By the end of April, the heat was stagnant and more than suffocating. Each morning, by 7:30 am, while I uselessly applied powder to my face, beads of sweat collected on my upper lip. Every night I was impaled on the residual heat of the day, my bed a mattress of coals, the air that of an oven. I would wake two or three times per night, the sheets and pillows would be soaked with my perspiration, and I would flip the pillow over, shift to another part of my small mattress and try again.
In the last week of living in Mumbai, I began to pack my things. I set aside several items to be shipped separately, and I chose carefully the items that would join me on my journey through India, Nepal, Qatar, England, Wales, Denmark, and New York. As I packed, a sensation crept up from the tips of my toes to the top of my head: I was excited. I had an enormous journey both behind and ahead of me, and I had nothing but the love of close friends awaiting me. But it wasn’t just excitement that I felt. I was anxious too, and it was more than trip jitters.
I told my cousin Natalie about it. I told her I had a bad feeling. I sensed that something bad was going to happen. I told her so that if or when something did happen to me, I could say “I told you.” I told her so that if something happened, if nothing else, she could say, “I knew it.”
Some element of this fear may have only been unfounded anxiety, but this overactive brain of mine has not stopped me from getting out there and doing things and seeing the world, even if I’ve convinced myself I am going to die. I left on my journey anyway, and I kept my eyes peeled for the reason behind the knotted feeling in my stomach.
Without going into details, I thought on several occasions that I had figured out what the source of my anxiety had been. I remember having a quick chuckle and a journal purge and moving on. Sort of. Something still didn’t feel quite right. And then a man selling me 14 postcards gave me a nosebleed. And there it was.
Two days later, my group was in Agra – to see the Taj Mahal, of course. I had been waiting for this and dreaming about it for years. I wondered if I would be let down by all the hype or if it would be as magical as I’d always imagined. Then I received an email from my friend Kathy describing her visit to the Taj in 1987.
We had had a rickshaw come to pick us up at the hostel: it was dense white fog, very atmospheric, well before sunrise. When we entered at the big archway at the end of the bed of water, the fog was a thick, white blanket: we couldn’t see anything. We started walking along the canal in the direction of the Taj Mahal, in total invisibility. Then amazingly, it just appeared, a faint white shadow, out of the mist. At the same time, a thin, pink light appeared from the right and began to slowly light up the structure, getting warmer and warmer, until it completely glowed, in an early-morning fire!
She described the experience as the most thrilling of any architectural work she’s ever seen and said the Taj is the one building whose reality surpasses its reputation.
I knew I would love it.
The experience was out of this world, and I will be writing more about the Taj later.
What happens next comes a couple of hours later. We caught a train as a group from Agra to a town called Orchha. On the train I pulled out my journal (stuffed with 14 postcards waiting to be written) and began to recount the events of the last couple of days; I try to never get too far behind. As I plotted my way through our trip, suddenly I came to the fat Indian man selling postcards. I started to write the story reluctantly; writing the words down meant reliving the unpleasantness. But the story needed to be recorded.
Then my nose started to bleed.
A small drop landed on one of my postcards before I tilted my head back, and someone shoved some tissue at me. And then (all together now), I said, “Fuck. Not again.”
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Dun dun dun… what is going to happen? Stay tuned for the third and final chapter of this tale of what I call my Indian curse.
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