A Travel Junkie's Diary

by Dina Bennett

  Of course I could make up an answer and that’d be that. But what bewitches me is that here, now, there’s a voice shouting, “Follow them!” And suddenly nothing is more important to me than finding out where this moment in their life may lead them, me tagging along behind. In terms of travel lessons learned over many mundane miles, here is one thing I know: If I can find the question, then I have an opportunity to discover, if not the specific answer, then something. And that something could be anything. I’m not talking major discoveries like John Hanning Speke’s “Ah-ha!” moment as he got his feet wet at the source of the Nile. I’m talking about a chance to lift the corner of that veil and step through to the other side, to be in the life around me rather than watching it go by.

  “Stop,” I yell to Bernard. Although I’m the navigator, he will hesitate. I know this man like I know the pores on my nose and like those pores there are things about him that will never change. For example, he is hard-wired to move forward, so when I tell him to stop I have to project rational firmness of the sort implying he disobeys me at his peril. Firmness that I would use if, say, I saw a piano falling toward him from the tenth floor and told him to move. And rationality that is benign and simple to comprehend, yet unarguable, such as, “It’ll be good to stretch our legs,” which is the truth if not the whole truth.

  A quick U-turn and we’re scuffing the dust as we wander behind those kids, looking into front yards, wondering what the job of that skinny horse might be and why he isn’t out doing it. The kids make a right turn and we hesitate, looking left instead, and realize we’re in front of a monastery, its yard weedy and derelict, a wood ladder with broad rungs leading to the raised living area. And now a monk appears at the top of the ladder, beaming in that warm, accepting way monks have, which makes me feel I am the only person of merit in the whole world, that he’s been waiting all this time just for me, that the infinite rightness of my presence is a granting of what surely was the monk’s most fervent prayer.

  “Come up,” he gestures. “I will make you tea.” His quarters are cavernous, easily holding two hundred cross-legged devotees, its teak floor exhaling musk, vanilla, and smoke. It’s airy in the monk’s cavern, though at present filled with little but peace and a small stove. And some jars stuffed with pale dried plants. “I am a medicine man,” he explains, before I’ve even stared at the jars. “The villagers. Anything they have, I help them.” A wizened woman brings us a tea tray. “A servant,” is my thought, followed by, “a monk would not have a servant,” neither of which do I let pass my lips as actual statements. As it happens, this monk is in tune with my thought waves. When the woman kneels to place the tray on a low table between us he says, “This is my mother,” and “there is my sister.”

  A notion that I am in the presence of true support and selfless gratitude flits through my mind. Has each woman sacrificed her personal pursuits, devoting her life to the well-being of the blessed son and brother? At this moment I definitely want to know the answer. But how to pose the question in a way that disguises my blatant curiosity under the cloak of appropriately friendly interest? I wrestle silently with my inner boor patrol. Boorishness is something I’ve been sensitive to ever since our first trip to India, when my drip-dry clothes and sturdy American limbs made me feel like Shrek in the valley of the Barbie dolls. The patrol warns me to keep my mouth shut on pain of being drenched in embarrassment.

  I sip monk tea, or monk’s mother’s tea, a mildly tannic, slightly bitter brew. I hesitate to take the offered sugar, which I know has cost them precious kyat (Myanmar currency). And I feel, as I always do in these situations, mildly distraught that I have nothing with me to share with our host. I review all parts of my body, hoping for some ache or ailment to assert itself so I can with honesty ask the medicine monk for advice and possibly pay him for a fusty plant or two. But I’m fine, really, and I can’t lie to this gentleman who has so genially taken us into his home, his bedroom, his prayer area, his meeting hall, because I realized from the subtle, head swiveling snoop I did on entering, that this one room is all those things.

  Dust motes float in a shaft of sunlight. The mother busies herself with a broom in a far corner and the sister’s slippers whisper across the floor as she brings us a small packet of cashew biscuits. Leaves rustle under the house. A warm puff of breeze brings the sweet oily scent of the morning’s fried doughnuts, the standard Myanmar village breakfast. My breathing slows until I barely want to stir myself to drain the little puddle of cool tea now left in my small porcelain cup.

