The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (20 page)

I watched the woman's eyes get wide. “Oh,
haram,
” she said.
“Haram, haram.”
She looked up to the crowd, her expression ferocious, and shouted a few agitated Somali words.

But before anyone could respond, the dynamic in the room changed suddenly. Two of the leaders of the kidnappers had marched into the mosque, looking disheveled and furious, with the captain next to them, waving a pistol.

One of them—a man called Ahmed—located me and pointed a finger. “You!” he shouted. “You have made a big problem!” The air in the mosque had grown stuffy and uncertain, filled with noise. Then came a loud, concussive crack, a gun going off somewhere inside the room.

The sound of it broke the spell, the holding pattern. I saw Abdullah pushing through the crowd in my direction, his head lowered like a bull's. I screamed as he dove at me. He caught my feet with his hands and began dragging me in the direction of the side door. I clawed at the ground as he pulled. I don't remember any of the onlookers trying to stop him.

It was only the woman who tried.

She clamped on to my arms and pulled me back, using her weight for leverage, letting loose a torrent of Somali. For a few minutes, my body was strung between them, with Abdullah yanking my legs while the Somali woman proved herself a stubborn anchor. We were being towed along—the two of us, linked like train cars—inch by inch across the floor of the mosque. My shoulder sockets ached to the point where I thought they would pop.

Finally, she could hang on no longer. I managed to lift my head and look back to see her sprawled on the floor and weeping openly. Her headscarf and niqab had been torn off in the struggle, leaving her exposed. I could see that she was my mother's age, in her early 50s, with a gentle plump face and high forehead. Her hair had been braided in tiny cornrows over her head. She still had one arm outstretched in my direction. Three men with guns now surrounded her.

Someone lifted my shoulders, maneuvering me roughly over the stairs outside the mosque and into a courtyard. My abaya had ridden up over my waist. My jeans, which were already baggy because I had lost so much weight, were slipping toward my ankles as Abdullah jerked me forward, holding my legs on either side of his chest as if pulling a cart. As we moved over the courtyard, my body skimming the dirt, I felt my frayed underwear sliding off as well. I was naked, basically, stomach to knees.

I felt something wet hit my stomach and realized I had been spit on. We were moving through a crowd, past a metal gatepost marking the edge of the courtyard and the entry to the road. I reached out and caught the post, latching on to it with both hands.

Abdullah turned to see what had stopped his progress. Beyond him and through the gate, I could see a blue truck waiting with its engine running. Another gunshot echoed from inside the mosque. Nigel, I thought. They've killed Nigel. The thought was like a suck hole, a thing that could kill me. I spotted a woman's narrow face looking down at me from the crowd, her expression unreadable. I screamed at her in English: “Why won't you help me?”

She looked stricken. “I don't speak English,” she said in perfect English.

Suddenly, the knuckles on one of my hands exploded in pain. Someone had kicked it to loosen my grip on the pole. I howled and let go. Then I was being pushed to my feet and toward the truck. I saw two other men hauling Nigel through the door of the mosque and in our direction. The sight of him brought a wash of solace and a hammer blow of anxiety. It had been all of 45 minutes since we'd slipped through the window. We'd made it out but not truly out. We'd crossed the river only halfway. Things would get worse from here. Everything that followed would be aftermath, punishment.

 

Nigel and I would remain hostages for another 10 months. We were freed, finally, on November 25, 2009, 460 days after we were taken, and only after our families managed to raise just over $1 million for a ransom and the services of a private security company. They held fundraisers, accepted other donations, and borrowed where they could. (Later, we learned, to our relief, that the three Somali men who were kidnapped with us had not been killed, but rather released unharmed.)

For a while, I kept track of my freedom, counting the days and the weeks and eventually the months that separated me from my captivity, sliding them like beads on an abacus, hoping that at some point one thing would feel stronger, more significant, than the other. But it doesn't work that way, exactly. What I've learned is that freedom can't fully overtake its absence. Once lost, a part stays lost forever.

