Manuscript Monday: Meeting Bindi

Today's excerpt is about Bindi Girl, a wonderful writer and intrepid India explorer who appeared in my life exactly when I needed her. Her amazing blog is here. I found it invaluable when I was preparing for my trip. While most of her stories have since been deleted, the good news is that they are being compiled into a book, The Adventures of Bindi Girl. In the meantime, Bindi is always creating new entries, with video and music and adorable photos of her amphibious roommates. While we're on the subject of blog entries, here's the latest from me:


I paused behind the glass double doors separating the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport from the rest of India. From this viewpoint, it looked as if all of the country’s 1.1 billion residents had gathered immediately outside, restrained only by a wall of waist-high metal barriers painted a dazzlingly bright yellow. There were old women with henna-streaked buns and candy-colored saris, strong men carrying children on their shoulders, bustling porters and chauffeurs holding up signs. Everyone pressed against the barriers, waving and shouting at the weary travelers emerging from the terminal.

The sky was a mass of churning licorice-colored storm clouds. Each time the automatic doors slid open, a blast of hot air slapped my face and shook more beads of sweat from my brow. Slick raindrops splattered onto the asphalt behind the crowd, which pressed closer to the barriers in an effort to squeeze under the awnings.

I was frozen. I suddenly had no idea why I’d come to India or what to do next. I wanted nothing more than to turn around, curl up in a chair in the airport lobby, and sleep for a week.

And then I saw her, parting the thronging masses and presenting herself at the yellow barrier without so much as a hair out of place in her bun. She was taller than most of the crowd, and her long black skirt and sleeveless white-flowered top stood out starkly against the sequined rainbow of colors the other women wore. With tanned skin, black hair and stacks of bangles tinkling on her thin wrists, she almost looked Indian, but her open smile was all California.

Bindi Girl had arrived. She was waving at me.

Bindi Girl is the nom de blog of Erin Reese, a former corporate headhunter turned wandering travel writer and freelance astrologer. She fell in love with India after her first trip there in 2002 and now lives there permanently.

Erin is also the daughter of the girlfriend of a guy who went to elementary school with my mother’s boyfriend. If that sounds like a tenuous connection, it is.

I’d never heard of Erin or Bindi Girl when I decided to come to India. When I told my family about my plans for a six-month walk on the other side of the world, my mother searched her vast suburban social network for evidence that anyone’s child had done such a thing and lived. Within a week, I had an e-mail from Erin in my in-box. She sent it from an internet café on the beach in Gokarna, where she was living in a hut. She had never met my parents and wasn’t entirely sure how we were connected, but she was planning a trip to San Francisco in a few months and wondered if I’d like to meet for chai. She attached a link to her blog.

I read every entry — six years’ worth — in a week. I learned so much about her that I actually felt nervous driving across the Bay Bridge on the afternoon of our meeting, as if I was interviewing a celebrity. On the passenger seat was a notebook full of questions: Should I take malaria pills? What’s the best price for a room in a guesthouse? How, for the love of Ganesha, do you go to the bathroom without toilet paper?

Erin was house sitting for some friends, and I found her sitting on the front stoop of their San Francisco Victorian. She wore flowing Indian garments of lime green and teal — colors rarely spotted amid the somber earth tones preferred by Bay Area residents. Her signature pink scarf, visible in nearly every self-portrait on the Bindi Girl blog, fluttered around her neck. Red Sanskrit letters raced up and down its folds like an indecipherable fortune.

Erin beckoned me indoors, made chai, and then curled up on the couch to patiently answer my questions. She recommended destinations and religious festivals. She unpacked her Indian salwaar kameez suits for me to admire. She even went so far as to squat in the middle of the living room and pantomime pit-toilet etiquette.

It hardly seemed I could ask for more, but she promised to meet me at the Mumbai airport in October, if she possibly could. I drove away feeling slightly more confident about my travel plans and infinitely more grateful for the intervention of my mother in my life.

