Precious Pearl

As I stood behind the yellow line that read “Please Wait Here”, I wondered what he would ask me. This was routine procedure, but I was restless that day. After being gone for four years, this land had begun to feel foreign to me. The people looked different, their language felt awkward. And even though I looked like them and could still read, write and speak the language perfectly, something was amiss.

 

As he finished with the newly married couple in front of me, he nodded to let me know that I was next. I knew they were newly married - Her green bangles were a dead give-away! Why else would she wear green bangles on a pink dress? They weren’t the only mark of a married woman on her, but were far more obvious than the dark henna tattoos on her hands. 

 

I stepped up, stood on my toes so I could reach over and handed him everything I was holding. He looked at my boarding pass, raised his head to scrutinize my face closely, and asked, "Bhutan?". He seemed a little surprised by my choice. Most people had been.

 

I replied, "Ji haan!” Yes, sir.

"Bhutan kaise?" Why Bhutan?

"Aise hi...ghumne..."  Umm...just...to see a new place.

 

It was his job to ask. As an immigration officer, he was supposed to ensure that I had all my paperwork and was not smuggling something out of the country or being smuggled out myself. He didn't ask, "Why Bhutan?" because he knew Bhutan was just the place I would go to if my life fell apart. If he had opened my passport to the right pages and seen the recent stamps in it, he would have known. Because no one travels for over 36 hours, halfway around the world, “just to see a new place”. If his nose was any better, he might have even begun to realize that after about 30 hours, the deodorant simply stops helping. 

 

As he compared my face to the grainy image in my passport from nine years ago, I wondered if he was trying to find the real Bhavna as well. I had already spent the past 5 months looking for her, but maybe he would have better luck. His receding hairline suggested he was probably around 40 and knew a thing or two about people. I am not sure if the real Bhavna was the twenty six year old who had hung onto the same dream for eleven years or the girl who always gave herself an excuse to ignore that dream. I am still not sure what compelled me to find my way to the Indira Gandhi International airport that day.

 

Email forwards are mostly annoying and have a way of invoking a strong sense of exasperation towards your friends. However, every once in a while, they change your life. I remember this strange forward about Bhutan from eleven years ago. It described a tiny, landlocked Himalayan mountain country whose fourth king coined the term “gross national happiness” to measure his people’s well-being. It went on to describe how they didn’t have television till 1999 and whose major source of income was selling hydroelectric power to India. Even as a fifteen year old, I was convinced this was the most egregious email lie being circulated! But 2006 was also the year I discovered google and instantly looked up Bhutan. It turns out, the country was real and beautiful and charming. It had 1400 year old monasteries hugging the edges of dangerous cliffs, hikes that went through lovely mountains and past a thousand lakes. Their national animal was called the Takin, looked like a cross between a goat’s face and a cow’s body and was found nowhere else in the world! Bhutan had always been a sovereign nation, but was also the world’s youngest monarchy. Bhutan seemed strange, but also full of mystery. I suppose that’s what brought me to the airport.

 

"Aapka naam bahut pyara hai." You have a beautiful name.

It was a nice name! It meant "lover". But the guy in the blue shirt did not know that I had stopped being everything that name stood for. I had loved truly, deeply and passionately, and still lost. I had completely shut myself off from the rest of the world. The bullet proof glass that shielded him was fragile in comparison to the walls I had been building around myself. I had run away from my friends and the possibilities of new relationships. Destiny took the one life, the one relationship that mattered and left me alone to deal with the emptiness and grief. How then was I supposed to feel close to someone again or let anyone in? How was I to ignore the knowledge that every relationship had the potential to fail; that everyone in my life had the power to destroy themselves and hurt me in the process; that circumstances always had a way of annihilating everything good, no matter how much of yourself you gave up to save something. I had tried, but even giving up all of my life couldn’t deter destiny from taking her ruinous path and taking everything away from me.

 

Today though, I was trying to change that. As I fidgeted with my red scarf trying to turn those thoughts off and focus on him, I responded,

 

"Shukriya, mere pardada lekhak the....isi naam se likhthe the". Thank You. My great grandfather was a writer, and this was his pseudonym.

 

I knew I wasn't forming a relationship with this man. I knew I wasn’t going to see him again. But I still told him the story of my name. I told him a tiny part of my story, and made my first attempt at slowing opening up to the people around me. I was learning to smile again. I was learning to let people around me know that I was capable of feeling happiness, even it meant accepting the fact that I would feel pain, loneliness, defenselessness, longing, grief, desolation and utter desperation and defeat.

 

"Visa to arrival pe hi hoga?". Are you planning on getting a visa on arrival?

"Ji haan". Yes, sir.

