A House in the Sky (7 page)

“Excuse me, excuse me,” he said officiously, “what is your good name?” The crowd leaned in close to listen.

“Well, my good name is Amanda!” I said back, finding it funny, raising my voice over the noise. “I am from Canada!”

“Can I help you?”

I pointed at the map, turning the guidebook so he could see it. “I think it’s just up here, right?”

“Ah,” said the man, taking the book and examining it. Someone from the crowd offered what sounded like advice in Bengali. More people chimed in. The Lonely Planet was passed around enthusiastically until a consensus appeared to have been reached, and the whole knotty mass of us started moving down the block.

The friendly man with the mustache introduced himself as Mr. Sen and trailed me inside the hotel. Another narrow flight of stairs, another tiny lobby with a Formica desk, though this time there was a sofa, and on it, three dark-haired young men who looked like they’d been dozing. A fourth sat behind the desk.

I asked for a room.

The deskman pointed to my new friend. “This is your husband?”

I sighed. “No, I need a room just for me.”

Mr. Sen jumped in, speaking a fast Bengali as the guy behind the desk waved his hands to indicate he was not in any way interested in renting me a room. Mr. Sen turned to me. “He is saying that if you have a husband here, then it is no problem.” He gave a flustered smile. “Do you have a brother with you?”

I could feel a small kernel of fear beginning to form. “No, no brother. It is just me, and I need a place to stay.”

Mr. Sen smiled again. “No problem, no problem,” he said. He added, “You can come to my home. My mother, she will welcome you.”

“No, I can’t go home with you. I need a hotel.” I smiled, hoping not to offend him. “Please,” I said, “I am tired.”

We walked several blocks to the next hotel listed in the guidebook—me and an entourage of what had to be forty Bangladeshi men, led by Mr. Sen, most everyone in the group seeming to be jabbering to somebody else about my predicament, calling out to others we passed in the dusk. A woman was frying chili peppers over an open fire and selling them in bags to people headed home for evening curry. The scent nagged at me. I hadn’t eaten since morning.

At the third hotel, the older man behind the desk looked me up and down and then asked about my husband. I started to quietly panic. This was no lark. These people really were looking at me—with my harmless ponytail and jeans and battered blue backpack, with my hoop earrings and eager-beaver smile—and seeing some sort of threat.

I was not totally naive. I understood the intricacies here, at least a little. I understood that it was a culture built on modesty and strict adherence to Islam. Most of the women on the street wore head scarves. Some kept their faces covered completely. I had read about
purdah,
the practice of shielding women’s faces and bodies from public view. I was aware of how completely foreign I appeared.

“Na, na, na!” the latest deskman was saying, waggling a finger emphatically, as Mr. Sen mounted some sort of argument in Bengali.
Their words hummed indistinguishably past me, a telegraph-wire blur, until my self-appointed protector turned back to me.

“You see,” he said calmly, “it is simply not possible for you to stay.” He added with a note of defeat, “I am sorry.”

Not knowing what else to do, I dragged my pack over to the black vinyl couch along the lobby wall and plunked myself down on it. “I’ll sleep right here, then,” I heard myself saying, surprised by the forcefulness of my voice. I fixed the white-haired hotel man with a stare. He looked away. I fought back tears. I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to appear formidable. “I’m not leaving,” I said.

The hotel man looked uncertainly to Mr. Sen for a translation.

A quiet conversation ensued. The man behind the desk appeared to be weighing his options. After a few minutes, he signaled grudgingly for me to step forward and hand over my passport. His eyes stayed down. A rushed notation was made in the guest register. A small brass key was produced and passed to a skinny young boy in an embroidered skullcap who stood waiting by the stairs leading up, apparently with fresh orders to guide me to a room.

The truce was awkward. The enemy was inside the gate. I thanked Mr. Sen warmly, taking care not to further damage his reputation by shaking his hand. I made an awkward bow in the direction of the deskman and then wordlessly and gratefully followed the boy with the key upstairs.

*

Once I got used to it, Dhaka excited me. I bought a sheer black head scarf and draped it loosely over my hair, like many Bangladeshi women did. I grew used to being the only Westerner on the sidewalk, the only woman in a restaurant. I strolled the Hindu market street, where clouds of incense wafted and jewelers in little stalls pounded silver. I stepped into one of the city’s high-domed mosques where, beneath an eggshell mosaic ceiling, rows of kneeling, murmuring men touched their foreheads intently to the floor.

