The Shooting Star: A Girl, Her Backpack and the World

by Shivya Nath

Sitting by Lake Annecy in France, you once told me I didn’t have to settle for an average life. So I decided not to . . .

With a home nowhere, I belong everywhere.

What I didn’t know then, in that New York City apartment, as I saw snowflakes dance outside the window, was that excitedly reading about ayahuasca on a computer screen is very, very different from drinking it on an unexpectedly ominous night, deep in the Amazonian wilderness.

kept drifting out of my visions of the past into a disorienting reality, and it hit me repeatedly that I’ve never been truly grateful for my life. I longed, like I’ve never longed before, for the simplest joys—of feeling alive, having control over my thoughts and being able to decipher what was real and what was not.

In that moment, for the first time that night, I felt like I was going to be okay. And for the first time in a long time, I felt truly glad to be alive, grateful for the people in my life and relieved to be somewhat in control of my reality.

I wondered how I went from being that girl on the Ferris wheel in the Indian Himalayas to being this girl healed by a Shaman in the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador. How did I really land up here? This is my story.

This was my second visit to a nunnery in Spiti, and I felt surprised yet again to hear that young Buddhist nuns were expected to study much longer hours than monks at the same level and they led what sounded to me like far more regimented lives. Yet, a nun has rarely been able to break the glass ceiling to become an advanced Buddhist scholar. And the world is yet to witness a female Dalai Lama.

So I had to ask her, a nun for almost five years, what had inspired her to vow nunhood—to leave her family and the vices of the world and dedicate the rest of her life to Buddhist teachings—at an age when the most serious issues we tend to grapple with are puberty and puppy love.

I was still admiring the hints of green in contrast to the bleak landscape, realizing only then how much our eyes and mind can crave colour when deprived of it, when we slowly chugged along broken roads into Phukchung. Elevation: 3700 metres. Population: 20.

Back then, it didn’t occur to me to find a quiet spot in Phukchung and ruminate on this human desire for solitude.

Maybe that is exactly what had drawn me to Spiti. Away from anything I had known or experienced in my sheltered life, I was filled with an intense desire to venture alone into this wild, uncharted territory, curious to discover

There were two options to get around during the day: hike or hitch-hike. I stuck to the former until I realized how safe I felt hitching a ride with the rare local who owned a car, unthreatened despite being a twenty-three-year-old girl, travelling by herself, in a country with a notorious reputation for female safety.

I felt tears welling up in my eyes as I thought of the young nuns, the ones who will never fall in love and have their hearts broken, who will never know the abundant joy of lying on this rooftop, drinking chhang and hearing the familiar chatter of friends late into the night.

But I do remember having this unshakeable feeling, as I lay on that rooftop, as I lay under a million stars, that my life was about to change. I can’t explain it. It was like a calling.

When some of my more adventurous friends from school got together to hike or drive their bikes up to nearby hill towns, I didn’t get permission to leave home, for there was always homework to be finished and lessons to be revised and, besides, who knew how safe it really was to venture out without adult supervision?

In addition to the grant, I took a student loan of SGD 32,000 to cover my living expenses. For the next four years, I would study economics, a subject akin to misery for a right-brained person like me. On that flight and in the next six years, it never struck me that this was the cost I willingly paid for my freedom: freedom from my protective upbringing in small-town India.

I managed to convince my boss to grant me a two-month unpaid sabbatical from work. Some of my co-workers advised against it, for I was risking my job, with no certainty that it’d be waiting for me when I returned. Others thought two months were a little too long to be on holiday. Some felt I was too young to feel burnt out. Others were more supportive and claimed that a few years down the line, they might risk it too.

When I look back at my journey now, I can clearly visualize the person I was before the sabbatical and after it.

More importantly, I had forgotten the battle that awaited this twenty-three-year-old at home in Dehradun, for being daring enough to consider travelling by herself to a little-known region of the Indian Himalayas. And what a battle it was.

The days were painfully similar in that one week in Dehradun. I woke up to a barrage of questions, of which I had answers to the easy ones: Are those roads safe enough to travel, and what is the point of this trip? And pretended like I did to the hard ones: Where will we find you if you go missing, and do you know what it’s like to travel alone as a young woman in India?

Battling my inner demons to reconfigure my direction in life promised to be easier than battling my family’s inhibitions. How could I explain in words my craving for freedom, that longing for anonymity, the need to distance myself from everything I knew in my universe . . . that there was no reason behind this ‘madness’ other than madness itself?

She reminded me of her fragile status as my mother, and implored me to imagine a mother’s anxiety at the thought of her young daughter traversing across big bad India alone.

But no words poured out of me. So I let the warm tears quietly stream down my face, pretending that the fear and paranoia that had been thrust upon me all these years didn’t make me feel equally fragile inside.

That is the feeling many of us live with, in office and at home, the feeling that obliges us to continue doing what we’ve always done, giving ourselves a false sense of importance. But on that Monday, I realized that not much had crumbled in the two months I’d been away. Maybe except for something within me.

That’s when it first dawned on me that most of us have developed a strange approach towards life. We tend to make big changes only when tragedy strikes. We tend to look for alternative paths only when we feel we’ve hit rock bottom. We tend to ask existential questions about happiness only when we are at our most miserable.

