By the time we got to Sri Lanka we had begun moving across the world with astonishing ease and even a little grace: with a bit of Buddhism rubbing off on us, our itinerary through time and vast spaces mattered less overall. We were still not jaded on this higher level as travelers. We visited the guidebooks’ sites and temples and monuments with a newfound gratitude and satisfaction for not feeling that we had to go.
On a whim, and with the ease of picking up a phone, we changed destinations and timetables. We glided through south Asia in the knowledge that every place was reachable. Imagination and spirit alone could box us in. The ardors of the road melded with the rhythm of our days and no longer grated as they once had done. We knew better the tricks and the pitfalls. We were gaining savvy. We could bitch out loud without feeling as traitors to our good fortune.
Ignorance of strange languages and exotic customs no longer elicited in us a self-conscious, humble pie awkwardness. What once had struck us as exotic now seemed almost normal: elephants and dancing bears on the verges, flying foxes in the limbs, saffron-clothed monks in prayerful clusters, beggars in the arcades, monitor lizards paddling where we swam. Unintelligible road signs, menus, directions, hotel staffs and immigration-customs officers didn’t intimidate us any more. Charlie, transporting our former pet turtle, Sherbert, over international borders, faced down with crocodile tears a whole phalanx of gentlemen customs officers at the Colombo airport.
Like other hardened travelers in these climes we gave up anti-malarial drugs long ago. We watch what we drink as a matter of habit. We deem as edible any morsel that neither wiggles nor sobs nor smells fetid when punctured on the tines of a fork. We travel light. We explore. We take odd routes. Places where others would not go, we find enticing. Indeed, by Sri Lanka, we had reached a comfortable accommodation with our year around the world. And like the pink plush bunny in battery commercials, we could keep going, and going, and going, to be slowed only by an exhaustion of curiosity.
Of any of us, the road has changed Charlie. Not that she ever suffered a deficit of grit, but she is now confident in ways that run counter to her nature and upbringing. I noticed this difference straight up. She was exhorting a Sri Lanka beachfront hotel’s “housekeeping” staff like The Three Stooges debating how to eradicate a nest of flying ants that blackened our bathroom’s tile walls and counters in their biting billions.
There was a time before our departure when Charlie trotted me out for confrontations and convenient histrionics, but now she asserts our rights: Refusing to overpay non-metered taxis and tuk-tuks she blithely drops on their drivers’ flattened palms what coinage she gauges they’ve earned, and doesn’t glance back. She blows off street touts with a scowl and the flip of her hand. She has no time whatsoever for the “hell-oh” come-ons of the thousand hungry street vendors. She suffers fools, as she should, hesitantly. She will not play the sad WASP game anymore of rolling over, and please, don’t make waves. She confronts, indifferent to what strangers might think. When a hotel room looks filthy, we check out at her command, even if we just checked in; in any restaurant that serves disgusting food she is first to push back and head for the door.
She has gained the hardest-won confidence of all: to make demands. She is also more relaxed (and fun). We are not under ungodly pressures, traveling as we do, but annoyances are inevitable. Only her accounts book has the power any longer to bring her down. “We were over budget on breakfasts last month,” she announced like a school principal one late morning while we were riding on a bus out of Colombo. None of us gave her statement the satisfaction of a reply. I raised an eyebrow as if to say, “You’re barking mad!” She wanted to share our budget, I guessed, with those of us for whom debits and credits have considerably less than a day-to-day relevance. Even a girl with Charlie’s self-confidence likes to know her work is appreciated, if not wholly understood.
For Molly and Fraser memories of home have broken into ever-smaller fragments. How they see themselves now, absent of peers and constant companions, close relatives, and without the myriad measures that children gauge their progress by (or what they prefer to call their “cool”) is anybody’s guess, but it is mine that the road has taught them a few hard lessons. They are comfortable with boredom; they can entertain themselves (or not) with minimalist tools. They understand the gift of being “calm.” This especially was hard for Fraser, as a boy with abundant energy. They listen. They observe. They pass judgment on people and things with a precocious acuity, and beyond their years they view their world as a stone on which to hone their critical faculties. Nothing any longer fazes them. Molly strides right past the cripples; she is first to go gooey over a cute baby. Fraser always pauses to offer cripples and beggars a pocket of coins; he is quick to notice strange animals and stranger modes of human conveyance.
The children’s exposure to this journey’s beauty and ugliness has changed them forever; the prism through which they had once viewed themselves and others will never be the same.
You don’t really go home from a year like this one, not this far in, not this long, and not with this intensity. You go back to where someone else, much like yourself, once dwelled.
