN
when you least expect them. But, I suppose, you have to be ready for them in the first place, even if you don’t know you are. My friends took me to a chichi dinner party at a grand house with high ceilings and a roaring fireplace and wine and a meal cooked by their chef, and the next morning I could barely get out of my big soft bed. After months of street food and the tap water of Mumbai and Kolkata and Dhaka, Delhi’s Belly had found me. A fever coursed through my body. I ached, and the Cipro I popped hit back, covering my face with hives.

Then terrorists struck Mumbai. Outside Café Leopold, where I’d met Nasirbhai two weeks before, gunmen sprayed automatic gunfire and lobbed hand grenades. And at Victoria Terminus, the locus for all our commuter train adventures, more than fifty people were killed. My hosts disappeared; she, a diplomat, became swallowed by the unfolding attack and hostage crisis. Her husband, a journalist, jumped on a plane to Mumbai on Thanksgiving morning, leaving me, again, alone. “Go to the Thanksgiving dinner we were invited to anyway,” my friend said in a call from the airport. “I’m sure it’ll be okay; just tell him the situation. And bring the case of beer I was supposed to.”

I still felt a little sick, not to mention awkward asking a stranger to let me come to his Thanksgiving dinner, but I made the call anyway. The host replied with grace. “Everybody had to go to Mumbai, so I’m not sure who’ll even be here, but at least there’ll be plenty of food,” he said. “You’re most welcome to come.”

Feeling like I had a stone basketball in my stomach, I lugged the case of beer into the Delhi night and hailed an auto rickshaw. It was far, the driver got lost, the temperature dropped; I froze as we wheeled and whined for an hour through the chaos, until he dropped me off at wide concrete house behind walls, and I stepped into the warmth of an apartment filled with the smell of turkey and the laughter of children.

“Hi,” said an American woman with thick brown hair and big brown eyes, wearing a flowery dress and black tights and no shoes. “Who are you?” I’d been asked a lot of questions in the past months, but never that one. The world of expat journalists in New Delhi was small; everyone knew everyone else, and I was an alien. She was direct. Sparkling. Inquisitive. The dinner party was small, casual, and most of the significant others were gone, deployed to cover the carnage in Mumbai. We ate off plates on our laps and she blasted questions at me; I liked her curiosity. We talked about the future of magazines. What we were doing. She’d had a couple of my editors as professors at journalism school. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, especially her hands. She was as tall as I was, both awkward and graceful, but her fingers and hands had a life of their own; they were the most feminine hands I’d ever seen. They floated and danced and drew me in.

When it was time to go, she called three taxis and three of us left the party. But there was only one taxi outside and I had the farthest to go, had no idea where I was. “You take it,” she said. I said goodbye, and she started walking away. Suddenly she stopped. Looked at me, looked at the taxi. Took a step. Stopped. It was tiny, the barest motion and expression, but I couldn’t help thinking she wanted to get into the taxi with me.

Her e-mail arrived the next morning. She loved my blog, and I could tell she’d read every word. I pressed her for criticism; she was younger than I, a creature of the web. “You have to interact with your readers, your commenters, more,” she wrote. “Your videos are too static.” My stomach was feeling better; I was dying to go out, and wrote back that if she and her boyfriend were hitting the town any night, I’d love to tag along.

“I’m throwing a party on Monday,” she said, “and you’re welcome to come.”

I got there late and was still the first to arrive. I came up the stairs onto a roof deck and she emerged, long brown hair wet and sweet-smelling, fresh from a shower. It was a moment. Wordless. I fumbled with a bottle opener to crack the wine while she stood close, too close, not close enough, just the two of us and those hands. After so long without a real connection to anyone, separated from my wife and living apart from my family for almost two years, the attraction couldn’t have been more fresh or surprising.

N
ISA, AS AN EAR CLEANER
I befriended later called her, and I met for lunch in a park a few blocks from her office the next day, had a quick drink that evening after work, and over the next days kept up a constant stream of texts, e-mails, and quick lunches and stolen drinks. We were connecting hard and fast and deeply, and I told her everything, my life spilling out like Victoria Falls. And the more I told the more she listened, questioned, wanted to know. And vice versa: she seemed a whole unexplored continent waiting to be discovered. Travel had taken me out of my life, had shaken loose my already eroded sense of home. A further complication ensued: I needed visas to China and Russia, and a letter of invitation had to come from Moscow. The Russian one would take at least another ten days, a process that would eventually stretch to three and a half weeks. After months of movement, I was suddenly stopped, going nowhere.

A week after we met, we were spending long nights on Delhi rooftops drinking wine and talking, talking, talking and days in parks amid gamboling gymnastic beggars and on the crazy, crowded streets of Old Delhi.

And then, at a bookshop one afternoon, she reached up to a shelf and pulled out a book:
East of Eden
. “One of my favorites,” she said. “Read it.” I did, and it was all about men’s complex but stunted emotional lives and I saw my life and my journey in every word. No book had spoken so directly to me since college. That we might, if we wanted to, tried hard enough, rise above ourselves and be strong enough to forgive ourselves. That we might rise above our own mistakes not because we must or because some deity commanded us, but simply because we could choose to. It should have been obvious, of course, but I’d gotten lost somewhere over the past decade, had done what many men did all too often: focused on work and let their wives take care of everything else, from friendships to social events to family. I was gone so much. If my sister or my parents wanted to organize anything, they called Lindsey. If I wanted to know anything about my children, I asked Lindsey, who also organized most of our social events, started new friendships. She held up our world, but it was a world in which I too often failed to contribute, literally and emotionally, and thus felt too often a stranger. Instead of admitting my distance from it, instead of trying to talk to Lindsey or anyone else about my unhappiness with the status quo, I just worked, running farther away. I’d lost so much of the intimacy and closeness I was envying in Indonesia and India and that I’d felt with Lily in Peru. But it wasn’t hopeless. It wasn’t the end. Every moment we had the choice to forgive ourselves and try again. And suddenly I didn’t want to run anymore; I wanted to be those people on trains and ferries and on Buru, lying in tangled piles, holding hands instead of running. Travel—my journey—was showing me what I wanted, craved, giving me perspective for the first time in seven years.