The Yellow Envelope

by Kim Dinan

  There was something off about Rich Guy, and I didn’t want his help. He made me uncomfortable with his insistence that we not trust anyone. “There are many bad people out there,” he told me, and I began to fear that he might be one of them.

  The mechanic and his friend drove off into the darkness before we were even able to give them money to buy the gasket. “If those guys don’t come back it’s because Mr. Rich Guy over there pissed them off,” said Sarah, nodding in his direction.

  I was drinking my third cup of coffee when the power went out. Everything for miles and miles became cloaked in a deep, black darkness. It became suddenly apparent how truly alone we were, stranded at an isolated Café Coffee Day with creepy Rich Guy and two male employees.

  “This does not feel right,” I whispered to Sarah across the inky expanse of our table, quiet enough that Rich Guy couldn’t hear me.

  “I know,” she said, “Mr. Rich Guy gives me the creeps.”

  For the first time on the entire journey, I felt unsafe. Rich Guy gave off a terrible vibe. Why was he still hanging around? We gathered our things and took refuge in Sunny, though she didn’t provide us any real protection. From my perch in the rickshaw, I watched with relief as Rich Guy finally climbed into his car and reversed out of the parking lot. As I let out a deep breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding, I whispered to Sarah, “Thank God.”

  But instead of driving away, Rich Guy reentered the parking lot and pulled his car up to our rickshaw so close we could touch it. He’d blocked us in. Music blared from his radio, a popular American song, And tonight’s gonna be a good night. And tonight’s gonna be a good, good niiiight. Suddenly my brain issued a red alert. Every cell in my body fired a warning. It was so dark out there.

  Before Brian and I had parted ways, he’d handed me his Leatherman tool and shown me how to extract the knife. “Listen, I know you probably won’t need to use this, but you should have it with you just in case.” I’d balked, but he’d insisted. “Just take it,” he’d said. “It will make me feel better.”

  I dug through my backpack and found the tool. Mr. Rich Guy watched me through his open window. My nerves were firing double time as I flipped up the blade and clenched it in my right hand, just in case.

  • • •

  We were still waiting for the mechanic to return when the lights came mercifully back on. A little bit of light made a huge difference, and I felt myself relax a little. Rich Guy was still sitting in his car, but he’d taken the hint and stopped talking to us. He played a video game on his phone, blowing things up.

  I began to lose hope that we’d ever see the mechanic again. Café Coffee Day would be closing in less than an hour, and Rich Guy did not appear to be going anywhere. We were stranded and out of options, again. The best plan I’d formulated was that we could sleep in shifts in the rickshaw, alternating turns holding the knife.

  But then, like a superhero, the mechanic-on-the-motorcycle came swooping back into the Café Coffee Day parking lot. In his hand he held a small cardboard box, and inside that was a gasket. I stole a glance at Rich Guy who still fiddled with his phone. It felt like all of India had been vindicated by the mechanic’s return. See, I wanted to tell him, people are good.

  It took the mechanic less than three minutes to replace the gasket and resurrect Sunny once again.

  Mr. Rich Guy, seeing that he’d done his job, gracefully took his leave. We thanked him with muted enthusiasm before turning our attention back to the mechanic, who was milling about with the motorcycle driver. These guys had spent their entire night sourcing parts for us and fiddling with our rickshaw for no discernable reason except for that we needed them to.

  When we asked the mechanic how much we owed him, he told us that the gasket had cost 150 rupees (three dollars). Otherwise, we should pay him only what we could. Lesley, Sarah, and I huddled together to discuss what we should do. Nothing seemed enough to express our gratitude. Lesley counted the money from our combined funds and folded it in her hand.

  “Wait,” I told her, “let me add some yellow envelope money.” I dug it from my backpack, and Lesley handed it all to the mechanic. He didn’t count it. He didn’t need to. We thanked the mechanic and his friend—we were getting good at thank-yous—and puttered down the road in search of a hotel.

