The reservations had been made a year back. We had no choice but to go on the trip. Quark said a cancellation now would cost us ten thousand dollars. The reservations were in both our names and they would only let us change one of the passengers. You said you did not want to go with anyone else and I had no one else to go with, not that I would have wanted to. I wasn’t sure why you still wanted to go in the first place. Last year it had been my new year’s present to you. It had been a dream for us. It would be my sixth, and your seventh continent. This year it seemed very odd that we would be taking this trip together.
The traffic was backed up bumper to bumper on 202 out of Malvern you said, but later called from the Philadelphia airport to tell me that you had managed to make the flight in the nick of time. The flight to Buenos Aires from Miami was not for another five hours and we would reach Ushuaia late in the evening the following day. I would not get any sleep for the next twenty four hours. I could never manage to get any sleep on flights. May be if I found a quiet spot at an unused Gate, I could still get a couple of hours of sleep. So I tried, stretched my leg out, tilted left, tilted right, rested my head on my knees, took the heavy parka off and tried that as a pillow, but to no avail. You would have said, “Give up Kim”. You were only one in the world who called me Kim. You were the only one to whom I was Kim. You used to say I looked Korean. I would say you were racist. And I think you are full of shit, would be your prompt reply. We would be back to where we started, you as usual on top, figuratively speaking. At the Hosur Road office in Bangalore, almost five years back, where you worked and I was visiting, I had once compared your dress with some sort of red and black web patterned prints, you a perfect stranger, except for a couple group meetings, to Spider-Woman’s. You had not been amused then, and even many years later you reminded me, frequently, that my sense of humor hadn’t improved.
But that day I was going to try my best to funny, okay maybe not funny, but happy and upbeat. Any grumpiness would surely be perceived as a sign of weakness. As you emerged from the throngs of people exiting my heart skipped a beat. The red North Face jacket, the one we had bought together online for this trip, lazily tossed over your shoulder, you already seemed worn out. My heart skipped a beat maybe because I had not seen you for over six months and all the conflicting emotions seemed to rush back in. I was digging deep to push those thoughts back again, not let them bubble up to the surface, to not show on my face. But what was the word I was looking for now. What was the look I wanted to implant on my face? Oh yes, nonchalance, I was going for cool, poised and happy. Whatever other meager gifts that I had of facial camouflage, nonchalance was not one of them. So I just gave you a big smile and a hug. I was determined not to bring back the bad memories or fight, determined not to show that this was not easy. This was our last trip together. I wanted to sure you had a good time. Perhaps our only dream realized together.
“Hey Kim”, you said, “What’s with the goofy smile”, returning my bear hug.
“Are you excited Ina”, I said, “I’m really really excited. Antarctica. Can you believe it? We made it,” hoping my voice was not cracking up and you would not see through my phony excitement. But luckily for me you were distracted, we had barely an hour before our flight and you had to call your parents in Bombay and get something to eat as well. The choice of the right thing for you to eat, which had to be the difficult combination of something special and low in calorie at the same time, as usual required us to make two rounds of the food court till you finally gave up and settled for the Southwestern salad from McDonalds. In the end you only managed quick call to Mom before we took our seats for the nine hour flight to Buenos Aires and from there another five hours to Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world. There were three stops before we reached Ushuaia, with a definite possibility, we had been warned, of loosing our luggage at any stop, which had it happened, would have landed us in the coldest place on earth in much the same state of dress or undress as the penguins there, albeit without the humongous layers of fat that they hide beneath their royal cuteness.
♦
After the fiasco of the comment about the Spider-Woman’s dress I had tried to stay away from you and the distinct possibility of causing anymore embarrassment that week. I had left Bangalore after my research assignment at your company and went back to Seattle to complete my work on my thesis. We had not kept in touch for a few months, besides occasional mails to your team requesting for additional information for my research at the Turing Center. Then one day late in the fall, with the winter fast approaching, I had returned from a game of tennis to find an email waiting from you. This time it was from a personal email id. You were moving to Seattle to work for Microsoft and wanted to know if you could get me anything from India and if we could meet when you reached Seattle. I replied saying I lived in Redmond, overlooking the western periphery of the Microsoft campus and asked if you needed any help, and if you had friends here, and no, I did not need anything from India. That started a flurry of emails and given that it was your first time outside India, I was quite happy to play Professor Higgins to your Eliza Doolittle. In the end you decided it would probably be better to stay for a week or two in my apartment since I had a spare room which would give you the chance to look for a place.
