The Best Women's Travel Writing (25 page)

I got lost in the winding streets of Pune, and it was dark before I took a rickshaw back to Aman's flat across the river. He'd been worried sick about me, it was clear; when I knocked on his door, he opened it immediately, relief in his eyes. His hair was greasy, like he'd run his hands through it over and over. He'd changed out of his white robe, but still had his black sneakers on.

“Oh, dear,” he gushed, before I was even inside. “I heard about the robe.” He looked me over. “I guess I should have known. They're very strict about the white robe.” He went to the stove to start tea. “Oh,
darling
,” he went on as he filled the kettle, “where were you? Oh, I'm so sorry. I apologize. What a long night you must have had.”

He turned to look at me, to check whether indeed I'd had a long night, and perhaps to hear where, exactly, I'd been. But I couldn't think of an excuse. How could I tell Aman that a palmist had seen something bad in my hand, and I'd wandered the city as a way to escape? I apologized, explained that I'd gone to the bookstore and lost track of time.

Aman and I resumed our routine. For three more days we rose in the morning, walked across the river for morning meditation, sipped tea at the ashram. Aman and I did not attempt the White Robe ceremony again, nor did we speak of the night I'd been turned away.

I tried to give the place another chance—Aman loved it so—but the sealed-off grounds and surly guards wore on me. The ashram tried to push India out, tried to erase the sounds, the pulse, of this country, and this was not what I'd come to India to find. So far, the closest thing to peace I'd encountered was the blank page in the journal, the one I could settle my mind upon. And so after my seventh day in Pune, while Aman and I stood in his kitchen, preparing tea, I told him I'd be leaving the next day. He was kind, helping me buy a ticket to Goa, my next destination. I could tell he was sorry I hadn't loved the ashram the way he did, and I was grateful he didn't plead with me to stay.

Aman still slept as I crept out the door in the darkness of early morning. I scribbled a note on the pad beside the phone:
Aman: thanks for everything. Will call when I get to Goa.

Then, as I let myself out, closing the door quietly behind me, I saw the envelope on the ground, tucked halfway under the door.

It could have been mail, an electricity notice, some apartment document, but something compelled me to pick it up and lift the open lip. Perhaps it was the spark I felt on my fingertips, seeing the unmarked envelope lying there. Opening it, I saw that it wasn't meant for Aman at all. I drew the page from the envelope slowly, knowing just what it was and at the same time hoping it was anything but.

It was the empty page, with the signature in the lower right corner.

The edge of the paper was ruffled from where it had been torn from the notebook. Ripped from its context, it had been folded and smudged, and now resembled trash. I held the envelope and the piece of paper with trembling hands. I remembered my train. With the papers still clutched in my hands, I ran down the stairs, through the gate, and onto the main road where I caught a rickshaw that would take me to the station.

I don't have the empty page anymore. When I got to Goa, I looked up the address of the bookstore and mailed it back with a note of explanation. I don't know why Teddy tore the page from the book, or how he knew where to leave it. But the memory stays with me, even as my time in the ashram has fallen away. The ashram was a place where I failed, spiritually and logistically, but Teddy and the empty page remain unanswered questions in my mind—as does the palm reading. I've never asked my parents or my brother, but his words have stayed with me.

Maybe, holding that journal in my hands, with Teddy looking over my shoulder, I did find what I was seeking in India. Maybe his smile was never sly after all; maybe he only used it to conceal something ugly from the world. Meanwhile, places that glimmer aren't always made of gold, and the truest beauty can be found in the clamor of an unpaved road, or in the layers of paint on a building—creamy white beneath robin's-egg blue, or coral cracking over teal. Secrets sometimes live in dusty bookshops, even when they're impossible to locate in the glistening reflection of a mirrored mosaic, or in the rhythm of a hundred people breathing.

I think of the creased paper, the texture of the scrawled words, and I hope that whoever wrote that journal will someday come to claim it again, that they will open the cardboard cover, check for the scrawled name, and find the page where they left it, torn from the spiral rings but intact, blessed in its comparative bareness.