I live with what happened. Memories leap the border between then and now. One sensation abruptly rivets itself to another—hot sand, the smell of an overripe banana, the rattling of a diesel truck—and tosses me, with a pounding heart, into the past. But that day, in particular, stays with me. The sweaty paranoia of slipping through the window, the frenzied dash into the mosque, the confusion that followed. All of it sits locked in my mind, surreal and forever vivid. I don't know what happened to the woman in the mosque, the stranger whose name I never knew, who fought until I was dragged out of her arms. But I recall the elemental comfort of her embrace and all the terror and sadness she seemed to be beating back with it.

During the rest of my captivity, the memory of the escape became a sustaining one. It held an electrical charge, a force. We had been hopeful for how long? Ten minutes? Twelve? Whatever it was, in the context of the dark months to come, the feeling turned out to be vital. I craved it, just one hit of lung-clearing, odds-stacked-against-us, nearly impossible possibility. And when I most needed it, I found I could summon it—that mad, dim hope. It was like bending a spoon with my mind.

FROM
World Hum

 

I
BLINKED. I MISSED IT
. Instinctively, I had closed my eyes. The black goat's head had been pressed down between two small stone pillars, then held in place by a thin metal bar. Swiftly the machete was drawn up into the air—and with no pomp in an otherwise elaborate ceremony, came whooshing down toward the taut, thin neck of the bleating goat. When I opened my eyes after no more than an instant, the two men holding the four legs of the now decapitated animal were flinging the carcass back, away from the altar. The body bounced up against the wall behind them, then slid back a few feet into a pool of water and blood that was gushing from the angry artery of the goat's neck. The legs were still twitching. People, mostly women in colorful dress, rushed in and dipped their fingers into the blood, dabbing their foreheads, and then the foreheads of their children. The small horned head of the sacrificed goat was tossed beside its recently separated torso. All the while, the tongue was protruding, then retracting, as if the animal were gasping for breath it would no longer need. The eyes still appeared to contain life. My recollection is that the goat was still bleating, but that can't be correct.

I had been up in the hill country of West Bengal, in the soft climate of Darjeeling in the Lesser Himalayas, sipping delicate teas and hiking through crisp air over steep trails, before descending into the plains and humid chaos of Kolkata—although everyone I met who lived in the city of 14 million still called it Calcutta.

Little about Darjeeling's charming provincial decay prepared me for Calcutta's assault. Yet in truth, the cacophony and filth and poverty I found on the streets did not approach the squalor I'd always conjured in my imagination whenever I'd heard the word
Calcutta
before I ever saw the place. Only occasionally during my visit, when I would come upon a horribly disfigured small child, or a family of four living in a doorway, did the profundity of human degradation take me so wholly off-guard as to stop me in my tracks or make me gasp.

Like any place that exists with death hovering in such open proximity, Calcutta throbbed with life. The City of Joy's natural condition struck me as one of openhearted generosity.

At the Victoria Memorial, the monumental shrine to the queen left behind by the British, I wondered why the Indians hadn't ripped it down. Sipping tepid, watered-down coffee through a straw, I engaged in a passionate discussion on nuclear weapons and pop music with a few of the local intelligentsia, one flight above the street in the smoky College Street Coffee House. I woke early and got lost among the millions of carnations being strung together for wedding celebrations at the flower market, then walked across Howrah Bridge, one of 6 million people a day who do the same. I attended a raucous and joyful cricket match. I also visited Mother Teresa's Mission of Hope, as well as her Kalighat Home for the Sick and Dying, then her orphanage—I came away with a decidedly mixed feeling about the diminutive nun who was so invested in suffering, and who seemed to me all too human in her love of the spotlight.

But most memorably I walked amid crushing crowds—rarely with a tangible destination. Wholly, thrillingly anonymous, a singular cell pulsing through a giant throbbing organism, I was carried along for hours, relieved of individuality. Smells—cumin and excrement, frying grease, jasmine and human sweat—registered and dissipated without consequence. Images—perilously thin men squatting atop idle rickshaws, naked children peeing in the gutter, stunning young women—all unfurled as I was swept onward. Thoughts slipped past without relevance—my mind rested. Decisions were unnecessary. Life amid so many was cheap. And imperative, the sensation made even stronger at night, when the heat would soften and the dim, straining streetlamps left Calcutta's darker corners to mystery while a gauzy mist hung in the air as people sought respite from overcrowded dwellings.

