A third draft of my personal essay, "A Bus to Dharamsala"
A Bus to Dharamsala:
Me
Life happens on the way to somewhere else. For me this tends to be quite literal—public transportation. This is one of those times:
It was my first time in India. The pretext? A leadership opportunity for a small international study program offered through my university. It was a chance to do four months of undergraduate research in Dharamsala, the headquarters of the Tibetan Government in Exile and home of the Dalai Lama. On this particular occasion the “deluxe” night bus that was supposed to take me the horrendous twelve hour journey from Delhi to Dharamsala broke down.
Things were already not going so well—including (but not limited to) having a drunk man conk out on my shoulder the entire nine hour flight from Amsterdam to India despite attendants desperate efforts to relocate him, getting a hotel door slammed in my face (reservations are apparently irrelevant) at another dead hour of night, having group members inform me last minute of their flight cancelations, and having said group members show up at the airport anyways when their flights were not in fact cancelled with zero means of contacting me. Now this? [I plan to expand and break up these sentences]
Two in the morning. A twenty something year old girl with minimal leadership experience, no phone, no skill with any of the hundreds of local languages, and no university permission to be taking a night bus to start with. Perfect.
I tightened my grip around my backpack sitting protectively in my lap and eyed the shifting silhouettes of the other passengers. The mosquitoes were feasting on the vulnerable skin not covered by my sandals. Sweat cascaded down my forehead in the 115 degree heat, and my salwar kameez was sticking to my back. And if that wasn’t enough, the screaming car horns from the relentless Delhi traffic made it impossible to sleep.
Once we had heard the snap and pulled off to the side of the road, others had shuffled out of the bus to take a gander at the spectacle. A broken axle. We were going to be there for awhile.
What have I done?
G.K. Chesterton, a prominent English writer, said that “every inconvenience is just an adventure in disguise.” I wrote it on my mirror and everything before leaving—hoisting it like Moses’ snake on a pole in my mind. If I would just look at it, all doubts and frustrations would dissipate. This was nowhere in the realm of comforting anymore. I couldn’t remember why I did this—why I did not just joined my fellow English majors on some fantastic England study abroad living the life of luxury, shopping for vintage scarves and gorging myself on fish and chips while walking the same streets of some of my favorite writers. Instead I chose yet another developing country. One that believes your hand is more effective than toilet paper, that the same cows that lick their nostrils and eat cardboard boxes are sacred, and that night buses are the best way to get to Northern India from Delhi.
Maybe I would see the adventure of this in retrospect, and maybe even admit it a bit funny, but at that moment I just wanted to crawl in a hole and dig my way back to the States.
But I didn’t want that, not really. I have never been one to content myself sitting at home—and to be quite honest, I have never really been content with anything. I am something of a wandering spirit. I am one of those foot shakers, and you would not believe how extreme my hitchhiker’s thumbs can bend. I don’t know when it began, and so I guess I was just born with it. Restless Rachel. Alliteration and everything.
Most of my life I’ve tried to deny that I am “a runner.” It wasn’t until sophomore year in my astronomy class that it really occurred to me. We were learning about the history of astronomy and the early Greek ideas when we came across the topic of planets—or planete in Classical Greek. These were “wandering stars”—the greatest anomaly to the perfect charts and theories about the structure of the heavens. Just when they had a perfect model figured out, one of the stars would slip out of line for no apparent reason. It took hundreds of years for brilliant astronomers like Ptolemy, Copornicus, Brahe, and Kepler to iron out this mysterious retrograde and realize that these were not stars at all. They were planets.
I felt like that Greek enigma, the planete. Just when things seemed to be going perfect, when I had the ideal boyfriend, a great paying job, scholarships, and straight A’s in every class—just when my place in the world seemed to be established, I would retrograde.
I first tried to abate my wanderlust by moving to Hawaii for a semester (as if the crystal surf and sacred land would cure me—what a joke), but to the disappointment to more than a few boyfriends and family members, it only fueled the timid flames and grew into a full blown obsession with a life away from home. It gave me a taste of that happiness sought for my entire life, and, now knowing that it existed; I have never been the same since.
“Hey, the new bus is here,” said the guy who sat in front of me through a thick Indian accent. It took me awhile for it to register as English.
We piled off the “deluxe” bus, drug our suitcases through the probably-not-dirt, and climbed into the functioning, long distant relative of the deluxe bus for the duration of the journey. The darkness was heaven-sent—we could not see how filthy that city bus was. We flung our bags on to the ripped seats and leaned our heads against anything that could tempt sleep—metal poles, broken window frames, whatever you could find, because if you were half sleeping at least you were only half enduring the bumpy drive. The bus gasped to life and plowed back into the crowded road, which was in desperate need of two, three, or maybe four more lanes, even at that late hour.