Kate McCahill is a writer, editor, and visual artist from Lake Placid, New York. As the 2010 Mary Elvira Stevens Traveling Fellowship recipient at Wellesley College, Kate spent a year traveling overland from Guatemala to Patagonia, teaching English and writing along the way. She holds a Bachelors degree from Wellesley College and an MFA from Vermont College, and she currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

ABBIE KOZOLCHYK

Meat and Greet

T
he Traveler's Code of Conduct—a body of oral law etched indelibly into the collective nomadic consciousness—is very clear on matters of food: however unfamiliar, unappetizing and/or squirmy, nothing a host serves may be turned down. Especially when you're a stranger in a strange land. To violate this rule is to violate one of the most ancient and sacred precepts of hospitality—and to reveal simultaneous provincialism and schmuckiness of the highest order.

Here, then, one schmuck's tale.

I became a vegetarian twenty-five years ago, during a tenth-grade biology lab, when my designated dissectee turned out to be the pigeon that broke the camel's back. Deceased animals placed before me, whether as meals or science projects, had long since induced guilt and a gag reflex. And for some reason, with this one squab au jus de formaldehyde, I was done.

Alas, some twenty years later, my hosts on Yao Yai didn't get the memo.

No, really. There was a memo. Or at least a
Special Dietary Requirements
section of the paperwork I'd filled out for my trip to this southern Thai island. I was heading there to write about a nascent homestay program, and my friend Lon—always up for a dose of the different—was joining me.

Thus did we find ourselves the newest residents of an isolated wooden shack. It was surrounded by rice paddies and water buffaloes, propped up on stilts, and filled—in our honor—with freshly prepared fish.

Yes, our appointed island home—where two men on motorbikes had just deposited us after a dock-to-door off-road derby—harbored the ichthyological mother lode. Name the Andaman Sea subspecies, however obscure, and it was represented in our welcome buffet. Highly identifiably, in fact: whatever had happened to these fish between their last swim and their appearance on the day's menu, nary a scale, fin, tooth or eyeball was out of place.

So I knew Lon wouldn't be the one to get us out of this mess. Normally she'd act as my omnivorous wingman, making at least a respectable dent in any non-veg offerings. But anatomically correct entrées were her deal breakers— grounds for a poker-faced declaration of vegetarianism. And I could feel one coming on.

I panicked. And the heat and humidity—augmented by a thousand steaming fish dishes, all enclosed in the house's tiny central room—didn't help. Within seconds I felt woozy. But apparently, no one was the wiser. Our host parents, each a good decade our junior, beamed expectantly, gesturing toward what had clearly taken them hours (him, on the fishing end; her, on the cooking end) to produce. Just for us. The esteemed guests. Oy gevalt.

As much as I hated being
that
tourist—the philistine who rejects such generously, lovingly, painstakingly prepared food—I saw no alternative. Especially as Lon was giving me the “can't help you, dude” shrug.

“I'm SO sorry,” I began, looking back and forth between our new parents, who spoke next-to-no English.

“So, so, so, so sorry,” I continued. “I really can't tell you how sorry I am. But there seems to have been a misunderstanding.”

Their brows—until now eagerly raised—suddenly descended to the mildly concerned elevations. But still, not a glimmer of comprehension.

So I tried again.

“You've prepared
such
a beautiful meal. So, so, so, so beautiful. Wow. Really, wow. The only problem is, sadly—very, very, very sadly—we can't eat it.”

Nada.

Between the fish haze and the fear of offending—both intense to begin with and rising at equal rates—I wasn't sure how much lucidity I had left.

My mind raced several years back to another such episode, when Lon and I were in Frankfurt, and I was struggling to order a meat-free meal. After attempting every possible pronunciation of the word
vegetarisc
—only to be met with the waitress's blank stares—I finally blurted out,
kein fleisch
.

No meat.

Plain and simple. Crude and desperate. The fumbling vegetarian's version of the Hail Mary pass. But it worked.

I thought I'd try it again.

Not knowing the Thai words for
no meat,
however, I resorted to miming them this time. And in a show of solidarity, Lon was soon in on the act. With a succession of moves not seen since my Red Cross Advanced Swimmer certification circa 1980, I did lap after lap around the tiny living room as she did the universal “no-no” wag. But the unfortunate thing about breast, side, and back-strokes is that fish tend not to use them. By the time anyone got what we were saying, we had performed a veritable Macarena of
we-no-eat-seafood
gestures.