  • • •

  Our brake pads had completely disintegrated, and duct tape held our spark plugs in place as we limped through the finish line in Kerala five days later. We pulled into a grassy lot where a few other rickshaw teams loitered about. A man sold chai from the back of his bicycle. We unceremoniously signed the arrivals board. There was an utter lack of enthusiasm among the three of us. We’d driven over one thousand five hundred miles through the rural villages and roaring cities of India in a rickshaw, and we’d arrived where we intended to arrive with all of our limbs still attached to our bodies. We’d survived! But we were too road weary and exhausted to enjoy our accomplishment. I only wanted to get the hell out of the rickshaw. And then I wanted a shower, a nap, and an ice-cold beer.

  The rickshaws of the teams that had arrived before us were parked in a row near the back of the lot. Some of them were banged up and bashed in and made Sunny look like a shiny new floor model in comparison. “Did anyone die?” I asked the woman collecting rickshaw keys as I slid ours across the table to her.

  “No,” she said, “not this time.”

  Later in the evening we caught a ferry to a small man-made island where the organizers of the Rickshaw Run were throwing the after party. They’d built a dance floor in the middle of an open field, and buffered it on three sides by two buffets and a bar. Dozens of round tables were sprinkled about the yard and draped with clean, white tablecloths. It looked like an upscale wedding reception filled with hundreds of guests who had black grime caked to their skin and rosy, wind-burned cheeks.

  In the buffet line I ran into the rickshaw runner who’d saved us on that first night by towing us into Barmer. I told him about our breakdowns (too many to count) and about the man who let us sleep in his chai shop, about losing Sarah’s cell phone and then finding it again, about the dogs we fed and the countless people that came to our rescue time and time again. Though it felt like an important piece of my Rickshaw Run experience, I didn’t mention the yellow envelope. This time I followed the second rule and kept it in my heart.

  A starless, humid sky stretched above us. It turned 1:00 a.m. and then 2:00 a.m., and we were drinking beer and laughing. I felt giddy with happiness and freedom. Everyone at the party had completed the same daunting task, but we all had such different experiences. One thing, though, we shared: the people of India had taken care of us all.

  The following day I said good-bye to Sarah and Lesley and caught a taxi to the airport. A few days earlier Brian had emailed to tell me that he’d rented an apartment in the southern state of Goa and asked if I would meet him there. It was not easy to get things done in India, and I couldn’t imagine renting an apartment had been simple, but he’d done it on his own. He was capable of more than I’d given him credit for.

  My nerves fizzed like exposed wires as my plane flew south, bringing me closer to Brian. A mixture of emotions bubbled inside of me when I thought about our reunion. I was excited to see him again but also anxious, comforted by the thought of him but equally stifled by it. The scale of my heart seesawed with dueling desires. I had no idea what it would decide to do.

  Chapter 12

  Brian opened the apartment door in his tattered Ganesh T-shirt and stained khaki shorts. I hugged him big, and he hugged me right back, and it felt right to be together. As he held me, I realized how much I missed him. There was no doubt that I loved him, but I was not yet sure if that was enough.

  Brian broke our hug and stepped back to look at me. There were tears in his eyes. “Welcome home,” he said, and held the door open so I could walk through. “I’ll give you the tour.”<
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  The apartment was a light-filled, open space with a couch, a glass table for eating, a thin strip of kitchen with a stovetop and a small refrigerator, a bedroom with a bed as stiff as a broom, and a single, sparkling bathroom.

  “A Western toilet!” I exclaimed when I saw it. I could not have been happier if it spat out hundred-dollar bills when it flushed. “I’ve gotten pretty good at the squat toilet though,” I bragged.

  “Me too,” he said. “I prefer it, actually.”

  As I ran an admiring hand along the length of the kitchen counter I asked, “This place is amazing; how’d you find it?”

  Brian shrugged. “It took some work.”

  I reached toward him and squeezed his arm just above the elbow. “I missed you.”