I knew there was a reason why everyone said to take the train. How long ago was that? I remember sitting in an office with the program coordinators as they reminisced over their best and worst guest house experiences in Delhi while dueling over the prize for the best haggler in the room. Though the meeting was for my benefit, I couldn’t keep up with the piles of advice and stopped scribbling down notes. “This isn’t like anything else you have ever done, Rachel. You just cannot prepare for India,” they said. And so I didn’t.
That was my first mistake.
I was nowhere near sleep; my jetlag was as fresh as the sewage smell in the air. I peered out the window and mused over whatever mixed motivations got me into this mess. Just a day ago my dad had dropped me off at the Salt Lake City International Airport. He pulled up to the curb, helped me with my single pack, and, with car keys still in the ignition of the idling car, offered to stay with me until I passed baggage check. I told him it was no longer necessary. What was another four months anyway? We knew the routine.
As I stood there and watched him leave I remembered the first time I went to that airport alone. “International”—that word, like my very own Lotus-eater or Siren, thinking the place was an enormous hub for Boeings and romantic adventures. This time was different. I knew big airports because I had been lost in them before. I knew romantic adventures because I had lived them and recognized that 48 hour flights were about as exciting as a can of beans. Yet, something about the transit—the physical movement, thrilled me. I noted my Chacos strapped to my feet, stained in some of my favorite memories, checked my single bag, and headed towards the airport security with an irrepressible smile plastered on my face. I was going home—my in-between, my no place, my road to somewhere else.
As the humid Indian air teased my disheveled hair I could not help but think how long ago that moment seemed. That smile, my dad standing there, arms outstretched to his little girl who had already seen more of the world than he would ever see in his lifetime. My gosh, the airport was air-conditioned. All of it, gone. A separate life. Life rooted in something “real”—the one I had known all of my existence, and even more surprising, a life I was growing to like. I think they call that maturity—but this was not exactly a phase I foresaw growing out of either. Whatever it was, now the only thing real was the dirty bus. The shadows. The ravenous mosquitoes. My nagging, silent regrets.
The breeze was broiling and the smell of the unregulated diesel fuel became unbearable, so I closed the plastic window.
It was the boy, wasn’t it? Gall, I swore I would never let this happen. I usually break up with boyfriends before leaving out of principle. They are always dead ends. It is not like I was ever planning on getting married. Some girls are petrified that they will end up lonely old spinsters, but I was looking forward to it—especially if it included grapes and a beach in Greece. It pretty much takes an act of God for me to even like anyone, let alone want to keep them around for awhile. I wanted nothing more than to be free of that baggage. Free of everything.
But Patrick was different. Roll your eyes, go ahead. It wasn’t because he was attractive and funny or that he had a full ride scholarship to get a PhD at that fancy university that starts with “h” and ends with “arvard” either. None of that mattered to me. He might have been the antidote to my restless fever. Our relationship was something euphoric and surreal, bending time and the day-to-day realities like they were inconsequential inconveniences. We were playing out a Hollywood movie or a classic romance novel. It was a brave new world. Against all expectations and precedence, I was determined to see if I could make this one last. The result? A long distance relationship. Urban dictionary defines that as nothing short of a suicide mission and “just as pointless as having a relationship via internet with somebody you’ve never even met.”
Hopeless.
I saw it written all over the expressions of my friends and family before leaving. “How long?” and then that look in their eyes of trying to hide foreseen, obvious misery—the “well that is too bad” look. But hey! They make matching “LDR” bracelets for $4.95 online. That has to count for something. Right?
I wasn’t on that bus. I wasn’t even in India. I didn’t want to be. I was with Patrick—I was revisiting our last nights together. Sitting beside him on the piano bench as we improved a little duet, or talking in his car all night until the windows fogged up to suggest something else—as if we had time for that; we were too hungry for conversation, for words and for meaning. Just hours ago it seems I was frantically stuffing my suitcase, too busy to even notice how quiet he was, how distant and reserved he was. Why did he look at me like that, just before walking down the porch steps and driving off? Already the doubts are going to strangle me? What chance do we have? Maybe the eyes of the experienced and practical were right.
No, it was real. That was the most real thing I think I have ever had.
But I wasn’t there with him. I was not even here. I was in transit.
And still quite literally. Three hours later a tire blew. I was so numb to reality that I forgot to react, my eyes fixed on nothing in particular while other passengers of all ages and sizes hopped out the back door of the bus to stare, squabble, or for the minority, try to fix the problem. I listened them quarrelling in their incomprehensible languages in the blackness. Nothing was open. Someone got an axe and jerry rigged a jack to slap on the pitiful spare. A group of men poked around and nodded, approved, and before everyone was back on the bus the driver drove off. We left one man behind, arms flailing in desperation. No one made much fuss to stop the bus, and the driver drove on.