During the best of my travel, I've felt the relief of locating myself by losing all sense of the familiar. Nowhere did I experience that more than in those swollen masses of humanity.

An introvert by nature, I wasn't a born traveler. Rather, I took to the road as a path away from a natural timorousness—an active effort to move more fully into the world I knew I wanted to inhabit. So when a long-familiar timidity came sneaking back to reassert itself in the instant the machete came sweeping down toward the goat's vulnerable neck outside the Kali Temple, I knew that I would need to return to the site.

Just as years before I had coaxed myself to climb aboard a listing riverboat headed down the Amazon while fear seized me, and as I had marched on through the wheat fields of northern Spain when internal voices urged me to retreat, I was compelled to take one more step in a lifelong journey away from trepidation.

The following day I approached the enclosure behind the temple of the Hindu goddess of destruction. The area was riotous in preparation for the impending Kali Puja Festival. Throngs of the devout were lined up to gain entrance to the temple. Drums were pounded, chanting filled the air. Just as I arrived, a black goat was being led to slaughter.

It strutted confidently through the crowd at the end of a short rope. Between an old man with a long white beard and a black-haired woman in a bright sari, I stood just beyond the sacrificial area—a 10-square-foot pen with burning incense and flowers littering the ground beside the altar. The animal was taken in hand by two men in sweat-stained T-shirts. Its head was shoved down between the pillars, exactly as I had seen done the day before. The condemned goat bleated once. The crowd surged forward. The machete was raised, then quickly brought to bear. The head fell, the body was hurled aside. And people—as by now I knew they would—rushed in to anoint themselves with the sacrificial blood.

My eyes were wide open.

FROM
The New York Times Magazine

 

I.

 

T
HE A
-1
NATIONAL HIGHWAY
in Spain heads north from Madrid straight over the Guadarrama Mountains, the peaks jutting like jagged shark teeth that cut the rest of the world away. And then you're floating, up through one last ear-popping
puerta,
or pass, perched above the upper Meseta Central, the football-shaped highlands that cover most of the country's northern interior, the silted land below glinting with flecks of red, gold, and green.

In that moment, you're no longer American, or anything at all. It wouldn't be surprising to see the entire flow of history illuminate that stage: megaraptors skittering after prey; savage packs of prehumans hoarding meat; the Romans building their roads across Hispania, and the Visigoths plotting and conniving; and, after them, the marauding Moors and marauding Christians, pillaging in the name of Allah, God, or chivalry; and then the huge, undulating flocks of sheep, whose wool became a source of Spain's wealth in the 15th and 16th centuries, spurring the grand imperialistic designs of Isabella and Ferdinand that brought the first caravels to the New World . . . and so on.

Harsh and given to extreme weather, the meseta of Castile isn't exactly Tuscany or Provence. It doesn't welcome a traveler with the same fecundity and open arms. From a tourist's perspective, it's a little like visiting South Dakota. You can drive miles on the meseta wondering if you've landed on the most lonesome patch of flash-baked clay in the world—past an abandoned car in a field, past a single tree in an ocean of nothingness—and then from a far hill comes the outline of a church tower, the silhouette of a castle (the reason that this land is called Castile), the clustered homes packed tightly together against what the wild night might bring.

On my first visit to the area more than a decade ago, I spun off the highway at Aranda de Duero and headed northwest through vineyards and sunflower fields, looking for a village I'd only heard about—a place called Guzmán (population: 80). I asked for directions in one small town from a group of old men wearing black berets on a shaded bench, then proceeded lost for half an hour, eventually cloverleafing back to that same exact spot. Finally, I found a thin serpentine road that narrowed as I drove, leading upward again.