My flight from Nairobi to Mumbai spent half the night laid over in Dubai. In retrospect I see those four or five hours as a turning point in my trip, like the forward supply depot in "Apocalypse Now" - a surreally hypernormal place beyond which things began to get pretty strange for me. Dubai
It was a shocking. The Dubai airport is as much a duty-free mega mall as it is plane station, and after the semi-functional chaos and poverty of Nairobi, the sheer volume of stuff - at least a kilometer of freshly cloned and crispy clean merchandise, everything from cameras to lingerie to cars - was bewildering. One can forget a lot about stuff in three months. I wandered through it all in an overstimulated and sleep-deprived daze, hacking like a smoker on his last legs, shopping for nothing but cough syrup. But there's no cough syrup for sale in the Dubai airport. Booze and cologne by the acre foot, but no cough syrup.
Feeling unreasonably desperate, considering the fact that I'd been coughing deeply and constantly for at least a month, I found a first aid station and waited for the duty physician who looked me over and gave me some cough syrup (you can't buy it, but it's free if you ask) and drops, neither of which did a thing to help. I didn't just have a tickle in my throat; though I was assuming illness, what I actually had was two month's worth of Nairobi crud - diesel fumes, dust, and God knows what else - in my lungs. It wasn't until two months after returning to the states that my lungs finally cleared out and calmed down. This, I was told later by my travel doctor, is typical of tender-lunged inhabitants of the "developed" world who spend extended periods of time breathing in cities like Nairobi.
As far as I can recall, I never looked out a window. It was dark when we landed, while I was there, and I think when we took off. But I can't even remember trying to look out a window, for city lights, if nothing else. Or maybe I did but they couldn't be seen from the airport. Or maybe there were just no windows between me and anything other than all the stuff that I presumably wanted to buy.
There was a day in Bodhgaya when I was just sitting there, alone, not as in "no one else around" - there is never no one else around in India, as far as I can tell - but "alone" as in just me, and any other people in the general area kind of in the same situation, alone, sort of. Individuals. The Bodhi Tree
As I sat there, in my not-very-serious-about-siting-there kind of way, there was a sudden increase in activity and presence around me, more bodies, more noise and movement - the monks were coming, maroon-wrapped and stubbly black-headed, lots of them, and quickly, appearing all around me. 200, 400? I don't know. It was obviously a scheduled thing and I was sitting where it was to take place. I wasn't sure what to do. Leaving would have been easy but I asked with my hands and body if I should and several of them told me with theirs that I should not. So I just sat, stillish and invited.
I have a photograph of them from a different time, an earlier day when I was there with a camera instead of a cushion. A picture of a rich layer of deeply breathing maroon, the color as resonant as the sound it made. I can show you the photograph but the sound is gone now for everyone in my life except me. I look at that picture now and what I notice most about it is the distance from which it was taken.
Though of all ages the monks seemed to me boyish, laughing at their own disorganization and confusion over what to chant next - fumbling with bags of looseleaf Sanskrit, the whole thing reminding me of nothing so much as a boisterous and disorderly high school band practice. No one seemed to be in charge, but somewhere the chanting would start, and as everyone would figure out what page they were on, the sound would spread and grow above and around and through us, that deep and utterly human harmony of harmonies that's become so recognizable to many in the last decade.
An hour later they were done for the time being and reversed, dispersed, and still I just sat there, feeling them leave like I'd felt them arrive. Two stopped to touch me, touched my head and shoulders, nodding, smiling in amusement and affirmation. Clearly, anyone could have stayed among them, but I was the only who did; perhaps in other eyes, the ones of those who left to make way for the monks, I had committed some Buddhist faux pas, demonstrated my ugly Western ignorance. But the monks, they just smiled and laughed and shared something more special with me than I imagine any of them understood it to be.
This all happened at the base of the towering stupa built on the site where, as the story goes, Gautama Siddhartha, sometime during the sixth century BCE and after seven years of trying just about everything to turn the corner, spent three days and nights in meditation and then in an instant went all the way, attained ultimate enlightenment, set the ideal and became the Buddha of our age. It was under the Bodhi tree which he chose to do this, a slip of which was (as the story goes) taken to Sri Lanka in the third century BCE, where it grew in to a tree from which another slip was returned to Bodhgaya at some point and replanted on the site of the original Bohdi tree. I'm not sure what happened to the original tree; I suppose it died of old age, or maybe at some point someone destroyed it - people feel the need to do things like that every now and then.
