At about 7:00 PM on a chilly evening in mid-February, 2009, I sat inside an Alaska Airlines jet on descent into Barrow as the pilot broadcast the ambient ground temperature: 48 degrees below zero.
The Borough had booked me a room at the Airport Inn, so when my bag appeared, I grabbed it, stepped out into the bitter air and walked over. It was not very far, about a block-and-a-half, but when you are still dressed in street clothes, wearing a light jacket and you walk through minus 48 degree air for even a short distance, you feel it.
The first thing I did upon settling into my room was to get out my laptop, log on to the hotel wireless and open my email. I felt certain I would see one from "Sandy R" - Soundarya Ravichandran, soul friend and Muse. I did not want to fully believe it until I saw it, but that's how it always seemed to work. If I felt I would see "Sandy R" in the inbox, I would. If I felt there would be no "Sandy R," her name would not be there.
Sure enough, her email was there. I opened it. Inside, she recounted a pleasant experience she had with her fiance, Anil Kumar, very late the night before, when they had been out walking about alone on "the cold, empty, streets of Bangalore..."
Sandy's description struck me as incongruous. Bangalore streets? "Cold?" "Empty?" In my experience with Bangalore, the streets had always been teeming with people. Masses of people, on the go, rushing here, rushing there, selling this, selling that; roaring about in a compact swarm of motorbikes, auto-rics, buses, cars, trucks - horns honking continually as each driver out there engaged in the continual game of chicken all drivers who navigate the hot, crowded, streets of Bangalore must play.
The streets were hot, even at night - even when the local people told me it was cool. Granted, I had been there in August and it was now Februay, but still, this close to the equator, how cold could it have cooled off to? Fifty-five degrees (12.7 C), maybe? If it had somehow matched Bangalore's all time record low, then 47 (8.4 C)?
T-shirt weather in Alaska.
The seeming absurdity of it made me chuckle and smile. Sandyz description (this how she would write her name when she used the possesive - Sandyz) put a pleasant and romantic image into my head, one that I liked: two healthy young lovers, soon to be married, out alone on the street - talking, laughing, stopping here and there to exchange hugs and kisses.
It made me think of Margie and me, and how we had courted through the fall and first half of winter on Utah's Wasatch front. We sometimes did find ourselves on empty streets in near or sub-freezing weather and it had been wonderful. The cold had only made our embraces feel that much warmer, the empty streets had made it seem as though we, together, were all that truly mattered.
So I pictured it somehow being that way for Soundarya and Anil - if I could but redefine my concepts of "cold" and "empty" a bit.
As I have written elsewhere, Sandy and I had bonded upon first meeting. The simple sight of her on the other side of a table at the wedding of my niece, Khena, to her cousin, Vivek, had given me a warm feeling, as though I had always known her, as though she had always been my close and trusted friend. It was the same for her. I called her "Muse" and "soul friend." She called me "soul friend" and "best friend." She had another friend or two who she also called "best friend," such as Nikel, westernized to "Nick Hill."
This did not make the designation, "best friend" less meaningful. One can love many people in different ways, simultaneously, and can have more than just one friend who ranks right at the top, in the category that can only be called, "best friend."
Nick Hill would die in the same crash that took Anil. That crash and the suicide that followed ripped a huge chunk of life and spirit out of so many - we continue to live, breathe, eat, drink and love, yet inside suffer this aching, empty, void. The crash was horribly hard to accept, the suicide - seemingly impossible. Yet, those who loved her live and continue on, anyway.
Some of us sometimes do strange and irrational things, like, sink one's self into a time-consuming blog with virtually no payout and then, in the face of the greatest financial challenge of one's lifetime, a challenge with great promise beyond but no interim survival solution - save for the construction of an online store that he can never seem to complete - drop everything and rush off to India.
Early on, Sandy and I would "talk" often of love, and the quest for love - which she was on. I would tell her about Margie, whom I called "Soul Mate." She would tell me of her desire to find her own soul mate, a man she could travel intimately through life with and embrace as father to her children. But she was confused, because she had been badly, badly, hurt before, in many ways and more than once. In some of these matters of the experience of her heart, she swore me to confidentiality.
On the day I met Soundarya, a relative a few steps removed from her had told me how her future was supposedly to play out - in about a year, a marriage would be arranged for Sujitha. Theoretically, as Soundarya was older, a marriage should be arranged for her first, the distant relative told me, but she was too independent minded, too adventurous, too free in her thinking to be tied down just yet. No marriage would be set up for her for two more years - by then, the relative told me, it was hoped she would be ready to settle down into an arranged marriage.
"Whoever told you that, told you wrong!" Soundarya retorted through rapidly typing fingers when I brought it up in an online conversation. Nobody but Sandy would chose a husband for Sandy. This would prove true for Sujitha as well. Both sisters would choose their own men. I'm pretty sure the brother will choose his own woman, too.
Even as she sought the right man, Sandy received many unwelcome advances. She was a teacher - a trainer of youth and young adults who needed to learn the skills to advance in a modernizing world, integrating in voice and by phone with the west. Her ambition was to start her own training institute but in the meantime, she had to apply for temporary positions. She had been very excited about one interview, but afterward she reported to me in fury that it had seemed to go well - until the man doing the interview and who would have been her boss if she got the job hit on her.