Nevertheless,
something
finally clicked, and our hosts nodded accordingly. Then they started laughing hysterically.

Some things—the unbridled joy of watching two grown women make giant asses of themselves, for example—are indeed universal.

With our plunge into idiocy, the group dynamic changed radically. No longer were we a collection of strangers, smiling and nodding at a polite distance. There was something familiar, even familial, about the way we were cracking each other up now.

Still, our Charades skills went only so far. We failed to convey to our hosts that the plain rice they'd already cooked would more than suffice, so an hour later—to our mortification—a replacement feast showed up. The motor-bikers had been sent back to “town” (a relative term on a one-road island), where some mystery chef had devised an all-you-can-eat vegetarian buffet—from the curries whose estimable coconut, coriander, and lemongrass quotient immediately overtook any lingering fish smells, to the garlicky, gingery stir-fries that finished the job. And for dessert, every possible combination of banana leaf, sticky rice, mango, and taro.

Absent a table and chairs, which don't come standard with Yao Yai stilt houses, we sat in a circle around the food on the linoleum floor.

By now, we were famished—and so were, apparently, all the neighborhood ants. They showed up as soon as we were served, and without ever breaking formation, marched militantly over our ankles, calves, and thighs to get to the goods.

Lon and I once again exchanged glances, but to our surprise, no one else did. There was evidently nothing out of the ordinary about 100,000 ants showing up for lunch.

Abstinence was not an option. Was it?

No
, we silently confirmed to each other; it wasn't.

So without even speaking, we arrived at a system. Pretending not to notice our ant-covered bodies and plates, we'd wait for breaks in the foot traffic. Then—our chopsticks pre-cocked—we'd go in with laser-like speed and precision, hoping to minimize the insect protein content. Because really, what was a little syncopated stick work, given our already curious eating habits?

Soon enough, we all started chatting again—and rarely stopped during the three days we spent on top of each other in this tiny home. Of course, no one had the faintest idea what anyone else was saying, but that seemed a minor detail.

So taken were we with these impossibly warm, open, and lovely people, that even activities we normally wouldn't sign up for—the admiring of doomed fish, for example—now seemed a perfectly acceptable form of bonding. When our host father and his fishing buddies took us by long-tail boat to behold the waterborne holding pen they'd set up in the middle of Phang Nga Bay, their giddiness was palpable. Forget the surreal limestone formations that protruded from blue-green waters, or the secluded, powdered sugar beaches—or any of the other greatest hits of Phang Nga Bay. Though we were dutifully escorted to all of them, nothing lit these boys up the way a mackerel in a net did. How could we
not
smile and nod appreciatively at every last detainee?

We repeated the exercise (or a variation on it, anyway) later that day, as our host mother expertly handled a succession of carcasses in the kitchen. She was so solicitous—always looking up from her work to smile at us and make sure we were having a good time—that we dared not disappoint. If we were going to commit the cardinal traveler's sin of not eating the day's catch, we could at least ham up our audience participation. And judging from our oohs and ahhs, you'd think fish gutting was our favorite spectator sport.

That night, our last on the island, even the ants endeared themselves to us as we dodged them to get to our farewell feast: ten curries, stir-fries and sticky rice confections for every one that had appeared on our first day.

After dinner, Lon and I gave our host mother a pair of earrings we knew she'd love. (They were the same enameled bohemian jobbies we had loved at her age.) And the following morning, they kept catching the sun as she waved goodbye to us from the dock. But as we waved back—our ferry slowly maneuvering out of its slip—we noticed a much subtler glimmer: tears were running down her cheeks. Down our host father's, too.

Within seconds, Lon and I were crying too—at which point we realized how quickly we'd all formed this funny little family. The process wasn't graceful—but God, was it delicious.

Abbie Kozolchyk, a New York-based writer and editor, has contributed to
National Geographic Traveler, Travel + Leisure
,
the San Francisco Chronicle, Outside, World Hum,
Concierge.com
, Forbes Traveler,
Traveler's Tales, and a variety of women's magazines. Visit her at
www.abbiekozolchyk.com
.