A Traveler's Guide to Belonging

Chapter 3-1

3

Timothy hiked out of the forest after he left the memorial, his feet making their own way on the rocks, almost without thought. He shook his head, fists clenched. The anger inside him was like a tide; his feet struck the ground like hammer blows. The baby stirred and meowed from the carrier, like a kitten. The baby had no mother, Timothy had no wife. It wasn't perfect! How could it be? The baby stretched and started crying. Timothy felt a sense of helplessness so deep it almost took him inside it, like a large red ball. It was the sun in a stop-motion movie, sliced from its space in a cut-out sky and rolling down the hill toward him. He walked and imagined how it would hit him, that red ball. He would stick to the outside and roll, bouncing on cars and dogs until they were mashed together.

The real sun had gone down while they sat in their circle, saying nice things about a woman who would never again see the sunset. The trees and hills were black now, against the light. Timothy had reached the chai shop. He nodded at the owner's friendly wave, but didn't move closer. Isabel had loved coming around this bend and seeing the view of the whole valley and all the little houses nestled into it. The curve in the side of the mountain was like a perfect bowl, holding the light. The village where they had chosen to have their baby was called Dharamkot, far in the foothills of the Himalayas. The nearby town was the home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile, but their little village was mostly Hindu with many Gaddi people, an old nomadic tribe with the light-colored eyes of northern Pakistan or Afghanistan. This was where Isabel had said she wanted to make her nest.

The baby was really kicking, making frantic noises. He was loud, like a baby animal. Timothy walked with long strides, desperate to get back to the house and back to Sunita, the wet nurse. He reached the steep part and climbed a stone staircase that had green plants exploding from all the cracks. The rain had been almost incessant lately and this was the first morning of sun in a couple of weeks. Timothy finally reached the house and headed straight for Sunita's door. She met Timothy at the entrance, frowning, shaking her head. She took the wailing baby.

"Too long, Bhaiya" she said. His heart warmed as it always did when she called him brother.

"Sorry, Didi," he said with respect, calling her older sister, hoping she would let it pass.

She clicked her tongue, then walked into the house to nurse the baby. Timothy stood on the porch and lit a cigarette, trying to avoid the sight of the little house across the path, the place where Isabel and he had lived, where she died. It had been a week, only a week, and he felt that Isabel must walk into the room any minute and at the same time felt that it had been forever that he had been this ghost, the un-man that he had become since she left.

When Timothy had come back from meeting the bear, a doctor had been examining Isabel's body to ascertain the time of death. There were three policemen, another man that Timothy later discovered was the secretary of the Panchayat—the village government—and three men who looked like low-caste laborers. When the doctor finished, the three laborers, looking sleepy now that it was the middle of the night, had gently wrapped Isabel's body in a long white sheet and hoisted her on their shoulders. Timothy was shaking. He shook until his teeth rattled, he grabbed his ribs, trying to stop the tremors that made him feel like he would shake right out of his body. He let Sunita take the baby for the night and he left the house and moved into the room that was next to Sunita and Gopal's little room, across the mountain path from what had been their dream house. The next day Timothy took all the things the two of them had owned and left that house. He never went back. It taunted him now as he looked at it. It felt like a symbol of all that they had hoped for, all that had been taken from them.

He hadn't even met Isabel as much as he was found by her, lost as he had been in the train station in New Delhi. It was a year and a half before, mid-March—a hot time to be starting out in India. He was standing in front of a board that had sheets of paper stapled to it, a matrix of names, numbers, cars, berths. The lists didn't seem to hold the possibility of discovery, of finding the right train. Timothy could feel his tired brain struggling to work the visual input into some kind of order, trying and failing. Around him, shorter men pushed in to get a closer look. He was about to give up when he heard a soft voice at his shoulder.

"Do you need help?"

He turned and saw her. Her accent was incredible. She was French, and it was not the French of his country, the wild, new country French with the rough edges, but the soft French of Paris. She pronounced "help" as "elp."

Dark brown hair pulled up behind her head. Dark eyes, so black you couldn't tell the pupil from the iris. She had sunglasses pushed back in the dim light of the station. She looked like a girl in a movie about trains. One of what seemed like several scarves she wore was caught in a breeze from the fan whipping maniacally above them. The gauzy material hovered around her face. She brushed it away.

Timothy didn't know how to answer the question. He had a lump in his throat because she had these little shadows under her eyes and perfect lines at the corners of her mouth. He only smiled and looked back at his ticket. She leaned in and peered at it with him.