Islam was everywhere in Dhaka. On the mirror in my room was a
small arrow-shaped sticker helpfully pointing the way toward Mecca. Five times a day, the muezzins chanted and the prayers began. These moments were strangely private and public at the same time. The men in my hotel lobby, guests and employees, arranged themselves into lines and bowed in unison, unaware of or unruffled by my presence. People, mostly men, were praying in the streets, outside of the mosques, which were often too small to hold everyone, especially on Friday, the Islamic holy day. I thought it was beautiful. The repeated bowing, the rows and rows of people humbled before God. After the bowing, they sat with their hands cupped in front of their faces in supplication, whispering a finish to their prayers. It was so foreign to me, a religion that required so much from its believers, this display of devotion every few hours.

As a traveler, I was formulating an edge that would help me in years to come—finding and holding the line between the pleased-to-meet-you openness that both served backpackers and made them easy prey, and a more aggressive way of using my own power. Without the language or a way to pick up cultural cues, it could be hard to parse opportunity from danger. Your mind always had to be thinking a move or two ahead. I believe I was good at this, for the most part. I’d spent enough of my childhood trying to read cues and navigate uncertainty. Uncertainty was what I knew.

Back in my hotel room one evening, I heard a rustling in the hall and some raggedy masculine breathing. When I got up to investigate, I realized with horror that a man was lying in the hallway, his cheek pressed against the floor as he tried to see through the half inch of space beneath my door. My first instinct was to scream, but I quickly thought better of it. The blame for any disturbance, I was sure, would fall on me. Any problem and I’d be kicked out, forced to make another humiliating quest for a hotel.

I did what I always did when I was scared. I reminded myself to breathe, to ignore the prick of anxiety, to settle back into my body.
Calm, calm, calm,
I thought. I then checked the lock on my door, dragged my chair out of sight of the doorway, and sat waiting for him to get bored and go away.

A couple of days later, having wandered my way to the outskirts of the city, I flagged an auto rickshaw and asked the driver to take me back to old Dhaka, to my hotel. “No problem!” he said as I climbed in. He was young, close to my age, I guessed, and I was tired enough that it took me fifteen minutes to realize that instead of steering us into the dense city, he’d driven us into an outer ring of Dhaka, and the two of us were now, as night began to fall, traveling what was almost a country road, the city high-rises having given way to ramshackle huts and roadside food stands.

I said, “Wait, excuse me, where are you taking me?”

The driver didn’t look back. He waved a hand. “No problem,” he said. “There is no problem, madame.”

In Bangladesh there never seemed to be a problem. Or that was what everyone said, anyway.

I spoke a little louder. “I think you are going the wrong way. Please take me to the hotel. In the city. The
city
.”

“No problem, no problem,” the driver said. He seemed to be driving faster.

We rode on another few minutes as my neck began to tingle. Was this some sort of shortcut? Was I being abducted? Would I be killed and sold off organ by organ on the medical black market, as per the most popular backpacker horror scenario of the day? What was I supposed to do?

What happened next surprised even me.

From my spot in the backseat, I yelled, “You need to turn around!”

For good measure, I leaned forward and slammed a fist into the side of the driver’s head as hard as I could, the rhinestones of my cheap Thai rings slicing thickly into his temple.

I had never in my life hit anyone.

Stunned, the driver slowed the rickshaw, reaching a hand up to feel the blood. I watched him examining it in the dark.

My knuckles throbbed. A new paranoia buzzed. I had obviously crossed a line. Now, surely, this man was going to hurt me.

But I was wrong. Without a word, the driver made a slow, arcing U-turn and we began the long, silent ride back to old Dhaka, where
the streetlights and frenzied sidewalks gave me an odd kind of relative comfort. Reaching the corner where my hotel was, I climbed out, flooded with a mix of anger and relief. The young guy looked at me sheepishly. He had a deep cut above his right cheekbone. It was unclear what his plan had been, where he had been taking me, and for what reason. Whatever it was, he’d been shamed.

