Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I walked over and asked the head mechanic, “Have you fixed my baby?”
For the first time all day, he smiled at me with his tobacco-stained teeth. I wanted to kiss
him after he replied, “Yes we have fixed it, good friend.”
We wheeled the bike outside to where we held a ceremony to confirm that Kindness One
would start. The bike roared back to life! The deafening applause of the crowd lifted my
spirits and followed me as I rode back into the mayhem of Patna's festival. Though the sun
was beginning to set, the crowds had yet to slow. I realized that in all my hours of waiting
at the mechanic's, I had forgotten to secure a place to stay for the night. Motorbike hospit-
als can have that effect.
The sun was quickly disappearing, and I had few options as to where to rest for the
night. It appeared I had used up all of Patna's generosity in getting my motorbike fixed,
which was fine by me. I was still pinching myself that it was done at all.
As I drove, looking for one of the quieter streets I could find, I realized how much I
had accomplished without any money, without any gas, without a cell phone. I remembered
when I was first dating Lina, we were sitting at dinner together, and as was the norm for me
back then, she was reading the menu while I was busy scrolling through my phone. Finally,
I looked up to find her staring at me.
“You can have dinner with me,” she said with a sly smile. “Or you can have dinner with
your phone. It's your choice.”
My phone had become my easy way out from paying attention to the world around me. I
would fall down the rabbit hole of emails and text messages and status updates, and I would
lose sight of the people right in front of me. I would fail to hear how their day had gone. I
would miss the point when they told me about something they had read or something they
had seen. I would ignore that they wanted the one thing from me that I continually spouted
that I wanted from others: connection.
I didn't realize it at the time, but my phone, my computer, all that false connectivity was
really just another mask, the way I separated myself from those around me, and here was
this woman on one of our first dates saying to me, “Drop the mask.”
I stopped on a quiet Indian road, Kindness One humming beneath me, and I realized that
this is what happens when we drop the mask. We show our best selves, and we invite others
to do the same. That day, I had not only seen the generosity of those mechanics and their
care for my precious yellow bike, I had also been connected into that extraordinary web of
kindness, one that I often failed to see at home, but had found here in India.