Erin and I communicated sporadically in the weeks before my departure. Through her letters, I got my first indication that Indian travel was an unpredictable beast. The day before I boarded my flight, I received a final e-mail: “Just confirming that I'll be there for you on Wednesday,” she wrote. “If I can't come into the airport, I'll be at the nearest doorway. If you can't find me at any exit by, say, 11:45 a.m., look for me at the prepaid taxi booth, OK? If I'm not there, then there has been an emergency and I will leave a message for you at your hotel. If you don't see me by 12 noon... no, let's say 12:30, I would suggest taking a prepaid taxi to your hotel. Of course, there will be absolutely no problem!”

I’d written down these contingency plans, but in a city of 13.6 million people and legendary traffic problems, the chances of our meeting began to seem dishearteningly slim.

Now, the sight of her freed my paralyzed feet. I ran outside and hugged her over the barrier like a long-lost relative, even though we’d only met once before.

A seasoned budget traveler, Erin had arrived at the airport via two buses and a lengthy walking stretch – which cost about 50 cents. She made it a rule to avoid taxis, which were 10 times more expensive than buses, but subject to the same traffic delays. I wanted to prove myself a brave and thrifty sojourner, but I was rapidly fading under the combined beat-down of heat, rain, jet lag, and backpack weight. Erin watched me swaying on my feet, sweat running into my eyes, and declared a taxi to be the best option.

“I’ll pay for it,” I said gratefully, even though I didn’t have any Indian currency and wasn’t sure when I’d have the opportunity to get some.

I followed her to the pre-paid taxi stand. The beige-uniformed man behind the plate-glass window fired questions at us in thickly accented English. What district were we going to? Did we want air conditioning in our cab? Did we have bags?

I had trouble keeping up, but Erin answered him quickly. Fort District. No A/C. One bag. She handed him a 500-rupee note and received a handful of change and a receipt.

As we walked away, Erin explained that the pre-paid taxi booths, found at every major airport and train station in India, exist to protect travelers from predatory drivers and financial scams by offering fixed-price rides to the city. Then she counted her change, turned sharply, and headed back to the booth, where she calmly collected the extra 40 rupees the clerk had “forgotten” to give her.

“Always count your change anyway,” she told me.

Erin walked briskly towards the airport parking lot as I stumbled in a zig-zag path behind her, like a baby turtle just learning how to balance my home on my back. We slipped into a maze of identical black-and-yellow taxicabs distinguishable only by brightly colored window decals proclaiming each driver’s religious affinity. Jai Ganesha! Sai Baba! Infant Jesus! Every cab wore a unique assemblage of plastic dashboard deities, religious stickers, and flower leis dangling from the rearview mirrors.

Erin matched the number on our receipt to the license plate of our cab. She leaned into the window and woke up our driver, who was napping open-mouthed in the backseat.

Looking mildly annoyed at the interruption of his afternoon siesta, the driver pulled my pack off my back and stuffed it into the tiny trunk of his taxi. He slammed the trunk door. It popped open again. He slammed it repeatedly until it finally stayed shut. Satisfied, he climbed into the driver’s seat and gestured for Erin and I to get in back.

Erin repeated our destination, “Hotel New Bengal! Fort District! Fort!” I groped about vainly for a seat belt. The driver started the car, shifted into reverse, and immediately laid on the horn. In the subsequent 90 minutes it would take us to inch our way out of the rainy plains of North Mumbai and into the arid heat of the Back Bay coast, he almost never let up.

Neither did anyone else on the road. Within minutes, our cab was ensconced in a city-wide traffic jam in which thousands of cars, motorcycles, scooters, buses, ox carts and bicycles vied to get in front of every other vehicle on the road without regard for lanes, signs or traffic lights. Everyone honked the entire time. It would have been terrifying, if our cab had ever topped 10 miles per hour.