"Ah! D'accord. Rajasthan Express. It is the very same train that I will board. How wonderful."

Timothy wiped sweat from his forehead, found his voice.

"That's awesome."

"Challo," she said. Her meaning was clear, though Timothy didn't know until a later time that it meant "Let's go!" in Hindi. He had to move quickly to catch up with her, after heaving his heavy pack on his back. He looked back down at his ticket, crumbly around the edges because he had handled it so much. When he bought it, three days ago, he set it on the bed in his stark room with the cockroaches in the corners, took a photo of it with his iPhone, and used the guesthouse's slow wi-fi to send it to his sister, Sarah.

"Lucky!" she wrote back.

She couldn't know the truth. India turned everything you knew inside out. At his first sight of Paharganj, the trip had seemed like a terrible mistake. A cow bleeding from a neck wound bumped him with her horns. A beggar with curling legs wheeled himself along on a skateboard, by his arms. Was this even Earth, still?

Timothy had boarded a plane in Vancouver, Canada, with the hope of breaking free of the constraint that he always seemed to feel—to fly! To leave his family and their watchful eyes, to see the world. He thought that India would be the place for him. He wanted to study Indian flute and he knew that it was an exotic place, perhaps just wild enough for him.

On arrival, he was instantly overwhelmed. After an incident where he gave a few coins to one beggar child and then eight more showed up out of the night, clamoring and laughing and yelling for money, he nearly got back on the plane. He saw a five-year-old doing flips in the dirt, her little face sweeping the place his shoes had just been, and retreated to his tiny guesthouse room, feeling more trapped than ever. He didn't go home. He bought a train ticket to the desert of Rajasthan, deciding to continue on.

The railway station was seething with life in its dark reaches. On the tracks, rats the size of small dogs. On the platforms, families planted on sections of floor they had squared off with mats. People had their arms flung over bags tied together with string. Real suitcases and sacks, boxes covered with white cloth with an unfamiliar alphabet decorating the outsides. Little kids cried or squirmed or danced away from frazzled parents. Exhausted women breastfed and old ladies lay down with their heads pillowed on their arms. Sweat trickled down Timothy's back, under his shirt as he wove between the mats. The air felt heavy. There were so many people, there was so little comfort. He felt a little bit sick.

Isabel was much shorter than him. At just over six feet tall, he was tall in India. She was closer to the height of many of the other women in the station. Her clothes floated around her. She had that thing that he had noticed about other European women since then—ordinary clothes moved around them in a different way, transformed by the women who wore them. She kept walking. Timothy struggled to keep up. Despite his exhaustion, he felt excited, as if something special was about to happen. Could they sit together, somehow?

They reached the platform just after she brushed past a dozen men in red shirts, who called "Coolie! Coolie!" at her. She stopped, dropped her bag on the ground, and delicately sat on it. The smell of roses came from somewhere inside her scarves. She put her hand in the little purse she was carrying and pulled a pack of cigarettes out, offered it up.

"No, thanks," Timothy said. He had yet to become a smoker.

She lit one and held it carefully, a small bird between two fingers. She extended her other hand toward him.

"I'm Isabel," she said.

He was still fighting with one of the straps of his backpack. He jerked it free and dumped the whole thing on the ground, one rib in his back aching because of too many books shoved in the crevices of the brand-new pack.

"Timothy," he said. "Nice to meet you. Thanks..." They were shaking hands, hers a tiny thing in his. He cleared his throat. "Thanks for showing me the platform."

She smiled, eyebrows raised, put her cigarette to her mouth, and inhaled. She turned slightly to the side to exhale. A large brass pendant clanked against her other necklaces. It sounded like the opening rhythm to one of Timothy's favorite songs, and he started to sing it softly, under his breath. He was already falling quickly towards love, soundlessly and heavily.

"Of course. It is no problem." She stepped back a bit, to get a better look at him. "Timothy."

When she said his name, it sounded like Teem o tee. It was something greater coming from her voice box. He was aware that he felt feverish, overworked. That his senses were pinging. Cigarette-less, he cupped his hands in front of him and stared into them. Tired, exhilarated. His heart was thumping as if he'd been running.

They waited there like that, Isabel perched on her backpack, Timothy shuffling from foot to foot. They began to do the normal thing. Asked each other questions about where they were from.

"Canada," Timothy said.

"Ah, oui? Parle vous français?"

He ducked his head. "Non. From the wrong side of the country."