  And there you have it, the reason I travel as I do: So that I can whirl with chance, my senses wider open than they were a moment ago. Some will say that the purpose of travel is to be in an exotic setting, defying risk, thrilling to the extraordinary. I understand that for many travelers, the fundamental rationale for travel is precisely that next high. But the problem with always seeking a high is that what satiates one time will not be sufficient the next time. Shock and drama are stimuli and the very nature of stimulation is such that the next go-round requires more in order to get the same reaction. If you’re a shock and drama traveler, you’ll always want to surpass what you got last time: more peril, more of the bizarre and alien.

  For me it’s never been about that high, because fundamentally I am a person who is unhappy with anything remotely cliffhanging in nature. In those Road Runner cartoons I watched as a child, if Wile E. Coyote were hanging by his claw-tips from the edge of a cliff, I rooted for him not to fall. Why do I travel? To live the similarities in the differences. To share in the most commonplace activities with someone whose days are as different from mine as silk is to steel. And in sharing a brief moment of ordinariness together, to participate in the full normalcy of life.

  Tailored

  KOLKATA, INDIA, 2013

  A globule of sweat drops from the soft, pendulous chin of Kurshad Alam. It lands on a bolt of crisp cotton fabric casually splayed open on a glass countertop for me to admire, to crinkle in my hand, to, if Kurshad has his way, have made into a shirt.

  Even before it has fully permeated the fabric, leaving a darkened aureole in a sea of checkered pink, I can see another drop ready to depart from Kurshad’s left jowl. This one is part of a rivulet with its source somewhere in Kurshad’s thinning black hair, which meanders through his wispy black sideburn to join similar trickles coursing down the smooth, dark-as-tobacco-juice skin of his plump cheek. The drop hangs suspended for a moment before splashing with a near-audible plop onto the fabric. I can only imagine the havoc Kurshad would wreak on all this material if he were a Labrador retriever and shook himself.

  The heat and humidity of this Kolkata morning are so normal to him that he doesn’t even notice the splotches that now rivet my eyes to a color which I otherwise don’t much care for. As for me, I stand a respectful distance from the counter, so that my own rivers of sweat will sully nothing but my own clothing. Fingering his back pocket, Kurshad extracts a carefully folded square of pocket handkerchief, of a fine, near-translucent white cotton. He delicately pats it over his face, on his fleshy ears, and his roundly feminine chin.

  Sweat drops temporarily solved, Kurshad gently caresses the fabric. “It’s beautiful, madam,” he says in his soft voice with a slight lisp. He looks down at me from his bulky height, but only briefly, a man so immersed in the pleasures of textile that he is blind to any physical discomfort. A hazy yellow light penetrates the large plate glass shop windows of his narrow shop, casting a mild sheen on the material which now draws his gaze back like a magnet. Outside, cars honk and motorbikes beep in the ceaseless clamor that is Kolkata. Saried ladies glide by on mid-morning errands. Rickshaw-wallahs heave their bodies left and right on stick-thin legs, pedaling heavy loads for delivery. Inside, two old ceiling fans whir quietly, moving the moist air about in a desultory attempt to cool.

  Kurshad unfurls more bolts, the better for me to assess their shirt-worthiness. “Look at this one,” he says. “Feel it, madam.” And he pushes the fabric
into my hand as if insisting I take another piece of cake. “This cotton is softer than that one. Lighter. Better for hot weather. You prefer it?” This third-generation haberdasher, who proudly shows me the tintype of his grandfather and father, knows fabric so well it’s as second nature to him as breathing.

  A young man joins us. “My son, Wasim,” says Kurshad. “The fourth generation. He will take over the business from me,” he finishes with pride. The relationship between the two is obvious, as Wasim has the same skin harking back to their Parsi (Iranian) origins, the same quiet voice, the same sweating as his father. But where Kurshad’s dark eyes now have a bluish tinge of age, Wasim’s are still piercingly black. And where Kurshad’s head is balding and looks like a vinegar-boiled egg, Wasim is the generation that skips male-pattern-baldness, with a thatch that is glossy, wavy, and thick. His full lips smile at me, nearly purple like his father’s. “Madam,” he says, pressing my hand softly between his. “A pleasure.”