♦
You had managed to sleep through the whole flight to Buenos Aires, through both meal services, and I had not had a chance to discuss our situation, which was just as well, because I clearly did not know what we could possibly say to each other, within easy earshot distance of twenty other people. The confusion with your visa at the immigration at the Buenos Aires airport did not make it easier. I had gotten both our visas processed together, but for some reason there was an error in the visa stamp on your passport, which strangely enough still were handwritten illegible scribbles over an Argentine government rubber stamp. Through their broken English and your knowledge of a handful of Portuguese terms, it became apparent that the visa did not mention the number of days you could stay in the country and it had been left explicably blank. My visa, done at the same time, had the correct ninety days. I had been bracing for weeks for something to go wrong before our dream trip. The way the economy was spinning out of control, I thought may be we would be out of work or maybe the visa wouldn’t come in time or our passport would get lost in the mail. This little habit of mine of working out all the permutations and combinations of things that could go possibly go awry, was my way of having an insurance policy of those things not happening, for I was sure if you did not expect something it would surely happen. But I had fallen short in not accounting for the ineptitude of officials in the Argentine consulate in Washington D.C. Damn, the unexpected had struck again.
“But there must be way”, you said, “Can’t you check the application or visa online. This is clearly a human error. Why would they give a visa without mentioning the days?”
We had held up the line for almost half an hour, by the time they finally managed to locate the visa approval record and printed it and appended it to your passport. One disaster averted I thought, but surely the airline would loose our luggage. But this time I had accounted for all the eventualities and our bags were waiting for us besides the conveyor belt at baggage claim. As we waited in the airport lounge, we made some small talk, how long the flight the next flight was, did we have to get off at El Calafate, did I know if the hotel in Ushuaia had internet. As we spoke I wondered at the back of my head, didn’t you want to discuss what we were doing here, why after all this time were we taking this trip together. For the last couple of weeks we had been so busy buying all the layers of clothing that we were told we would need, finishing all of the pending things at our respective jobs, given that we were leaving well before the year end shutdown, that we had not had the time to ponder how crazy it this whole notion was. I was not sure you had really thought through about taking this trip together, being together virtually all day for more than two weeks. But it was too late now. There was still daylight in Ushuaia’s twenty hour summer days when the Aerolinas Argentinas flight landed a little after nine. A Quark representative was there to pick us up, give us the plans for the next day and direct us to our hotel. Embarkation was at three pm the next day and our ship, Lyubov Orlova, quite small by cruise standards, which we came to love over the next fourteen days, would set sail at five.
“Ina” I said to you, when we finally reached our room, “I don’t want to fight in this trip. We should both try not to fight. Maybe just enjoy our last trip together”.
♦
Once you reached Seattle, after a couple of weeks of thankless apartment hunting, you decided my apartment, where I had said you were welcome as long as you wanted to stay, would do fine. You later joked, it was because the location of the apartment was just too convenient, the rent was too low, and I was way too good a cook. I discovered that I was very different from you, I was, what people would call the quiet serious sort, a compulsive loner, my idea of a perfect evening being a good book and this city’s famous obsession, a cup of coffee. You on the other hand were always surrounded by friends, could make friends everywhere you went, really cared about the legions of people who called you a friend, and genuinely worried about their well being. Their sorrow or happiness, I was always amazed to observe, made you more sad or happy than those people themselves. Redmond was a big change for you, in terms of the lack of cacophony and the hustle and bustle of a throbbing Indian metropolis and also because you missed your friends in Bangalore. Perhaps friendship was what you sought in me, may be not having any other friends at the beginning had misled you to believe that I could be a good friend, especially surprising given my lack of interest in the well being of anyone other than those very close to me. Whatever it was, you decided that I was to be your friend, and you faithfully added me to the list of people you worried about. Your arrival also coincided with me finally getting a job to teach at the University of Washington, which was good because it was the first time I was going to have a full time paying job in this country, after studying and doing part time odd jobs and research assistantships for more than five years. Despite my best efforts, and protestations to the contrary, I did have a couple of close friends here. I had gone to engineering college for four years with Amit and Sudhir back in Calcutta and now we all stayed within five miles of each other. Since they both were a year older than me, married, with children, I had been delegated the role of a younger brother to their wives, the ones they had left back in India and could not longer pamper anymore. They in time had become my closest friends here, and slowly in that first year in Seattle, they became yours.