  He leaned in and brushed his lips against mine. “Same here,” he whispered, then picked my backpack up from where I’d dropped it near the couch. “Let’s get your things put away.”

  In the bedroom, I settled cross-legged on the floor and folded my clothes into the bureau while Brian sat on the bed watching me.

  “Well, how was it?” he asked.

  My lungs filled in a deep breath. How could I describe the dust-filled emptiness of the Thar Desert and the maniacal chaos of Barmer and Pune and the dozen other big cities we drove through? How could I explain the heartbreak of seeing the starving dogs and the hopeless poverty? How could I convey that despite all of that my drive through India had been beautiful and uplifting and transformative? That it had shown me that many people have hard lives but a hard life is very different than a bad life or a life without purpose and meaning.

  “I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Okay. I get that,” said Brian. “How about I tell you about one of my days first?”

  “Yes, do.”

  “Well, after the camel safari, I took the train to Jodhpur and decided to find a few of the bazaars that I had read about. I didn’t really know where they were, but I figured if I wandered around long enough I would find them. So I started out and was walking down the streets and felt like I was on the verge of a panic attack.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “I’m not saying that to alarm you. I’ve realized that is the norm for me when I wander the streets in India. But this day was especially bad. My anxiety was so strong that I felt light-headed and had to stop for a moment to gather my bearings.

  “So it wasn’t going so well at first. After about twenty minutes of walking, I found myself in the Old Town district of Jodhpur, which I had wanted to explore. It was nice there, quieter and more residential. Somehow I ended up at a small lake, which was really peaceful, so I hung out there for a while. While I was there a couple of teenage boys came up and asked me if I wanted to feed the fish with them. At first I thought there was a translation problem, but when they started throwing little balls of wheat into the lake I joined them. Then they showed me a small Hindu temple that was nearby, and that was neat to see.

  “After parting ways with these boys, a guy about the age of sixty stopped me. He had a two-year-old in his arms, and I shook hands with both of them. He invited me into his house to have tea, which I accepted. He introduced me to his entire family. During tea he told me his hobby was collecting friends. We talked for about twenty minutes, and then I left.”

  I laughed. “Collecting friends?”

  “Right? How great is that?” He continued. “I was feeling good because I hadn’t felt good at the start of the day, and my anxiety levels had been really high, but I fought through them and met some people who were really nice.”

  “That sounds like a great day,” I said, happy that it had not ended with Brian locked in some dingy hostel bedroom trapped in bed fighting panic attacks.

  “I’m not done yet.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “Then I was hit by a motorcycle for the second time that day. The first person clipped me on the arm with their handlebars on the elbow. It wasn’t a big deal, but it did kind of hurt. The second person hit me in the calf from behind, which took out my leg. I nearly fell, and it kind of hurt, and the guy didn’t stop, which pissed me off.

  “This totally ruined whatever good feeling I had from the people I’d met earlier. So I headed back to my hostel to read a little bit, listen to some music, and begin packing up my stuff. Then I headed out to dinner.

  “On the walk to dinner I was stopped by a number of people wanting to chat. People were just being nice, but I didn’t want to tell everyone my name and what country I was from and my age and whether or not I liked India. One of the guys who wanted to chat stopped his motorbike to talk to me. We ended up going to a bar to get a few drinks. We talked about things ranging from music to what we thought life was about to the girlfriend who’d recently dumped him. It turned out that he lived in Goa and was headed down there on his motorbike. But he told me that only after I told him I’d planned to go to Goa. So I didn’t know if the guy was honest or full of shit.

  “I left the bar and went to a restaurant, alone, and ate a delicious curry. The owner’s dog curled up at my feet, and it was a pug in a puffy coat, if you can believe it.”

  I let out a little laugh, “Now, that’s one thing I haven’t seen here yet.”

  “It was just another day in India, and I felt a range of emotions, from wanting to fly away ASAP to loving it and everything in between.”

  “Wow,” I said when he’d finished. He’d managed to capture the experience of traveling in India in a single story.

