A House in the Sky (8 page)

People would say to me all the time, “It must be so hard to travel by yourself as a woman.” But I was finding that it was easier. I was sure about it. If you smiled, if you showed people that you were happy to be there, you were met most often with warmth. The swindlers backed off easily. The tuk-tuk drivers and beggars eased up and became more human, maybe even a bit protective.

Nothing slowed me down. I took a train to Varanasi, a holy city for Hindus, thought to be a direct portal to heaven. There, pilgrims sat half-sunk in the gray-green water of the Ganges, washing their bodies, washing laundry and dishes, washing cows, while dead bodies burned on the ghats above. I went to Delhi, Mysore, Pushkar. I learned to sleep on trains, to not think twice while using the toilet holes that emptied directly onto the tracks rushing below. I tried the southern beaches of Kerala, where the lip of the Indian Ocean foamed over long stretches of white sand.

Here is the rule of proximity: You get to one place, and it becomes impossible, basically, not to start looking at whatever else is nearby. Climb to the top of one mountain, and you see the whole range. If you
make it as far as Cambodia, what’s keeping you from Malaysia? From Malaysia, it’s just a little hop to Indonesia, and onward from there. For a while, the world for me was like a set of monkey bars. I swung from one place to the next, sometimes backward, sometimes forward, capitalizing on my own momentum, knowing that at some point my arms—or, more accurately, my quivering bank balance, accessed through foreign ATMs—would give out, and I’d fall to the ground.

Pakistan was next to India. Unignorably so.

There were plenty of reasons to avoid Pakistan. If you read the news or listened to people sermonizing about the state of the world, Pakistan was a big fat problem. There were bombs on buses, headless bodies turning up in ditches, land mines, kidnappings. Al Qaeda was in Pakistan, bin Laden was in Pakistan, the Taliban was in Pakistan. Nobody there, it seemed, was to be trusted.

Still, people went. I’d met a couple of travelers in India who’d been. And I’d met people who knew people who said they’d met a guy a week earlier who’d just come over the border from Lahore or had a friend who’d gone six months ago. The word on Pakistan in this context was always positive, an interesting bass line playing beneath a more familiar song. The place was amazing, untouched. The food was awesome, the people friendly and welcoming. The headlines were the headlines, as ugly and frightening as they were anywhere. The country itself was supposedly something very different.

I sent my mother an e-mail, telling her I was planning to head into Pakistan to travel around. While in Delhi, I’d gotten a visa. I was now in the far northern Indian city of Amritsar, seventeen miles from the Pakistani border.

Her response was swift and emotional, announcing that she did not want me to go. She garnished the request with a thick wedge of guilt. “I would never want to change you, Amanda, nor would anyone else in your family,” she wrote. “But I want to ask you to put the shoe on the other foot and consider us and our feelings before you go . . . I can’t help but feel physically ill to think of the danger you’d be in.” She went on to compare my travel plans to having sex without a condom. Reckless, in other words.

I read her e-mail and thought about it. I tried to put the shoe on the other foot. But it didn’t work. My mother and I were closer than we’d ever been, and yet images of Russell, of his leering relatives, his piled-up liquor bottles reeled through my mind, the uncertainty of the place hanging like a vapor in the air. We weren’t safe then. What right did she have, I was thinking, to worry about it now?

*

In Pakistan, I felt like a bird on a limb—perched and ridiculously light. Lahore, where the bus from northern India deposited me, was a booming, modern city. With a Dunkin’ Donuts and KFC near my cheap hotel, it was more familiar, less exotic, than most of the cities I’d visited in India. Immediately, I started to erase any fears, chalking up all the warnings to Western paranoia. I kept the argument going with my mother silently for days. What was reckless, I decided, was the way people were writing off huge swaths of the world as unsafe, unstable, unfriendly, when all they needed to do was go and see for themselves.

It was “Sufi night” at my three-dollar-a-night hotel in Lahore. The hotel manager corralled a bunch of us travelers into a van and took us to a mosque where, in a buggy outdoor courtyard, men pounded barrel-sized drums while others shook their bodies, whipping themselves into a state of spiritual ecstasy. The drummers chanted:
La Ilaha Illa Allah!
The hotel manager translated:
There is no god but Allah.

