Writing Prompt #109: Close Calls and Near Misses
February 2024, Writing Exercise: What are the wonderful things you nearly missed?
Hi Friends,
Last week, we wrote about close calls and brushes with death—nearly missing danger and peril. It’s likely that you can write another few essays, poems, or stories based on your lists from last week, and I hope you do go back to those lists, but this week, we’re going to focus on the most wonderful things we nearly missed (but didn’t). Because I am a natural worrier and often afraid of the wrong things, I have had to fight myself in order to have certain experiences, so there have been so many times I nearly missed out. Sometimes I have needed a little help along the way in overcoming my fears. One of the bravest people I know is my dear friend Sholeh, and she has convinced me to go against my own fear and worry, and the consequences have yielded some of the most incredible experiences of my life.
This is a story I told in Bad Tourist, my memoir in travel essays, and it’s an example of a time when I could have missed out, but because I trusted in Sholeh (and in the world), I had an amazing experience. It takes place in Kochi, India in 2007.
The Grand Elephant Festival
As we sped from the Cochin airport, two Indian strangers sat in the front seat of our car. Sholeh and I sat in the back, hanging onto each other as we weaved between other cars, trucks, camel carts, and cows. I clutched my noisemaker key chain (yes, I had such an implement, given to me by my practical boyfriend), just in case; in case of what, I didn’t know. Pulling the chain would only omit a piercing siren that would surely result in a swerve off the road and a fiery crash, despite the Ganesh good luck charm dangling from the driver’s rearview mirror.
“Do you like India?” Bijuraj turned around to face us. His giant white teeth gleamed. “Do you like my country?” Bijuraj had recently tracked down Sholeh on the internet and translated a few of her poems, and when he found out we would be traveling in India, he insisted we stay at his family’s home. I kept asking Sholeh, “Are you sure we should stay with someone we don’t know?”
“Don’t be silly. It will be lovely to stay with a family. He invited us because we’re poets,” she said, as if that explained everything.
Sholeh and I originally planned to travel through the south of India from Mumbai, where we stayed with my friend Shalini’s family—an actual friend, not someone I had met online. But Kochi worked out as a convenient stop on the way south to Alleppey, so Sholeh accepted the invitation to stay with Bijuraj and his family. I went along with it because I had learned Sholeh was usually right about these things. Plus, I had heard there would be a grand elephant parade, and I love elephants.
When we stepped off the plane, there was Bijuraj, grinning and waving his hands above his head. He had written to Sholeh, telling her he would hire a car and driver to fetch us from the airport. He had said: “Look for the tall and fat Indian.” He was certainly tall but not at all fat, at least not by American standards.
Despite Bijuraj’s large smile, I held my safety key chain until we pulled up to his house, a modest two-story home set behind a leafy patio. On the front porch waited Bijuraj’s also smiling mother. She wore a beautiful maroon sari, a matching bindi on her forehead, and her black hair pulled into a tight bun. I didn’t think a bigger smile than the one on Bijuraj’s face was possible until I saw her.
“You see,” Sholeh said. “They couldn’t be more lovely.”
I tucked my noisemaker away, feeling silly indeed.
When Bijuraj’s mother heard I wasn’t married, she began calling me daughter, which she pronounced “doughter.” And she insisted I call her Amma, meaning “Mother.” She also took it upon herself to make sure I was well fed, putting food into my mouth whenever I opened it. If I started to speak, which happened a lot, Amma would shove in half a banana. According to Amma, a well-fed child was the sign of a good mother, so she stood over me at mealtimes, replenishing my plate of rice, plantains, and chicken tikka masala as soon as I took a bite. She also made sure I used the proper dining etiquette; the right hand is for eating, while the left should be reserved for bathroom business. Because I have always had trouble keeping track of right and left, I could not keep my hands in order and received playful slaps to the wrist from Amma. I ended up sitting on my left hand at mealtimes.
Amma made her displeasure clear when I said I wanted to try toddy, a milky wine made from the fermented husk of a coconut. We stopped at a roadside “bar” on our way home from the tea plantations in Munnar, and Bijuraj had to go in for it because women were not welcome in such an establishment. He brought out a bottle of the whitish brew, though Amma stood with her arms crossed, shaking her head. Sholeh spit it out on the ground and said it tasted like someone had thrown up coconut milk. Amma looked vindicated, so I didn’t tell her I didn’t find toddy half bad.
For the most part, Amma left Sholeh alone because she was a married woman and therefore a grown-up. But I was unmarried, a mere child of thirty-six, so Amma followed me around the house, trying to put sesame oil on my skin, comb my wild, curly hair, or affix bindis to my forehead to make me look “more Indian.” I loved the attention, but I ended up looking like an oily pink-skinned dimwit who was trying just a little too hard.
Amma didn’t need me to need her the way my own mother did—that dynamic so many grown daughters encounter with their mothers. She was just curious and wanted to be helpful. I know that if we didn’t have a language barrier, Amma would have been a good listener, offering me sage advice about love and life, but we couldn’t communicate without Bijuraj’s help translating. Even so, Amma managed to teach us how to make a delicious chai tea.
The lack of boundaries I had with my own mother made me the kind of person who was easily motherable. Amma was there when I woke up in the morning; at night, when I got ready for bed, she stood next to me in the bathroom, smiling at me in the mirror. The first time she saw me take out my contact lens, she screamed in terror. Then she laughed in delight when I showed her the lens. She asked me to repeat this, putting the lens back in and taking it out, again and again as she looked on, squealing in horror and glee, clapping her hands as if I had performed a fantastic trick.
While I was the proverbial apple of Amma’s eye, the literary men of Kochi were smitten by Sholeh. Bijuraj had arranged for Sholeh to give a talk at a bookstore in town. It happened to coincide with the culmination of the local elephant festival, where a procession of fifty elephants would take to the streets. I am ashamed to admit it, but I was a little annoyed. This was not a very generous attitude, but I wanted instead to see the parade I had read about.
The bookstore set chairs up outside, and the event was standing-room only with more than a hundred Indians, mostly men, gathered there to see Sholeh, who delivered an eloquent lecture on the political situation in Iran, literature, and the relationships between East and West (check out Sholeh’s work here). The audience listened with intent, intellectually hungry, engaged in the world of literature. They were entranced by Sholeh. And I was entranced, the sweat rolling down my back and the heat making my head light, by watching them watch her.
Afterward, Sholeh was ushered into the Communist bookstore, where the likes of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Saddam Hussein looked out from book covers on the shelves. A crowd of reporters fought to take Sholeh’s picture, film her, ask her questions. I took pictures of everyone taking pictures of her.
The next day, we watched Sholeh’s interview on television with Bijuraj and his family. Amma and I clapped for her. During the filming, I had sat with Sholeh, so along the bottom of the television screen ran the script: Iranian Poet Sholeh Wolpé and American Writer Suzanne Roberts. My first poetry book had not yet come out, and I felt like the title “American writer” was a bit generous, but still I felt proud. “This station is broadcast all the way to London,” Bijuraj said. “I bet there are millions of people watching.” We all agreed what a wonderful thing this was.
And not a one of us anticipated that homeland security might be concerned by a sweaty want-to-be-writer with a bindi affixed to her forehead.
I would find this out a week later in the Frankfurt airport, when the gate agent stopped me from boarding the Los Angeles–bound plane and questioned me because I had made it onto the “no-fly” list. My no-fly status would follow me around the world