I’m thinking of Cheryl Strayed, who hiked the Pacific Crest Trail solo after the unexpected and heartbreaking death of her mother, and Elizabeth Gilbert, who embarked on a year-long journey around the world after a painful divorce and depression. I admire their grit to pick themselves up and do something extraordinary in the face of tragedy. But what about the tragedy of a mundane, average, unfulfilling life?

That I was just a girl in search of ‘paradise’, who had saved up for a few months, found an affordable flight and boarded it without much thought was beyond the realm of most people’s imagination.

And it didn’t occur to me to explain why. I mean, how can you explain the joy of feeling in tune with the wind and the ocean and the sky and your own heart, even if it only seems like loneliness to the rest of the world?

How many Indian women in their twenties would venture off on their own to a small island in the Indian Ocean and share a platonic joint with a local on a moonlit night? Even if I was way out of my comfort zone, I didn’t feel it.

Out of the blue, he began telling me about the couples he met on the beach every day. They were either on their honeymoon or annual vacation. They worked long, tiresome hours for years, saved money for their dream holiday and came to Mauritius. And look at us, he grinned. Indeed, neither of us was rich or employed.

As his anklet shone in the moonlight, it suddenly struck me that this man, just a humble fisherman with a worn-out sweater and no slippers, was a dreamer and explorer at heart. Perhaps the same heart that had made me board a flight, alone, to ‘a place like this’. And yet, we were different. Not because he lived in ‘paradise’ and I came seeking it. But because he realized that paradise is just the place where your heart belongs.

On the brighter side, my time in Delhi taught me to fend for myself and pushed me to travel courageously, for I had the feeling that if I could survive in Delhi, I could survive anywhere.

Each family has its stories, but the ease with which an outsider could become familiar with the family’s history, jokes and politics in the span of a few minutes felt unique to Punjab.

On our way out, I fell in step with an elderly farmer and asked him what it had been like to spend his life, knowing that he might need to leave his house and farm at literally any moment. We live in transit, he said. We think we can control our circumstances, but really, what we can control is our spirit.

In that intoxicated state of mind, amid the warmth of friendship in that house, with a tummy satiated by lentils slow-cooked in a handi and crisp rotis on a chulha, I had an epiphany: Could I use my digital marketing skills to bridge the gap between authentic travel experiences across the country and travellers who seek them? Thus was conceived the idea of India Untravelled.

I began to seek remote regions about which little was written online, and locals who, in their own creative ways, were using tourism to drive environmental initiatives and provide an alternative source of income for marginalized locals.

We were unconventional business owners in many ways. We wrote no business plans, attended no networking sessions, quickly dismissed what we had learnt in entrepreneurship classes back in college and wrote no jargon-filled strategies—but brainstormed hard and worked smart, and within the first month of unofficial operations, we scored our first big client.

Maybe this is the first thing they should teach in entrepreneurship classes. You can’t start a business unless you’re really passionate about a concept, but you can’t sustain a business unless you’re equally passionate about the revenue it generates—and that is the conflict I began to hate.

In that intoxicated state of mind, it struck me that I was just a girl who liked the idea of having her own company, not an entrepreneur. But that entrepreneurial journey, brief though it was, had changed my travel philosophy forever.

Friendships on the other side of the globe didn’t seem all that different.

Life on the other side of the globe, too, didn’t seem all that different.

I won’t forget how she stopped her work one time, looked up ruefully and stated: people think our culture is dead. But this is our culture—we treat everyone as our own.

In my mind, I thought I was no different from the geese that flew over Lake Peten Itza, flapping my wings, swooping down on parts of the world that beckoned me. Here now, gone tomorrow.

My thoughts trembled with the water, until Elise suddenly asked me: porque viajas solo? Why do you travel alone? Under that moonlit sky, my legs dangling over the ledge of a Mayan Itza home, in an obscure village in Guatemala, in a language that wasn’t my own, I could craft only a few words for an answer. No se, I said, la libertad . . . freedom. And I think she understood, for she flashed me her affectionate smile.

I was about to embark on a new journey and I desperately wanted to be a different me—courageous and unafraid. And though I didn’t know how then, I had unknowingly taken my first step—a step away from my protective upbringing, societal conventions and the fear I had learnt to live with but never truly accepted. Ten years later, I felt like I had come a long way.

Hiking up the mountain in my inebriated state, I would make a mental note of telling people who asked me about my time in Ethiopia that locals here might barely make ends meet on subsistence farming, but their coffee is strong, their injera soft and their hearts big.

I would notice Genetu regarding me with fascination, just as I had regarded him on that first day we met. And almost anticipate the question on his lips: how can you travel alone? In my inebriated state, I’d whisper: would you ask me the same question if I were a man?

Perhaps I was a fool, but I felt like I was becoming a liberated fool.

The agarias pump water out of the ground and put in back-breaking work under the hot sun to account for close to 14 per cent of India’s salt. That’s a lot of salt. And a lot of back-breaking work under the hot sun. I silently thanked them, and pledged never to take the food on my plate for granted again.

Let’s drive out to the watchtower in the Little Rann, he said. We could lie on its roof, munch on khakra (a crispy, savoury Gujarati snack) and relish the night sky.