Meanwhile, I deliberately ignored my mother’s e-mails. Rightly or wrongly, I was punishing her for trying to put limits on me. I let her marinate in her worries as I took a two-day bus ride from Lahore to Gilgit, in the Hunza Valley of northern Pakistan, where I met up with Jonathan so we could travel up the Karakoram Highway, a slim ribbon of pavement cut between some of the highest mountains in the world, connecting Pakistan to China.

As instructed by Lonely Planet, we flagged down a northbound truck on the highway, a jingle truck—one of the ornamented transport rigs common in central Asia, with chains and bells dangling noisily from the bumpers to help shoo away animals in the road. The
driver slowed and halted. He climbed out, a smiling, mustachioed man dressed in a sand-colored vest over a white
shalwar kameez,
and gestured for us to climb the metal ladder that led to an open-roofed cargo space above the cab.

It was another daydream actualized—pages from my guidebook, from the magazines, opening into something real.

For the next week, Jonathan and I caught rides on different jingle trucks, roller-coastering through the mountains toward the Chinese border, climbing off at little villages to eat and rest. There were so many trucks, and so many drivers happy for the novelty of loading foreign hitchhikers into their rooftop holds, that we started to be choosy, waving down only the flashiest, most overdone vehicles. The trucks had quilted, sequined interiors and were hand-painted in carnival shades of orange, blue, green, and red. The larger panels held vividly detailed murals of hopeful things—peaceful landscapes, pretty women, verses of the Koran, and bold, lidless eyes meant to ward off evil.

The drivers, usually two to a truck, tended to their vehicles as if they were children. They passed pillows up to us in the cargo hold to make sure we were comfortable. They passed up cigarettes, candies, and lots of apricots. When we offered to pay them, they almost always refused. We communicated in gestures and bits of basic Urdu and English, stopping at roadside stands to buy oily plates of chicken
karai,
so spicy it made my eyes water. In motion, we swerved to avoid herds of yaks and goats, oncoming trucks, and tractor-sized boulders that had tumbled off the steeplelike mountains and slammed into the road. About five months after Jonathan and I rolled up the Karakoram Highway, the biggest earthquake in a century would hit the same part of northern Pakistan, flattening villages and triggering massive landslides, killing some eighty thousand people.

It wasn’t that we were unaware of the road’s various perils. The reminders were there, from the overturned Suzukis and shattered guardrails to the tiny stone pyramids meant to memorialize a person’s death. The possibility of disaster sat at the edges of our days but never moved closer. Children sometimes chased us, throwing rocks in our wake, though it was impossible to know if they were angry or playful.
Jonathan and I were blithe because it was easy to be blithe: One good day reinforced the idea that the next would be good, too.

Already, in my mind, I had half-composed an e-mail home, in which I would narrate the thrill of the adventure, packaging it up for my mother, this little triumph, the one she’d tried to talk me out of. When, maybe a week later, having parted ways with Jonathan, I found myself in the city of Peshawar on the far western edge of Pakistan, at a linoleum-floored restaurant with a dial-up Internet connection and an ancient-looking computer in the corner, I sat down to write it. I was dazzled, still, by the highway and the mountains and the fact that nobody knew where I was.

What I sent off to both my mother and father was a big, overdecorated jingle truck of an e-mail with the subject line “I love Pakistan!!!” In it, I detailed how I was eating heaps of delicious street food and wandering the market alleys on my own, wading among a sea of people—friendly people, I made sure to say, more open and warm than in India. Midway through my note, I announced that I was going the very next day to apply for a visa to visit Afghanistan, another place I’d heard was better and richer than the headlines it earned about troop movements, suicide bombs, and the ongoing search for Osama bin Laden. It was a day’s bus ride away. I ended the e-mail by proclaiming myself “the happiest I’ve been in my entire life.”

The jab was intentional. In case anyone missed my point, it was followed by four more exclamation points.