  Wasim reviews the counter, now strewn with the conservative cottons I prefer for my travel shirts, along with fine wools for trousers. “Allow me to show you some other whites.” He is courtly, earnest in his endeavor to please me. In my opinion, there’s no travel day that can’t be improved by a white shirt. And since I may travel for two months at a time on far-flung road trips, I have a bottomless need for white shirts. I choose to ignore the obvious inconvenience of white for a pleasure so intense I’m willing to put up with the fact that I may make that shirt instantly unwearable if I take a sip of black currant juice at just when our Land Rover hits a speed bump. As Wasim now heaves bolts of fabric off the shelf, flings them out, sweats, hefts, and flings some more, I realize I have barely scratched the surface of possible textures, weaves, and weights of white cotton.

  Kurshad retires to a small scratched desk kept company by three chairs, an oasis of furniture in a store that is just scarred linoleum on the floor and two walls stuffed to the ceiling with bolts of fabric. Squeezing his ponderous body into a modest swivel chair, he slowly leans back, as if testing whether the springs will hold his weight one more time. A gentleman arrives. “My friend,” Kurshad gestures to him and to me, glad, apparently, to have us both there. Then he waves his hand mildly in the air. Five minutes later a chai-wallah appears with two small glasses of steaming sweet milk tea for Kurshad and his caller. The two men sucking noisily on their burning tea makes my forehead burst out in sympathetic beads of sweat. Not having a handkerchief, I use my wrist as a mop cloth.

  Wasim begins my measurements, slowly wrapping a flexible tape around my neck, next from my shoulder to my armpit, then down my spine. The bust measurement looms. It feels improper to have an Indian man do this. Without batting one of his long-lashed eyelids, around my back go Wasim’s hands and over my bust goes the tape. “Thirty-three,” he says quietly. “And a half.” There. It’s done. He circles my waist. “Thirty.” Then he goes down to my hips. “Forty.” How embarrassing. I seem to have become a pear.

  My measurements are nothing to anyone in this shop other than a dimension defining what to cut and where to insert needle and thread. That’s what their lives are about—Wasim, Kurshad, and the three runners who dash to and from tiny stitching rooms in the warren of streets nearby, bearing bolts of fabrics, returning with samples for fittings. It’s the shirt, the jacket, the trousers, not the body in it. They gaze as fondly at gauzy cottons lying limp and exhausted as they would a recently loved mistress. A fleshy palm fondles rough linens exuding a scratchy coolness, caresses tweedy slate and blue wools, suitable for the cold weather of their British customers, a climate entirely unimaginable to them.

  “Come back to tomorrow at eleven,” Kurshad says. “This hour is fine for you?”

  “Oh, no, no, no. I’ll come in the afternoon. No rush for the morning.”

  He waves away my stuttering objections, in which I strive to give the cutters and stitchers more time to create my garments. Kurshad is quietly insistent. “Yes, yes. Eleven is perfect. You will try everything.” He beams me a beatific smile, waggling his head just once to indicate that, since we are now in agreement, he is happy. “And we will have tea.”

  Red Carpet

  ALODAW PAUK PAGODA, MYANMAR, 2012

  I wish I’d dressed for the occasion. But no one mentioned at 7:00 a.m. that morning that I was about to cross paths with the president of Myanmar. And then there was that red carpet luring me onward. What choice did I have? Ignoring the proffered hand of the boy holding our long boat, I stepped carefully onto the splintered dock, removed my sandals, and strode off down that scarlet strip.

  Don’t let that red carpet mislead you. This was not the Kodak Theatre in LA, not even close. It was mid-March and we were on a skiff ride through floating gardens and delicate waterborne hamlets of teak and bamboo houses posing precariously on stilts above placid shallow blue canals, where house cats gaze out over the water from boat ramps, dreaming of trees and birds, where children as young as four use child-size paddles to help steer the family canoe. Unlike those villages, living examples of how we all would be living had not Noah’s flood receded from Ararat, in this particular spot children were running everywhere. If I were them and lived in a watery world, I’d be just as excited to be on a patch of dry land bigger than my five-hundred-square-foot hut.