♦
There was absolute chaos the morning of our embarkation, precipitated by the fact that in our excitement, we had failed to pay attention to our briefing the previous evening, and that we had to bring our luggage down to the lobby by nine in the morning, so that it could be loaded on to the ship. After we had somehow managed to hand our bags over by holding the last van leaving for the ship, we lazed for a couple of hours over breakfast, checking and responding to our mails for the last time for the next twelve days, calling our respective parents, me assuring them that they would hear from me only after I got back and you reassuring them that you will most certainly get a message through to them from the ship every couple of days. My assertion and intent of a voyage devoid of quarrel and full of mirth and general merriment had been received the previous night with a “Oh c’mon Kim, not now, I’m tired,” post which you had proceeded to surf the net for two hours, which was not uncommon, because I was a morning person and you were a creature of the night. You did not want to be serious and worry till you absolutely had to, and I had been pathologically geared not to be able to stop worrying.
Though Ushuaia was basked in sunshine, as we stepped out of the hotel finally around noon for lunch, there still was a nip in the air. Between the lofty mountains on the north, which were still snowcapped in the middle of the southern summer, and the waters of the Beagle channel on the south, the small town of Ushuaia was about 4 avenues deep and about 20 blocks wide. Directly overlooking our hotel, down a slope, less than half a mile away was the harbor, where we could make out the crew working hard at loading supplies onto our ship, which was dwarfed by a couple of much larger traditional cruise ships. By mid afternoon we made it to the ship, and fell in love with it immediately, and though it was small, and would hold only a hundred of us guests and about 35 expedition staff and crew, it was the most charming ship we had seen. When I was looking for expedition options late last year, I wanted one with a small and intimate group of people, which would allow for a more personal experience. As we dropped off our bags in our cabins and headed out to the deck for the first time, I finally saw a huge beaming smile on your face, an unadulterated look of pure happiness. As we stood quietly next to each other on the upper deck, I thought in all of life’s vagaries, I was happy that we at least had had this moment, and nothing could ever take that away from us.
♦
I had a crush on you the very first time I had seen you in your office in Bangalore, not quite realizing it till I was on my flight back to Seattle and had found myself quite inadvertently thinking about you, and being embarrassed by both the fact that I was thinking about you at all, and also that I had referred to it in my own mind as a crush, a word which anyone besides gushing teenage girls would not be caught dead using. I had instantly been drawn to the effortless mix of warmth and playfulness that you shared with everyone, the way you made every stranger feel like an old dear friend. By the time you had settled in, and even though both of us had started new jobs, and even though we rushed through the initial weeks totally immersed in our new worlds, mine in teaching Embedded System Design to a freshman class, you in programming for the first time on a gaming console, we were not strangers anymore. You were getting used to staying with a guy for the first time. It was definitely different for both of us, and perhaps a little awkward as well, till we took our first trip together with Amit, Sudhir and their families, a large group of eight people in three cars, to Vancouver. I loved Vancouver, the wide open expanse of Stanley Park overlooking the Marina, quirky Gastown and the lovely drive to Whistler in case one wanted to ski. I was happy it was here that we had planned our first holiday that thanksgiving break, maybe it would bring us closer, something which strangely enough is impossible to do when living in the same apartment. Our friends were nice enough never to ask us about what our relationship was, never made a careless flip remark making either of us awkward. But Vancouver did bring us closer, without us even trying. After the first couple of days sightseeing as a big group, the third day we snuck out early on our own, and walked around the city whole day, stopping only at the farmers market in Granville Island to have lunch. In the evening as we crossed the Capilano suspension bridge, it swung wildly due to a bunch of over excited kids coming from the other direction, causing you to hold my hand to steady yourself, and which you did not let go for the next hour as we crisscrossed the Treetop walkway, huddling together for warmth as we braved the cold gusts of winds of late fall.
♦
We had our welcome briefing that first evening in the forward lounge, most of us still trying to figure out the nautical jargon and confusing the starboard side and from port side and the stern from the bow. We would be at sea for the next 48 to 60 hours depending on the weather, and would cross one of the roughest open seas, the Drake Passage, made famous as a sort of right of passage to the Antarctic Peninsula. We had seen “I crossed the Drake” T shirts in Ushuaia, and heard tales of people being sea sick, but had not paid much attention, and even though we were carrying scopolamine patches, we had not expected that we would need them. Regardless, most of us tried our best to avoid as much of the delicious three course dinners as possible and retire to our cabins early, intending to get as much rest as possible before the Drake showed its full clout. The hundred or so people on the cruise were a pretty geographically diverse bunch, though a fair majority were Americans, but the group trended far younger than I had expected, helped though by the fact that there were three groups of graduate students from various US universities on class field trips. Most of them bravely decided to ignore the Drake Passage and head to the small lounge cum library, connected to a rather well stocked bar named after the famous Russian actress, Lyubov Orlova, after whom the ship itself was named. I retreated to the cabin however to recover from the severe stresses of over socializing that had been required, as in any first evening in such a long journey, with such a small group. Your friendship juices were however on an overdrive and you decided to head to the library, leaving me nursing my cup of coffee and one of the four books I had been saving for this fortnight.
