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.