  “At this point I have no idea what to make of this country. It has tried and tested me in so many ways. The only way I can really describe it is exhausting. It’s both good and bad, but I can’t tell which it is more of.”

  Good, I wanted to say, but Brian’s feelings about India were more convoluted than my own.

  “Also,” he added. “This is the first time in my life I have experienced real culture shock. Some days I can do a good job of letting things just roll off of my back, but other days everything starts to jade me.” Brian sat back on the bed and seemed overwhelmed just at relaying the story. “We’ve only been in India for three weeks, and there’s a lot more to learn, but at this point it confuses the hell out of me.”

  “Me too,” I said. “But that’s what I love about it. India demands that you are fully present. You have to be all here, just while walking down the street. It kind of pulls you out of your own head.”

  “That is the truth.”

  While unpacking my backpack I’d pulled out the yellow envelope and sat it atop a stack of my clothes. I held it up toward Brian. “Hey, did you give any yellow envelope money away?”

  He shook his head. “To be honest, it was the furthest thing from my mind. What about you?”

  I told him about the dogs and the pineapple biscuits, about the boy who guarded our rickshaw and the magical mechanic in Pune. “There were so many others—” I stopped midsentence, thinking of the man at the chai shop who’d slept at our feet and the dozens of kind strangers who’d tinkered with, jump-started and changed tires on our rickshaw.

  “I know,” Brian said, and I knew he did.

  As I shoved my empty backpack beneath the bed I looked down at my left hand; my wedding ring was still tucked away in my wallet.

  “Brian, I…”

  “Wait,” he said, and held up his hand. “I know we have a lot to talk about. But can I just enjoy you for a few minutes, just enjoy having you here, before all of that begins?”

  Surprised, I sat back in the bed, sensing a change in him. He was more confident, more self-assured.

  “You seem different.”

  “Huh,” he gave a small laugh and looked down at his ratty traveling shorts. “Same old me.”

  I looked him in the eye. “No, something is definitely different.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe I am different.” Then he paused befo
re saying, “Or maybe you’re the one who has changed?”

  • • •

  Our apartment sat at the edge of Colomb Bay, a peaceful blip of a village that seemed to be barely winning its fight for existence against the encroaching jungle. The single-lane roads were covered in thick red dirt, and the palm trees and tropical plants were so dense that monkeys could swing from tree to tree without ever touching the ground.

  That evening we set out on a fifteen-minute walk from our apartment to the beach. Following Brian down the skinny roads, I swiveled my head from side to side as we passed colorful houses painted lime green and fuchsia. Chickens clucked aimlessly around in the dirt yards, and clotheslines slumped between trees, draped heavy with laundry.

  A warm breeze blew off the ocean and bent the palm trees away from the water. We settled in at a beachfront restaurant constructed of palm fronds and tarps, and sat at a plywood table lit with a single flickering candle. The sand was still warm from the heat of midday and I buried my bare feet beneath it. Brian leaned toward me. “Remember that email I sent you about the camel safari? How I told you it gave me time to think?”

  My heart began to pound. This is it, I thought, he’s going to tell me he’s not happy anymore.

  “Kim, I realized something when we were apart. We sold the house and all our stuff; we left our jobs and everyone we know behind. All of a sudden we’re spending every minute together in foreign countries. Everything about our lives has changed, but the way we approach our relationship hasn’t changed at all. It’s crazy to think that we can go through all of that change and not change our relationship too. We’re not on vacation, this is our life.”

  Our waiter arrived and slid a paneer masala dish and a steaming piece of naan in front of me. I ripped tiny pieces of it off and gave it to a begging dog; grateful for the few seconds the interruption gave me to think.

  During the last day or two of the Rickshaw Run, I’d tried to wrap my head around my feelings about our relationship and what I wanted moving forward. And I hadn’t come to any definitive answer. But Brian was right about this. Our entire lives had changed. If we wanted our relationship to work it would have to change too.