People were always left behind, weren’t they? Patricks and others—others before Patrick. But what if I am staring out the back window? What if I should stop?
The hours started to mush together, and before I knew it the sky was a gradient of blue and yellow, outlining the approaching purple figure of the Himalayas. It was so gradual you could have missed it. But there they were. Looming there. Looking more or less like a two dimensional cut out of the Rockies back home. At a first glance they were, I admit, not impressive.
Just like India.
More hours passed and we drew closer and deeper—the flat forms morphing into exponentially large ranges that quadrupled my imagination’s expectations. I realized that I had long let go of my backpack. The emerging highlights and shadows all added a rich layer of dimension. The highest peaks mingling with the wispy clouds, the snow caps and sky inseparable. I remember thinking, half serious, that maybe I could write about that. Maybe I was chasing stories. Not me, not contentment, not the pieces of my absent mother. No—there was something more to this.
The bus heaved forward, lunged up the mountain switchbacks, and flirted with the sheer cliffs as the back row passengers vacillated between demanding a refund and vomiting out the window.
Yes. Something more. Something beyond this. But what? And how to express it?
It had been twelve hours since we began our journey, and we were still climbing up the mountain—so many layers, like rows of shark teeth. The switchbacks felt like a two hour rollercoaster, and (like all adventures) somewhere in the middle, or the beginning, or maybe the whole thing, it looked like a mistake; the fun element, gone.
And yet, somehow I was okay with that. I liked hard things, and I still do. Being in uncomfortable situations is oddly comfortable to me. Three months in Ghana taught me that. When people would ask, “How was Africa?” And I would respond, “It was great.”
And it was.
But that is only half of the story. It wasn’t about fun or having a warm-fuzzy volunteer experience. There was nothing enjoyable about blood-sucking bugs and paradigm makeovers and looking like a blubbering idiot for not knowing the language. In Ghana I was forced to see things differently—forced to deal with the uncomfortable realities of life outside of myself and my sheltered Utah upbringing. It would have been, no doubt, easier to stay home and remain within the safe confines of my ignorance. And sometimes I wonder if that would have been best. The nightmares never went away. The images of yellowed eyes, mutilated limbs, and five-year-old child road kill are scarred into my mind. It took months for my stomach to stop hating me, and I have few people in my life who can really relate to my experiences. So “it was good” was about all that could be said—there was no point of reference—no way to bridge my two realities. No way to explain why I cried when my little sister threw away all her less stylish clothes or how strange it is to have three meals a day.
But at the same time, there was so much good they could never understand—the sound of real silence—a life without a phone, an internet connection, a TV, and other distractions from the important things in life. They will never get to see the true color of the night, the magic of white and red fireflies dotting the untamed grass at dusk, or marvel at the unwavering faith of the hospitable Ghanaian people. They will never know the strange joy that comes from spending half a day washing clothes by hand or master the skill of eating soup with their hands. They may never know what it is like to feel beautiful without a mirror, cute clothes, or a collection of makeup. They might never get the chance to experience that peace—to hear God without white noise, and smile before bed each night because they can feel that harmony.
Somewhere, even in the hard experiences, I found a piece of meaning, and instead of throwing it away or scrapbooking it upon my reentry home I kept pulling it out and looking it over until it grew so big I could no longer stuff it into the closet or hide it under the rug of “normal” life. It became so prominent that I decided to do the whole thing all over again. In India.
Fifteen hours later the bus came to a screeching halt. I hobbled out like a hung-over sailor shaking out my sea legs. And there I was, in Dharamsala, India—a cluster of bright colored restaurants and guest houses all stacked up on top of each other like a patchwork quilt—something between a city and a village nestled on the green mountain ridges, a place in transit, a sanctuary for the homeless, the country-less (and not just Tibetan’s in exile either). The street was packed with maroon-clad monks and dreadlocked, tattooed hippies, Tibetan seniors waving their canes at oncoming traffic trying to get to the Dalai Lama’s temple, and then the occasional, dazed traveler.
It felt like home.
We arrived, but in a way I was just beginning to understand the passage and what this experience would mean to me—a personal transit through my meandering fragments of thought, a place to sift through mixed and maturing motivations, and maybe a place to determine a tentative destination point.
Or maybe I just wanted to understand (though I hate to admit it, naive as it may be),
me.
My sleep deprived musings were shattered by a Tibetan woman standing next to me. She had a long, black braid reaching down the back of her traditional chupa and eyed me with a bright, elastic smile. She was a person, no longer a suspicious shadow of someone about to steal my backpack. Just a fellow passenger, and I think, I think, there was something foreign and familiar about her that I liked.
“Wow, that was crazy,” she said.
“Yeah,” I agreed, “it really is something.”
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