Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey

This is the story I will tell my grandkids.

In November 2008, Abbie and I went on a ghost tour in Georgetown hosted by a professional buffoon and serious-person-impersonator named Andrew. At the end of the tour, he offered to read tarot cards for his guests (right before asking us to comment on his myspace page). Fun, but I thought it was a little bit of hooey. The first tour-group(ie?) he called took her card in hand and showed it to him. He cringed. The card, an upside-down man clad in black hanging from the gallows, contained a message he wouldn't dare tell us. Andrew pocketed the card and quickly, but with an ominous gestured cultivated from years of bit-part horror roles, moved on to the next guest--Abbie.

We had been dating for about a month at this point and had been seeing a lot of each other. For us, a typical day consisted of meeting up after work, then traveling to either Alexandria or Dupont for dinner and other nerdy things (hence the ghost tour). It had been a routine we'd grown used to. At this point, we had only briefly grazed over the topic of my assignment to Chennai and my shrinking Tamil training. Things were looking good, but I was very aware of the ticking clock in the background.

Abbie pulled out her card--she was about three people ahead of me in the group, having been called to the front--and shyly showed it around. The card depicted a man draped in a cloak, facing away from the card-holder, and staring off at three distant sails and more-distant pyramids. The man stood on one shore of a yellow river, grasping one of three wands, as though he was about to step into the river after a brief rest. "This is the card of The Traveler." Over-dramatic pause. "Do you plan on taking any long journeys?", Andrew asked with a cocked eyebrow. I could feel myself stiffen as the idea I had been worrying about for a month now was put out in front of 30 bemused strangers. Abbie told me later that she fudged her answer, "I might get to go to San Diego for work...?" "No, that's not it," muttered Andrew, "but take the card anyway". Abbie plunged the card into her coat and walked back to me before we broke off from the group a few minutes later. The card now hangs in a wood frame next to our bed in Chennai.

This is the story I probably won't tell my grandkids:

Some of you--particularly my family and college friends--probably gritted your teeth when I met, dated, married, and whisked away a young lady you'd never met and I'd only known for six months. Don't get me wrong, I understand how weird that must have looked! At this point, though, we've been married for over two years. It's hard to explain, but it feels like these last two years have been the quickest, longest, and best years of my life. Coming to Chennai could have been a huge trial--a difficult city, taxing jobs, isolation from friends and family--but it turned out to be a blessing.

We've bonded together through our many air-/water-/sausage-/airline food-induced illnesses. We've laughed and fumed at the obnoxiously persistent (and usually drunk) auto-rickshaw drivers who'd pursue us on our walks to the store thinking they'd found a patsy. We've found ways of reaching each other emotionally that we wouldn't have thought of before. These weren't traveler-card, Java House-moments, but rather I'd-love-to-watch-Back-to-the-Future-with-you-again or doing-the-dishes-just-because times. I'm not going to bore or sicken readers of this blog more than I have to (though I can really turn it on if you want!), but the last two years have been a never-ending rediscovery of both expected and unexpected closeness.

As this chapter of my career closes and Chennai's finish line nears, I'll think about how its unique (and really weird) challenges have drawn us closer together. I doubt we'll ever have to make a decision to stay home because the people in our street might accidentally explode what amounts to a small stick of dynamite every other minute during Diwali. Or how we sometimes have to walk through scorching heat to three different grocery stores and still won't find any chicken.

Now that we're heading back to DC, we're starting to realize that the ground will have shifted. Many of our friends will be there, but they will have gone through their last-two-years while we've been far away. Our trainers at FSI always say, "Your scariest foreign tour might just be your tour in DC". While the glories of friends, functional public transportation, seasons, clean streets, and sandwiches (really) await us--and don't we know it!--it's the unknown tectonic changes that excite us. We're getting ready to exchange rapacious rickshaw drivers for twenty-five minute waits for the Red Line in 10F cold at Silver Spring. Instead of Prithvi walking with Mani, she'll do battle with ice and snow (it's going to be hilarious).

I'll miss Chennai--not ready to give the full eugoogly on our tour just yet, but we're getting there. As much as we're not ready to leave, we're ready to come back.