“I am sorry,” he said twice. He bowed his head and I turned away. I didn’t give him any money and he didn’t ask for it.

I
had momentum now, for real.

After three months in Asia, I was learning to navigate the backpacker ghettos—the chaotic crossroads for the world’s wanderers that are found in nearly every big city, the streets stuffed with hotels that are cheap but not too dirty, with street vendors selling bootlegged DVDs, used novels and guidebooks, flip-flops, luggage, fake Gucci sunglasses, and the billowy cotton harem pants that travelers buy to stay comfortable on overnight train rides but lapse into wearing everywhere. For the broke, there are Western Union offices. For the ill and anxious, there are pharmacies selling antibiotics and blister packs of generic Valium. For the planless, there are travel agents working out of kiosks, their sandwich-board signs reminding you that with two hundred dollars, you can get yourself to Phuket or Angkor Wat or Mysore.

I tacked my way from Bangladesh into India by bus and train, arriving in Calcutta sometime in February and finding a room at the Salvation Army guesthouse, in the heart of the backpacker ghetto. After Bangladesh, India seemed more user-friendly but no less crowded. Children tailed me down the street, calling “Aunty, Aunty!,” their palms held open for change. Men brushed up close, muttering “Ganja? Ganja? Hashish? Smoke?” I spent about two weeks there, volunteering at one of Mother Teresa’s charities, working the morning shift in the women’s wing of the Kalighat Home for the Sick and
Dying Destitutes, delivering tea and giving sponge baths to patients with tuberculosis, malaria, dysentery, AIDS, and cancer, sometimes in combination. The frankness of it was galling, even nauseating at first, but slowly I relaxed. I would never be saintly like the nurses who staffed the place, but I tried at least to be helpful.

I was also getting used to being alone. What once might have overwhelmed me no longer did. I could read bus schedules, figure out the various classes of train tickets, ask for help when I needed it, sit in a restaurant and eat a meal alone without feeling self-conscious. I was learning to seize my opportunities.

*

My mother was not a worrier, exactly, but she did want to have a sense of where I was. As I moved around India, she sent me encouraging e-mails. She expressed her love. I wrote similar things back, often copying my dad and Perry. I sprinkled my e-mails with descriptions of what amazed me most—the honey-colored camels ambling around Agra or the snake charmers plying their trade on the Varanasi ghats, the flower-garden brightness of Indian women in their saris. I used a lot of exclamation points to illustrate how great it all was. “Tomorrow,” I wrote to my parents from an Internet café in Agra, “I am going to a different city called Jodhpur. It is a city in the desert, called the Blue City, as all the buildings are painted blue! I am having the BEST TIME EVER!”

And I was. I was meeting people from all over the world—some nurses from Australia, a couple of Israeli teenagers on leave from the army—traveling with them for a few days or a week before parachuting off again on my own. Riding the bus one day in Calcutta, I struck up a conversation with a fellow Canadian—a blond guy in his early thirties with arresting blue surfer-boy eyes—and ended up having a several-month mini–love affair with him. His name was Jonathan. He carried a black canvas backpack and a guitar.

I was a sucker for guitar strummers. Since my breakup with Jamie, I’d been guarded around men, unwilling to jump into the ongoing carnival of traveler romances. Sex on the road seemed, for a lot of
long-haul travelers, like a given. The pints of beer in warm air, the months passed without a haircut or a good shave, the boastful chitchat and dazed hours spent at bus windows all lent themselves to a certain sexual ease. The options were almost too exotic to be ignored. I’d seen Chileans wander off with Danes, old men and young women, older women with younger men, men with men, and women with women, and every once in a while a boozy international threesome tiptoeing back through the tamarinds to somebody’s room.

I wasn’t against any of it. I had just never been all that self-assured. If I got involved with a man, even briefly, I usually ended up feeling overattached and extra-vulnerable. I wanted to be more like other girls my age, able to have fun and move on, but it didn’t happen easily. With Jonathan, who was extroverted and not serious about anything, I did learn to lighten up a bit. I had fun and never once asked myself if I was falling in love. We were both so devoted to solo travel that we saw each other only every few weeks, arranging by e-mail to meet up for a few days in one city or another before moving on alone.