There But for the Grace of God
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The other day my twelve-year-old daughter, Josephine, said to me, “You’re lucky I saved your lives.”
She says a lot of funny things that make us raise an eyebrow, but the truth is she just might have saved our lives.
At the time of Josephine’s birth, our whole family of five was in the midst of planning a move to Mumbai, India. My husband had gotten a job there, and was already intalled at the Taj Hotel while he went through the hand-wringing task of trying to find an appropriate place of residence for two adults, two toddlers and a baby. It was slow going. Much slower than he’d anticipated even though his company was fitting the bill for it, allowing us a much bigger budget than our wallets could have otherwise afforded.
Mumbai was (and I’m sure still is) a gloriously crazy place where nothing was as it seemed. The most beautiful, well located apartments had jackhammers firing on the floors above 24/7, or were infested by several families of insidious varmints, or simply fell through at the last minute for no good reason. Six months after his arrival in India, my husband was still living at the Taj and wasn’t even close to signing a lease for us.
Then came Josephine.
She was born terribly ill and put the kibosh on our whole India adventure rather decisively. At first, we were too focused on trying to make sure she stayed alive to really think about the fact that our plans had radically changed. It was a few months after her birth, when we were at last getting a bit of a breather regarding her most acute health scares, that it started to sink in how we’d been forced to pass on what would have been a life-changing experience.
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Photo by C Rayban
Except that the term life-changing can be deceptive. It doesn’t have to be a good thing, after all. Life changing events can mean great jobs, weddings and births, or getting fired, losing an arm to a nasty infection, and falling out a window.
Months after Josephine’s harrowing birth, as we sat watching the Mumbai terrorist attacks on the news, we got a look at just what kind of life-changing event we might have been in for. The attacks were taking place in exactly the same hotel at which my husband had been ensconsed. The same hotel we would have probably, though hopefully not still been living in.
But nevertheless, the Taj Hotel was and remains a hub for ex-pats and internationals. The series of coordinated terrorist attacks we were watching with open-mouthed horror on our TV set took place on American Thanksgiving weekend, and that was in all likelihood a strategic date chosen by the handlers of the ten young Pakistani extremists who walked into the Taj armed to the teeth. As my husband pointed out, there was a very good to great chance that we would have been sitting in the Taj’s famous Blue Bar, or in one of their many restaurants, celebrating the holiday with our children and new friends.
“There but for the grace of God,” my husband said.
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The Taj Hotel, Mumbai
That’s why when Hotel Mumbai, a movie about those terrorist attacks came out recently, my husband and I were determined to go see it…even if we really didn’t want to. It’s not just because the depictions of the attacks would be gut-wrenching – one hundred sixty-six people were killed, after all, and mercilessly so. But also because that time in our lives isn’t one we revisit with any enthusiasm. Truth be told, there’s a lot that we’ve blocked from memory and even our most poignant experiences seem to come back to us in vignettes rather than whole pieces.
But Hotel Mumbai, despite the fact that we never made it to India as a family and did not actually live through the terror of that night, sucked us both into a kind of time portal that had us re-living the emotions of that year; the one we spent living on the brink of rational thought. When our house was a mess and we would forget to do things like shop for our older children’s school supplies – sending them into class empty handed on their first day.
Before things got a little bit better and we were able to think with some level of clarity again.
We were reminded of our younger selves, too. Those crazy new-ish adults who were hell-bent on throwing the dice and seeing where our fortunes would fall. Always having the utmost faith that the fates would bring us to a better place, and we would arrive smarter, wiser, ready for the next chapter.
In some ways that did indeed happen, although not how we expected it to. My husband and I had figured we would mature like a fine wine, gaining complexity from the luxurious process of getting to know exotic cultures, and testing our abilities to learn and adapt. Instead, our growth came about from getting to know ourselves…what we were made of and what we valued above all. And it arrived at a rather break-neck speed.
I suppose, depending on how you look at it, we did travel far away from where we started and to places we never could have imagined. We just did it without ever leaving our zipcode. We don’t regret remaining in our quiet, semi-rural home and we did gain wisdom, I think. Our daughter’s illness has certainly been an adventure in and of itself – I can’t deny that.
What became apparent to us as we watched Hotel Mumbai – in the casual loss of life that occurred, visiting the most unsuspecting people who, like us, had never been afraid of shaking things up – is how un-special we are. We saw ourselves in the Australian back-packing tourists, the father and daughter missionaries, the foreign residents and what became glaringly obvious was the randomness of life.
Truth be told, had we gone to Mumbai, we really may have been at the Taj Hotel that ominous night. Either as part of the carnage or witnesses to it. Even if we’d decided to stay in or celebrate Thanksgiving at the home of a friend, we would have never had another day of peace in that city. Each and every morning, we would have felt our hearts flutter as we put our children on a bus to go to the American School – a fortress of a place where incoming cars were routinely searched for bombs even before those horrific attacks occurred.
As I look at how things have turned out, I can’t help but be grateful for the unceremonious and breezy way in which we’ve sent our kids out to their respective school buses on any given day here in central Virginia, year after year.
So, yes, I feel a deep sense of gratitude to our youngest, Josephine. The one who took us on one hell of a ride, and continues to challenge and delight us on any given day. Because she may very well have saved us. If not our lives, then maybe our sanity.