"Not Québec," she said. "Where they speak some strange wonderful language that they like to call French."

"And you?"

"France, of course. South of France."

A weak-willed fan chugged away above them, pulling the fumes of her cigarette away from her, across the station, into the steel beams, away. Timothy nodded, trying not to appear young and ignorant, although he knew he was both. The strain of it was tightening his forehead. He felt an urge to reach for his flute, to stop himself from talking about Canadian politics, which was what he did when he was nervous. On the tracks beyond the empty space that waited for their train to fill it, another train was parked. People stood in its doorways and stared at the two of them. The station was a cave and they were creatures cut into the walls. Timothy didn't have anything to fear, but his heartbeat was speeding up again. Time and shock and sleeplessness were catching up with him. He saw nothing he could decode. Nothing was familiar.

Isabel stood up and put her hand on his arm.

"Are you all right?" she asked. Her eyes were worried, and he realized that no, he was not okay; he had not been prepared for this.

Before he had a chance to answer, a long blast of a whistle filled the station. The train was coming. Isabel stamped her cigarette out and kicked it on to the tracks. A large rat waddled over to investigate. She grasped her bag with one hand and swung it onto her back.

"Get ready," she said. "Hurry. You must be ready, this will be very serious."

She snatched at his ticket, stared at it. Clicked her tongue.

"Non, this is not good. You will sit with me."

His heart was beating quickly again. The train sped into the station and slowed with a creaking squeal. Surely they weren't all getting on this train. People had begun to appear beside him; there must have been two hundred people in their small space. His backpack was on. A man beside him had one of the white boxes covered with writing on his head. He was staring at Timothy. Dark, intense eyes and an eagle's brow. Timothy looked back at him, wondered who he was, where he was going.

The train squealed to a stop and Isabel grabbed Timothy's hand.

"Come!" she shouted, and her voice was there, then drowning in the air, thick and ringing with noise. It was madness. It was a stampede, running with the bulls, a log-rolling festival. This was not the way Timothy had been raised to board a train. He realized too late that he was far too tired for this, but he was caught in a swirling pool of people. They piled in every direction, shouting, arms flying. Timothy was pushed away from the door. He was so confused. Were they all getting on this train? Isabel yanked hard on his hand before he was moved away on the current.

She pulled him toward the doorway of the train and he did his best to fight his way through. As he tried to climb the narrow metal steps, other people spilled out, bumping his backpack and whipping him around with the force of their landing. He smelled sweat and garlic mixed with the stale urine on the tracks. He let go of Isabel's hand just before his wrist was bent beyond recognition, but he knew he couldn't let her get away. He burrowed in, finally made it to the top of the steps. He turned and faced the long train aisle, but several men with boxes on their heads were coming down the passageway in the opposite direction. There was only enough room for one person to squeeze through, but three crammed themselves wherever a single person would fit.

Isabel turned around and shouted, "Fourth compartment!"

She turned and tunneled under a fat man's arm to get through. It looked easy for her, but with his height, Timothy was not going to make it.

A woman shouted nearby, her baby being squeezed in her arms. Madness. One innovative foreigner heaved himself to the top of a bunk, then walked along the crowd, his feet landing on ladders or bunks, but occasionally a man's shoulder. Timothy stood for many minutes with his neck pressed to the side of an upper berth, unable to move. Things calmed down, a little. He finally made his way to Isabel. She was busy shooing a man out of the compartment. Next she took his ticket and showed it to another man, apparently trading Timothy's seat for his. The man let himself be persuaded, grabbed his things and held his hand out for Isabel to shake, but she turned him down with sharp words.

The train was moving now. Isabel turned another man away at the entrance to their compartment.

"Ticket!" she said, one hand on her hip, the other held out in front of her. The man tried to push past her, into the compartment, but she stood her ground, and he drifted away. Timothy was still standing, hunched over with his shoulders under the top berth, not sure what to do next.

All the eyes of the others in the compartment were on Isabel as she walked calmly to the window seat and sat down. There were now only the two of them and four others. Timothy stuck his head into the neighboring compartment. There were at least twice as many people in there, resigned, in piles on the floor or the top berths. He pulled his head back into their own compartment.

"Is it okay to tell people to get out like that?" he asked. He wasn't even meaning to say it aloud, but couldn't help himself. The look on the man's face when Isabel told him to go away gave him a sad feeling in his stomach, like when he forgot something after school and went back to his classroom to get it, finding his chemistry teacher eating a bag of Cheetos with orange fingers, reading a romance novel.