We might have been sitting under it, those hundreds of monks and I; there were certainly a lot of big trees there, and we were under one of the biggest. Though I'd gone to the temple every day to watch, sit, and wander, I'd never bothered to figure out which tree was the Bodhi. Imagine that - all the way to Bodhgaya, and never took the time to figure out which tree to look at and say to myself "Wow, that's it." But it really didn't seem to matter much to me then, and it doesn't now. I bet it wouldn't matter much to the Buddha, either; seems to me that all trees are equally worth sitting under.
Two days after sitting with the monks I realized it was time to leave (see my India page for more details regarding why). And the day after I decided to come home I did. The trains were booked for months in advance, due to the post-Kalachakra mass exodus, and though I probably could have gone to Gaya and gotten a seat on one by dropping a few rupees in to the relevant hands, I wasn't up for it - Gaya can be a rough town, and it was time for me to leave, not to play games trying to figure out a way to do so. A local travel agent booked me on a flight from Patna, a three hour truck ride away, to Mumbai, via a stopover in Lucknow and a plane change in Delhi. The truck left at 10:00 the next morning, and of course the plane left Patna two hours earlier than the ticket said it did - so, when we got there with plenty of time to spare, they in fact had to rush me through security (and I have never been through security as rigorous as that in an Indian airport - multiple searches of my bags and person, multiple X-rayings of everything, and no baggage loaded in to the cargo bay of the plane until I had personally picked it off of the tarmac) and push the stairs back up to the plane. Another minute or two and it would have been gone. Bolting
I don't remember the plane change in Delhi. I don't remember much until I saw the lights of Mumbai at 8:00 that night. Once there, I immediately took one of the ubiquitous three-wheeled taxis to an all-night travel agent where, after much fighting with phone lines to validate my credit card, I bought a ticket to San Francisco via a six-hour layover in Heathrow that left at 2:00 the next morning - or that same night, as it were. Then back to the airport. Still no sleep, and I purposefully left my Lonely Planet guide to India - all ten pounds of it - on a seat in the waiting area. Somebody else would need it more than I.
I swear it took thirteen hours to get to Heathrow, but my Indian friends who know better say it only takes ten. I believe them, but it felt like thirteen.
I couldn't sleep on the flight to Heathrow, nor during my six hour layover there. My hands shook with the effort of keeping them from shaking. I was a mess. From Heathrow I sent an email to my friend Will, letting him know that I'd be arriving in San Francisco at whatever time it was that I'd be arriving in San Francisco, and that if he got the message and could I would be pleased if he picked me up - otherwise I'd take a cab. And then I just shivered and waited for my flight.
I think the flight from Heathrow to San Francisco was about ten hours; the one thing I do know for sure is that I spent 52 sleepless hours getting from Bodhgaya to San Francisco.
As it turned out, Will did get my email and was waiting for me. His first words to me were something to the effect of "Well, you look like someone who's spent a while in Africa." I was pretty deranged at this point and didn't really understand what he meant - I just assumed he was referring to my tan or my clothing. It was only later, after I realized what kind of physical shape I was in and had begun to recover, that people admitted that words like "emaciated" and "cadaverous" had crossed their minds when first they first saw me on my return. But at the time I had no clue.
I came home a mental and physical wreck. And perhaps the worst of it was that there was no sense of relief at being "home"; I felt like I had lost track of where home was. And in fact, my housemates had moved while I was gone - very graciously moving all of my stuff for me to their new house - but what I was returning to was not the home I had left, and all of my things were in boxes in the garage, and I was overwhelmed with exhaustion and the sense of having failed and bolted, from India and my trip in general, in a panic. Which is exactly what I had done. After all the shit that I'd been through in Africa and handled with a confidence and competence that I displayed, if not always felt, in the end I fell apart and ran home as fast as possible.
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