THE LIFE I WAS IMAGINING by Todd Greenwood

You could sit sprawled across the wooden floor of your apartment on Charles Street in the West Village, garbage trucks clanging and crushing their way down the street, with the map of the Indian subcontinent laid out in front of you. A copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to India with two smiling turbaned men in Rajasthani splendor guarding the door to the mystery that lay behind the golden bejeweled entrance to a mystery world. And there next to the map is a schedule of trains, and list of cities and places to be seen.

I had won the Priskell Travel Fellowship, a stipend of money that would allow me to study Open Air Marketplaces – and the world was my oyster. Anywhere in the world, any place on the planet where the agora had created its own organic form. To study and construct how the order of commerce, the simple and unplanned could be seen through the eyes of the designer, the architect. There was something to be learned by wandering in places that never saw the hand of an urban planner; places never needed to be mapped and plotted and defined.

Lying prone over the subcontinent it looked simple, easy, and knowable. It was December and the wedding was going to be in April. I had decreed. We had planned. I wasn’t going to let up this opportunity and Ruth wanted me to go, to take this opportunity and let me explore what there was in a place that the two of us could only imagine. Two mustachioed smiling men of Hindu mystery guarding an ancient door.

But as excited as I was by the prospect of flying to Bombay, and taking the train wherever the spirit moved me, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that this voyage would be the last of my life as a single man. At 24 years of age, I would be going to India, a place where I knew only one person – my Industrial Design teacher from Pratt - who would be staying with his mother and father while I was in Bombay. But from there, I would be on my own. The names of the map were mysterious, and alluring. Places that I knew little about. I could hardly even know what to expect in a place called Goa. Places in the South that eluded pronunciation. Places with names so long that I was sure they couldn’t be correct, or that they came along with some simple and shorter nickname that the cartographers were too proper to include.

I looked at the map and thought about the fact that we had sent out the invitations, found the synagogue, found a caterer who was Kosher enough for Ruth’s mom and dad to agree to (if they were going to pay)… but cool enough to be more than the "chicken or flanken" choices of the too many perfumed Leonard’s of Great Neck Affairs that I would die before submitting to. It was set: flowers, invitations, and an auspicious date: 4/8/84.

It was December and the wedding was April. Four months and I had enough money for just about that amount of time -- backpack, youth hostels and 30 rupees to the dollar. The only problem was that as I looked at the map, it dawned on me that the distances were huge. There was no way that I would be able to circle and explore the entire continent from the disputed and communist-controlled lands of Assam to the shores of Trivandrum in just four months.

The greatest trust: The moment of standing at the Pan Am counter, in Kennedy, with a suitcase that could be strapped to my back. My fiancée, the woman who I loved so dearly, an adventure that I had wanted so much. An adventure that I would have dreamed my whole life for. All those lists that I had on my wall as a child – the fifty things I would do in my lifetime. List of travel adventures, of jumping from airplanes, of taking a submarine across the ocean. Dreams fueled by Jules Verne and Popular Science magazine.

And I had managed to convince the committee sitting somewhere above Willoughby Street at the office of Pratt that here was a young man with a crazy notion: open air market places, organic design, the architecture of the unplanned. Let me have five thousand dollars and let him explore the unseen world.

I stood at the International Departure Lounge, surrounded by people who held their cigarettes in new ways, walked in curious arrangements, wore on their faces the signs and markings of places airports away, lands beyond. My sweet fiancée stood there telling me that I should have this adventure. Give this to myself, allow myself to experience what I had planned to do. She wanted it for me. But I wanted to hold on.

A month went by in which every day I smelled more like turmeric. A month went by in which the sounds of goats crunching on tin cans and honking rickshaws awoke me. A month went by in which my sandals became more deeply caked with the dust of the streets of Goa, Pune, and Bangalore. In which I sat transfixed by temples melting into the sea and lingams buried within the dark sanctums of places that I felt I should see, but were beyond my vision.

A month went by and I was sitting on a beach in Sri Lanka, in a small town south of Columbo - a place where the empty shells of buildings stood eviscerated by the ire of the Tamils. But this place was different. It was relaxing, peaceful -- so different than the cacophony of India or the sorrow of Columbo. There was a bar, and a bar tender and there was just one cassette tape that was pumping across the beach on endless repeat. I recognized the voices, seemed to know the singers.

"Hi, Hi, hi, hi, hi, Hi, hi, I want take you home. Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi. Ooooo."

The Talking Heads. And the voice of David Byrne was of a deep unsavory guttural – a lurid devilish seducer, a dance of sexual invitation at the feet of imagined gyrating beauty.

I sat under a baobab tree – a tree with huge arms that swept and protected the beach for centuries. This was one of the most beautiful places I had ever been in the month on the road. The food was good. The air was clear and there was a freedom and clarity. A place of repose -- for the tranquility of India is the biggest myth of all. Maybe tranquility within – but certainly chaos without.

I sat under the tree and I cried. The pain was too great. I could not wait a moment longer and I knew that at that moment there was a decision that I could no longer put off. Each day, I had asked myself the question. Each day I felt the longing and I thought of the woman that I loved and the comfort of sleeping in our three quarter mattress atop the wooden loft, down the block from the Korean Grocer and the corner sushi and little place that we went for Gai Yang chicken after work.

My adventure… I sat under to Baobab tree, picked up my bag, and called Indian Airlines. I told them that I needed to be home on the next plane. Get me home in 24 hours. Someone at home had died.