  It was a special event that we stumbled into that morning at Alodaw Pauk Pagoda on Inle Lake. The president of Myanmar was coming. And here I thought they’d rolled out the red carpet for me! Mothers in everyday longyis, women in the traditional burgundy and silver weave of the local Intha tribe, men in short-sleeve white shirts, police in creased olive uniforms, and soldiers in blue camouflage mingled and chatted in small groups. The women carried small paper yellow, green, and red Myanmar flags; sparkling cut-glass hair ornaments held their shining black hair in intricate twists and buns. The soldiers slung AK-47s and the police each had a pistol on their hip. No one had a camera or a cell phone. This was Myanmar, where such items exist only in the hands of the cosmopolitan wealthy.

  Once on the red carpet, I gave myself up to wherever it wished to lead me. I knew I couldn’t go wrong with that approach. After all, the president would soon be striding the same frayed threads as me. Wending my way through this oldest shrine on the lake I oohed at the sparkling gem-encrusted, Shan-style Buddha for which the shrine is famous. And I aahed at its neighboring Buddhas, covered in real gold leaf.

  The carpet, though, kept distracting me with its scratchy texture and curling edges ready to trip me if I didn’t watch my step. It would have been more comfortable—and safer—to walk on the cool white marble tile. After a brief tour of the Buddha and his lesser mates, I settled in the shade of a side-stuppa to await the president’s arrival with the locals.

  I asked around to find out when the president was due. Not that anyone spoke English. I conveyed my question by pointing at the sky and then pointing at my watch. Everyone had a word or two in answer. “Sometime soon,” one said. “In an hour, or a half hour, or by noon,” gestured others. Thus enlightened, I shared cookies with the kids, played games with the girls, waited, took photos, waited.

  Scattered about the pagoda terrace were several welcome groups, each in their assigned place around the shrine. Men lounged in the shade of nearby pillars, spitting red betel juice from packets of kun-ya stuffed in their cheeks. It was a festive occasion and everyone seemed happy to have the extra time for socializing, until finally, no president in sight, the welcome groups slowly began to disperse, drifting to the teashops on the other side of the pagoda. Eventually I drifted that way, too, and squatted on a low plastic stool along with everyone else. Waiting had raised an appetite and I made quick work of some crunchy, hot potato-stuffed samosas.

  Unexpectedly, as if blown by a gust of wind, everyone lifted off their stools and wafted over to a low wall. Yes, the faint sound of a helicopter could be heard. With measured pace, they returned to the arrival area, on the other side of an arched bridge from the heli-pad. To help the p
residential chopper land safely, soldiers lit damp piles of brush to create a smoke wind sock. The red carpet sections were given a final dusting with stiff reed brooms, while a man tried to uncurl the carpet edges and made sure they overlapped so as not to trip the presidential feet. Someone carried a tall stack of blue plastic chairs to the shade of a scraggly tree, where they were set up for the assembled dignitaries who would greet the president.

  Then fingers pointed to the northwest. There it was, a bulky white helicopter, Russian made, wheels out for landing. All the Intha lined up on one side of the carpet, as a six-person band squatted on a hump of grass and tested their flute, drums, and cymbals. Suddenly, the tribeswomen were separated from the men and instructed to line up on the opposite of the carpet; the double tribal line made for a more impressive sight. Children clutched their mothers’ hands, and everyone who’d been sitting on the far side of the pagoda came over to our side, to watch the landing.

  The helicopter was closer now, and the band struck up their first tune, shrilling and beating out a welcome. An official noticed an unsightly, half-empty bag of concrete near the red carpet and ordered it hidden behind a wall. Paper flags were given practice waves, grannies raised babies high, white-shirted men took their seats as the helicopter came closer, slowly descending.

  And then, and then … the helicopter made a lazy circle and flew away. One minute the president’s arriving and an entire village has turned out to receive him, the next minute he’s changed his mind and left.