Another time, a man hit on her and she punched him right in the face. There was another man who she did like, had dated and who wanted to make a life with her. She liked him but the statements and promises he made did not seem quite right to her - not true to life. She did not believe it could be that way. She wondered what I thought.
I lack the wisdom to give anyone advice on love or much of anything else, so, whether the topic was love or otherwise, I would respond mostly not with a real answer but maybe just by relating an experience of my own - something that happened with Margie when we courted, maybe, - something that happened that day with Jim Slim Many Toes - my good black cat.
Somehow, whatever I told her, it always seemed to help. She always felt better afterward.
I made a promise to her. When she found her man, I would come to India to photograph her wedding.
And I always felt better, just to see her words on my screen. Her words were bright, filled with energy, passion and the desire to fully experience life. She would speak of those she associated with and things they did. There was "Barbie" - her pet name for Sujitha; Gayarti, a village boy, and he was very pretty and she was protective of him. There were many others. She described an eclectic group of young people determined to make very different lives for themselves than those lived by their parents and the people in the India of yesterday.
One day the name "Anil" appeared in her writings.
Somehow, even though she did not write about him in the context of love or make any extraordinary statements about him, I sensed electricity in her very typing of the word... "Anil."
Soon, there came a dark and frightening period, yet one mixed with flashes of brightness, glee and love...
As it transpired, this period of time seemed long, but it was short. When it came to an end, Sandy told me that, after many bitter tears mixed with redemption and new-found trust, she had finally found her man, her Soul Mate, the man she wanted to go through life with. She said I had been instrumental, that she had felt my love and guidance all the way through, as if my hand had been on her shoulder. She said this soul mate of hers was one of the people whose names had appeared in our past conversations. Could I guess who?
Immediately, I thought of Anil - but was reluctant to say so. I didn't want to be wrong.
It was Anil. Soon, they decided to marry. We tried to bring her to Alaska for a spell first, but it didn't work out.
They needed to set a date. I told her to please avoid late spring through early fall, if she could, as I hate to leave Alaska during the time of light. Anytime in the winter would be okay - except Kivgiq time. Kivgiq had not been scheduled, but I was certain this would be a Kivgiq winter.
Other than Sandy and Anil's wedding, there was only one event that would take place in the year 2009 I absolutely could not miss - Kivgiq: the great celebration of Iñupiat song, dance, gift giving, story telling, trading and bartering. I HAD to be there.
She wrote of the children she hoped to have...
A daughter, to bring the sun into her life...
She hoped her son would be just like Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes: mischievous, naughty, yet sensitive, observant, good at heart - despite his sometimes seemingly twisted outward manifestations.
She sometimes had second thoughts, misgivings, because she knew first hand many of life's cruelties. Was this really the kind of world she wanted to bring children into? She would push these fears aside, because, yes, whatever the challenge, the love was in her. Yes, she wanted children.
I kind of hoped she would prevail upon Anil and name one of them, "Bill." I was afraid to suggest it, though - in part because it would probably be important to the larger family that this son carry a Hindu name.
Good grief, this story is getting too long! Not too long for the telling of - it is a much longer and more involved story than I can tell here - but the construction is getting too long for the technology.
Soon, the number of photos will really jam up, bog things down and drag down the browsers of readers who must endure slow connections.
So I had better zip along and wrap this up. Kivgiq was scheduled. Sandy and Anil set their date - right smack in the middle of Kivgiq - the very Kivgiq I had gone to Barrow to cover on the night when Sandy told me about "the cold, empty, streets of Bangalore." It became apparent that the family of the groom has more say about the wedding date than does the bride and they base their choice on a number of factors - not one of which is an Eskimo dance celebration in Arctic Alaska.
Yet, somehow, Sandy got the wedding postponed - right into the heart of bowhead whaling season. I have covered whaling in many different years, but I was working on two stories in two different whaling villages and had planned to divide my spring up between them. Yet, I had made a promise to Soundarya, Muse and soul friend. I would keep that promise.
So, in May of 2009, I came back to Bangalore for the wedding. Back in Alaska, some amazing things happened in both of the whaling villages I had been working in, events I would sorely have loved to have photographed.
That May was brutally hot in Bangalore - hotter than the Bangaloreans I spoke to could ever remember May being. I came straight off the Arctic ice to temperatures in the 100's. I sweated profusely. I drank gallons - literally - of lemonade and water and never even had to pee. I drenched my clothes in sweat. Sandyz desire to have me as the only photographer had been overruled by the family of the groom, and I had to contend with an aggressive, abrasive, photographer/videographer team who did not believe in subtle light and so blasted the beauty right out of the natural with their scorching spot-light and hot, pasty, straight-on flash.
Still - the wedding of Soundarya Anil Kumar is a cherised, cherished, day of my life. Cherished! Not for anything else that happened in the world that day would I have missed it. Nothing. I was in the right place - just where I needed to be.
One morning, early on in this trip of 2012, I walked down a street in the neighborhood where Sandy and I had walked on my first visit, shortly after we met. We had found a cat on that walk.
Now, in 2012, as always, many people swarmed all about - but the street felt empty, so horribly empty.
The rays of the sun burned my untanned skin, yet the absence felt cold - so bitterly, bitterly, cold.
"The cold, empty, streets of Bangalore."
Suddenly, I understood.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012 at 2:55PM ;)
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