*This essay won the University of New Orleans (UNO) Creative Writing Contest for Nonfiction in 2012, which awarded a scholarship to the month-long UNO Writing Workshops Abroad Program in Edinburgh, Scotland and publication in the literary journal, The Pinch.*
Road to the Himalayas
The bus to Dharamsala is a bright swirl of decoration, painted joyously pink and yellow, with flags and ribbons hanging off and bells and deities surrounding a makeshift alter on the dashboard. Dreamy eyed Hindu gods adorn its roof and walls. It’s psychedelic facade stands out against the damp, beige morning landscape. It is empty as I climb the stairs, dumping my belongings in a cargo hold at the front and claim an empty seat by an open window a few rows back from the door. The road north climbs through villages and forests, collecting new bodies from the sides of roads and lanes at each arbitrary stopping place. At one point, the thin, potholed road stops all together and we navigate across a field of mud, the tires sinking into oozing puddles and getting stuck three or four times, requiring various local men to get off and push until it reaches firmer ground. With much yelling and discourse from the passengers, the driver tries to navigate, steer and coax, his tin-box steed across the sodden expanse and back onto a firm stretch of twisting, cow lined path with its rock walls and monkeys dangling and stretching, taking us higher into the foothills of the Himalayas.
Trodding along, gathering passengers and their parcels, the space within the walls of the bus begins to fill until bodies are hanging out doors and windows, clutching to the sides and climbing to the roof and still they load on, load in. Packages and bundles, swaddled babies, sacks of fruits, backpacks of schoolbooks. It is hard to tell where any one person ends and another begins. The hum of chatter, of Hindi music, of rain on metal, of unseen babies crying, and women cooing to them softly, of laughter and men yelling to people alongside the path all swirls together and becomes the collective sound of India wandering around in the background of my thoughts as I lay my head against the cool metal of the bent open window and watch the countryside pass by. There are bodies in front of and behind and beside and beside and beside to every wall, people sitting on laps, people piled six across a seat that might have been built to accommodate two or three. I sit wedged against a window and shift my weight, trying to shrug off something strange.
I adjust the weight of my bag in my lap from one leg to the other, as much as I can move the bag full of cameras, journals, traveling documents and everything else that I have decided I can not let out of my sight, anything that is explicitly necessary and irreplaceable. I shift my weight again. I can’t see my legs. I tell myself it is only the wind blowing through the open window, the rhythm of my breath moving my body against the strap of my bag. Nothing to worry about, I repeat, turning this phrase over and over in my head as though rolling beads on a rosary. Weight shifts, knees pull closer, ankles cross and uncross under the seat. I fight my thoughts for a mile, wedged in too tight to move.
Did I feel something?
No, it was imagined.
I look at the face next to me, a young man, small in stature with hair combed and oiled. He is looking off in the opposite direction, face placid, wearing no expression, almost asleep in the rattling lull of the rambling and bumping bus. I look back out my window and try to focus on the landscape. I feel something again, so light it is indistinguishable, a weight like a feather.
In a sudden, instinctual movement, I free my elbow from the mix, draw in a breath and jerk the bag up off my lap. Looking down, I catch a quick glimpse as a brown hand recoils from between my legs. The exposed culprit of slim fingers retreats as the man leaps up and hurls toward the aisle, taking two leaps, like a fawn, and darting out the open door of the moving bus. I sit stunned, and before I can exhale, another man takes his place, undisturbed by my neighbor’s abrupt exit.
Slim brown fingers brushed over my hipbone, my lap, my inner thighs so lightly, so delicately that I had tried to believe it to be nothing but the wind. I search the faces of the men packed in next to me, against me, and all of their gazes are fixed with passivity, looking bored, straight ahead, at the ceiling, out the window. A tangled nest of arms, hands and fingers seem woven all around me.
I climb over the seat, pushing my way up and over the crowd and lunge to the front of the bus where the luggage is stacked. I sit on top of the pile, beside the driver, who glances over casually and then turns his attention back to keeping us on the narrow road, now climbing higher on a slender ridge. I sit looking forward out past the front dashboard, my legs crossed, jacket pulled in close, choking back tears. I pull a chocolate bar from my pocket and eat it for comfort. The chocolate fights past the lump in my throat, a few tears fall behind a shield of sunglasses, my shoulders shiver without heat, I reach for the chain around my neck and hold tightly to the amulets of an angel and an evil-eye between my fingertips. I sit looking out at the shantytowns through the window and feel very alone and very far from home.
In New York City, I lived in the meatpacking district, in a short building next to a fish market. Every morning at three am, heaving trucks would arrive, gears shifting, brakes squealing, machine noises of doors sliding, levers lowering, conveyer belts whistling, to deliver fresh fish to be cleaned and parceled for delivery to restaurants on the island of Manhattan. Men would raise the garage door to open the cave of the processing room, in the still dark of another new day, filled with counters and sinks, knives, giant hoses to clean fish, lop off the heads, remove the pin-like bones, package up orders and then spray down the area until the next morning. Leaving rivers of blood trickling onto 9th avenue, smells of salt and fish lacing the air, silvery disc shaped scales shimmering on the sidewalk in the mid-morning sun. Often, on the way to work, I would pass elderly Asian women picking through the bins of trash, collecting fish heads in little plastic bags to take home to make soup. Sometimes I would look down as I walked, so as not to trip on or step in any of the fish mess and an errant eyeball would stare blankly back up from the concrete.
Walking home one night, late, I stopped a few feet from my doorway and bent down to inspect a small something pressed into the sidewalk. A tiny seahorse, the size of a dime, illuminated in the cold moonlight, flakes of snow dusting the ground all around, its frozen eyes fixed, looking up. I nudged it with a mittened finger: you, my friend, are a long way from home.
Climbing the almost vertical mountain roads in the lurching, sputtering, hulking cab of the bus, cold and trembling, hot trails of tears stinging cheeks, chocolate lined lump in throat, sickness feeling in stomach, necklace clutched between fingers, bumping along up the mountain into the unknown. Alone. I thought of that seahorse and understood.