R
ight as I was planning to leave for Afghanistan, a woman disappeared in Kabul. She was Italian, thirty-two years old, an aid worker who’d been living there a couple of years. Walking along the pedestrian mall in Peshawar, I’d happened to buy a Pakistani English-language newspaper and read the story. The article was short and not on the front page, but there it was: Her name was Clementina Cantoni. She’d been dragged out of her car in the center of the city one evening by four armed men, put into another vehicle, and driven away. Beyond that, nobody seemed to know a thing.

I went back to the ratty dorm room at my guesthouse, which I was sharing with about ten other travelers, and studied the newest visa pasted into my passport. It had an official stamp in purple ink, blurred slightly at the edges. The particulars—the date, my passport number, my nationality—had been filled out in black pen by a consular employee. “Mrs. Amanda” was granted a month to travel freely in Afghanistan.

Tourists did go to Afghanistan. I’d met an older British couple in a camper van who’d driven through the country without incident. They’d checked in to my guesthouse, plopped themselves on a couch in the common area amid a group of motley backpackers smoking hash, and gushed about the Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif and the flowering hillsides of Panjshir. It was all I wanted—to see these things, to leap another hurdle—but the kidnapping story stayed with me. It
was as if an invisible branch had snagged my collar. I felt fear but also something else, something missing—a sudden absence of conviction. A doubt when I wasn’t used to having doubts. My grandmother, I knew, would have labeled it a much-needed attack of
common sense,
but that, to my mind, was code for being afraid of new things.

I spent a week considering my options. I left Peshawar and headed away from Afghanistan, taking a few long bus rides to get myself all the way across Pakistan and into India, figuring I’d try to see the mountains of Ladakh. I was scheduled to fly home from Delhi in a few weeks, to resume my life as a waitress. Already, the prospect seemed dull. On an overnight bus, I found a window seat and proactively piled my belongings high next to me, to discourage potential seatmates. I’d had too many men’s fingers creeping toward me as I fell asleep on buses.

For about seven hours, I sat beneath a dome light with a book open on my lap, watching the Indian scenery slip past in the dark. I could make out trucks, trees, the shapes of villages and mountains. I read and dozed. At first light, we pulled over at a roadside complex to use the toilets and have a cup of tea before climbing back on board. Then it was more trucks, trees, villages. My head ached and my stomach churned after so much time sitting still and so little food. Every so often I’d spot a snatch of gray river, a factory twirling smoke into the sky, a farmer using oxen to till a field.

I was chastising myself for not having gone into Afghanistan, for having retreated. A few years earlier, I’d sat on the top of Mount Roraima and quietly vowed that I’d always push forward, no matter what. Each border I’d crossed since then had felt like a revelation. It was better than school. It was better than church.

The book I was reading was called
The Power of Now,
by Eckhart Tolle. I’d lugged it all over India and Pakistan but hadn’t cracked it, always choosing to read other books instead. Back in Calgary, the book had been passed around among some of my friends, who were starting to make big decisions about whether or not to marry a guy, buy a house, or take a certain new job. Tolle’s point seemed to be that the present moment mattered more than anything. If you could focus fully on the present, things like pain, guilt, and worry all dropped away and
you could then listen to your deeper self. And the deeper self would know what to do.

By the time my bus crawled into the Indian city of Jammu, midway through the following day, I had turned the last page. My deeper self was now entirely and exuberantly in command, and it was busy brow-beating my other self for having dashed away from Afghanistan, so full of fear.

I found a station agent, got a refund on the rest of my ticket, and applied it to the cost of a new one—headed right back down the road I’d just traveled, toward Peshawar and the Afghan border. As I waited for the next bus, the Italian woman’s fate flashed through my mind. I shuddered on her behalf. But I wasn’t her, and she wasn’t me. Clementina Cantoni had been unlucky, I decided. I would be okay.

*

I pulled into Kabul on a hot day in early June, having caught a twenty-dollar minibus ride over the Khyber Pass. The city had a distinct smell, not the mix of garbage and sewer and smog that permeated the air of other Asian cities; rather, Kabul seemed to be the site of some massive and unseen incineration, reeking of kerosene and wood smoke with an undernote of something more acrid, like melting plastic. My backpack and clothing would carry Kabul’s scent for weeks, long after I’d left the country and despite multiple passes through the laundry.