 

He handed my passport and boarding pass back, but only after he had marked this day in it. I walked towards my flight. I would soon fly over the highest mountain in the world, to the happiest place in the world! And destiny wasn’t going to change that. 

"I do"
"I do too"

The ironic thing about traditions, is that while each generation rejects the old, it is the shared experiences that help us connect with people, with communities, to form lasting bonds. These bonds are forged stronger and are more meaningful than those we form due to mere proximity. They too met as result of shared misery, but it was their desire to find their place in the world that bound them. Their desires to be someone, to find happiness, to deserve happiness, to share it with the people around them and to someday, leave behind their imprint in the world.

Their story starts at the Miami International Airport. They flew to Miami from Mumbai, India. She via Paris and Atlanta. He flew to Miami directly from Amsterdam. They first met in the airline's tiny room behind the ticketing office, where lost luggage lived. They bumped heads digging through hordes of lost bags. As fate would have it, his flight arrived late and the airline sent his bags to Atlanta, where they got lost with hers. The airline systems said their bags were sent to Miami, and so they went, every Sunday, to look for them.

The first time they met, they smiled shyly at each other and complained about how irresponsible the airline had been. "I had my prescription medicines in the bag! It's going to take me a month to get another appointment with the doctor! They're so irresponsible!" "I had my father's watch in the bag. He's worn it right from grade ten till the day he retired".

The second time they met, they smiled at each other with recognition and complained a little more about the airline's insensitive staff.

The third time they met, they smiled at each other knowingly, and then got coffee together.

And it went on like this for a while. They never found their bags, but, as cliched as it sounds, they found each other.

Sumit's father grew up in the India before 1991, where things like fancy watches were not easy to come by. But even when they were easy to come by, even when he had traveled the world and had all the money in the world to afford anything he needed, his father still wore the same watch. It was a present he had received when he scored really high grades in school. His father was a self made man, in every sense of the word. He didn't come from money, but had put himself through school and the most elite educational institutes in the country. He started his own design and manufacturing business with a friend in the days of the license raj and struggled like a factory worker to build it into something good. The watch reminded Sumit of his father, the values he embodied, the principles he led his life by, his relationships with people around him, his work ethic and everything that made him so impressive. All of Sumit's friends respected his father and looked to him for advice. His father was emotionally balanced and cared deeply for the people around him. Sumit had cursed himself over and over again for packing the watch in the bags the airline had lost! After all, Sumit had spent his life competing with the man. Sumit knew he had been given a headstart in life by virtue of his father's hardwork. Sumit never had to worry about money for books or the high cost of tuition at Stanford. He was accepted there because of his academic caliber, but he could never shake the uneasiness associated with being privileged. He believed that the only way he could deserve the opportunities and luxuries afforded to him, was, at the very least, being more successful than his father. But that was not the end of his ambition. Someday he wanted to be the CEO of the firm he worked at. And it was this strange desire to be ridden of guilt, guilt that he alone was responsible for, that had brought him to Brickell, Miami's financial capital.

Chanchal had wanted to leave India and go see the world, ever since she was a child. She always wanted to run away from everything and that might have brought her here. She was also very perceptive. She had read somewhere that people who experienced abuse at a young age tended to develop a keen sense of perception. So she always knew the truth without being told. She feared confronting it, because for her, it meant confirming the worst. And this keen sense of discernment made her leave. But she understood this. What she was totally oblivious to, was her profound sense of self doubt. She was confident when it came to matters of procedure. She knew what was right, what was wrong. However, when it came to personal responsibility, she naturally tended to take onus for everything that went wrong, whether she had the power to influence it or not. And so, she left India. First, to escape the abuse. Because running away even if it had been fifteen years after it stopped, was the only way she could truly stop feeling responsible. It was the only way she could right the wrong. She traveled and moved around the United States, and finally settled in Miami. The city's sense of chaos resonated with her. The city's persistent high rise development that forced new roads to close and maps impossible to follow, excited her. She understood the city's drive to define itself just as she was working hard to define herself and find her place in the world. The city was hot, just like her temper. The high rises wanted to be the tallest among the country, even if they were going up against a hundred and eighty mile per hour hurricane winds; just like she wanted to move up and be the best at what she did, despite the storms constantly brewing around her. And just like Miami's high rises stood on some of the poorest soils in the world, she knew her past wouldn't hold her back from having a magnificent future.

And thus their paths crossed because of their shared misery. But then they kept them crossing. They shared more than plain misery. They understood each other's need to deserve, their need to know that they were worth being saved and deserving of the good things that happened to them. They admired each other's ambition and their limitless passion for what they did. Someday, they would learn to be kind to themselves too. But that didn't stop them from falling in love. Neither did it stop them from accepting each other as life partners. Today, in the way of their ancestors, they embraced a life together by making the traditional seven rounds around the holy fire that would bear witness to their union.