Isabel looked up from rifling through her handbag.

"Of Indian trains, Timothy," she said. "Tu es un enfant."

His elementary school French was enough to understand that, so he shut his mouth and waded through the legs to reach the seat opposite her, next to the window. He picked up the bag she had left there to save his seat for him, handed it to her. She smiled at him, her mouth sweet, as though she had not just called him a child.

Timothy glanced around at the other people in their little space. They were staring, openly curious. A woman with a dark purple sari, a streak of red color in the part of her hair, rings on six of her toes. Silver anklets. Her feet were impossibly clean. Had she really walked through the same station he had? Timothy assumed the man next to her was her husband. The two men beside him on the bench lost interest in him and started looking at pictures on a mobile phone. Isabel was unwinding the scarf around her neck. She threw it lightly around her shoulders and rested one foot on her seat, knee up, draping her arm around it. Smiled at Timothy.

"Well," she said. "We made it."

Timothy's backpack was next to him. He stood up and squatted to shove it under the bench, winding a chain around it and locking it to the seat legs, then locking the zippers together, like he'd read about in his travel guide. Sat back down. The train beat a rhythm on the tracks; it cracked its way into Timothy's brain. They were on their way to Jaipur, traveling through the dusty central plains of India, on into the desert. Desert was alien to Timothy, so far from his forested island in Canada.

Isabel pulled out a tattered journal and started scribbling in it, not looking up until a man waded down the aisle, calling "Chai, chai! Garam chai!"

She set the book beside her and fished around in her purse until she came up with a ten-rupee note.

"Do chai, Bhaiya," she said, when he paused at the opening to their compartment. "Let me buy chai for you, Timothy." It was a statement, not a question. He nodded and watched as she handed the man ten rupees, took two piping hot paper cups of chai, handed one to him. He sipped it, burning his tongue. It was very sweet.

Isabel didn't pick the journal up again. She sipped her chai, gazing out the window. The train compartment was open, no glass on the windows, only iron bars to keep the world out and the passengers in. The two of them sat and drank chai as the train sped through the plains. They watched the light change, soften, watched the sun become a brilliant red ball, falling toward the horizon. The light on Isabel's face was gold, then ruddy and brilliant. Timothy saw stark trees with white flowers at the tips of their gnarled, bare branches. Round haystacks. A different kind of tree, many of them, all in a line. Even the trees were different here; he saw nothing he recognized, and he the son of a carpenter. The train pulled up in villages where more tidy, clean people climbed aboard and tried to find seats. Dusty beggars trailed after their window as the train pulled away, holding their hands out. When the train was still, the air was too. Sweat gathered on their upper lips, under their chins. When the train moved on and wind found its way through the windows, the relief was a song.

They talked, pointing things out as they saw them. Timothy was curious about the round dung patties, rows of them pressed to walls with handprints in the center. Isabel explained—they were old news to her—that the patties would dry and become fuel for kitchen fires, and pointed out the old man squatting on a station platform, large turban and larger mustache, legs coming out of his dhoti like bent sticks.

"Traditional Rajasthani clothing," she said. "We're getting close."

They were on the outskirts of the large desert state, the ride was softness and light and the sweet smell of burning dung. It was a thudding in his heart. Her startling smile. It was a trail Timothy had certainly not expected to find himself on.

When she turned her face to watch the fields beyond the window, he could see every line of her profile, how the curves swooped and melted together. He felt so far away from Canada, from the stuck feeling he'd been trying to break free of. He felt a door opening.

Across the aisle, in the alcove berth, a family with two small children sat, bunched together, the kids wound in their mother's sari. As Timothy watched, the man reached out and touched his wife quickly, lightly on the cheek. They settled down for sleep as the sky darkened, the man climbing into the top berth alone.

Timothy and Isabel moved into the top berths when their neighbors wanted to swing the middle berth up, for sleep. Isabel made a nest for herself and spread a blue lungi over her arms and legs.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Twenty-three," he told her.

"Ah! Vrai, tu es un enfant!"

No man likes to be told he is a child.

"Well, how old are you?" he asked.

"I am thirty-four," she said, pronouncing it teerty-four and the words reached into the air and stirred the space around him. He felt a click, like he had been waiting for them. But she looked like a teenager, except for those shadows under her eyes.

"Too old?" she asked, her voice soft.

"No, not too old," he said. He reached his hand across the space between their berths and their fingers twined together in the darkness.