“You want to come” you said though before leaving, trying as you always did, “It will be fun, you might make some friends,” knowing despite your efforts, I would not listen, that I did not want to make small talk with people I didn’t know.
It was still only nine, and I was not able to focus on the book, so I decided maybe it would be a good idea to unpack. We would be out of the Beagle Channel and enter the Drake Passage in a few hours, and we had been advised to keep everything either in the ample closets in the cabin, or in our bags, because of the possible turbulence. The cabin was larger than I had expected, though it only had a small porthole window, through which I could see that there was still daylight outside, even though the sun had gone down. There were two bunk beds with a small chest of drawers in between and the top had some sort of a restraining beaded rubber mat, which was meant to avoid things from falling off, when the ship rolled, which as we found out over the next few days only worked to a certain extent. The bathroom was small and one had to hold on to the handrails for everything, and take sharp turns to maneuver. Still it wasn’t bad. It would be our home for the next fourteen days.
♦
Vancouver had changed our relationship in such a wonderful way, and yet, when we got back, we were not sure where it would lead us. We had only really known each other for eight weeks. The morning after we returned you left for work early saying something about early meetings with your development teams in Hyderabad. Not having any lectures that day, I woke up late, wondering if you were trying to avoid me. Now that we were back, maybe you were unsure about what had happened. I had some course material to prepare for rest of the week, so I decided to push the troubling thoughts to the back of my head and immerse myself back in work, which was easier said than done. I found myself thinking of you like in the flight back from Seattle, sitting alone in our study, dark except for a table lamp, and found myself grinning like a Cheshire cat for no apparent reason. If anyone had seen me then, barely typing 3 sentences in over 2 hours, and constantly breaking into a silly smile, they surely would have worried for my sanity. But I was purely, completely, utterly happy. After a while I decided to banish the dark thoughts and rejoice in the happiness and embrace all the clichés of love. I went down to the local grocery and got supplies for your favorite dinner, blackened chicken penne in Alfredo sauce, and bars of Dove Almond ice cream, the kind you absolutely adored. I stopped off at the next door florist and got a bunch of roses as well. After all if it was going to be a cliché, it was going to be done right. You, never one for melodrama, came home, looked at what I been up to, and did, what you went on to do many more times after that when something I did made you happy. You came up to me sitting on couch and sat on my lap and hugged me.
♦
We had been briefed about the Beaufort scale used to measure the sea conditions the previous day, which went from a scale of one to twelve, twelve being when the sea was the most violent. Luckily enough for us the second day passed with barely any turbulence at all. You missed breakfast in the dining room, so I brought you some corn flakes and fruits to the room. As you sat working through your cornflakes, and thinking aloud about where to keep your things, and I browsed the pictures and videos we had taken the previous day, I realized you had no intention of discussing the topic foremost on my mind. Maybe in your mind there was nothing to discuss, this was just a trip that you had not wanted to miss, and there was no other significance, and meant nothing else.
I smiled inwardly at the pictures of you playfully posing like a diva as usual, and when I watched the video of the city taken from the upper deck as the ship left Ushuaia with you intentionally flitting in and out of the frame, pretending as if it were by chance, I chuckled aloud. That piqued your interest and you came to over to my bunk and rested your elbow on my shoulder and scanned the pictures and videos with me. For a moment it was like old times again, my heart trying to convince me as if nothing had changed. But for all too short a moment. Then we realized it was time for the mandatory zodiac briefing without which we would not be allowed ashore, and rushed to get ready in time to make it to the forward lounge. Shelly, a Kiwi, was our expedition leader, and an old hand at Antarctic cruises, this being her ninth summer here. She took us through the safety procedures, the dos and don’ts and the guidelines followed by the association of Antarctic Tour operators. We were then given knee high rubber boots, for the zodiac cruises. Thankfully although we had been asked to carry, and did end up carrying, a huge list of recommended clothing, starting with waterproof gloves, glove liners, multiple pairs of woolen socks, sock liners, waterproof pants, hand warmers, and upper and lower inner thermals, we did not have to carry these large boots. As it is I had barely managed to stay within the strict Argentine airline weight restrictions, weighing and reweighing my suitcase many times before deciding to stuff all the papers and books I was carrying in the laptop bag. Doctor Jules, a big hit from last evening when she was handing out the sea sickness pills, walked us through the precautions we needed to take when we were ashore, rules of engagement with the wildlife, which of course was quite simple and summed up in two words - “No engagement”. The rest of day was quite uneventful, with a series of wildlife lectures, staring into miles of open ocean in blistering cold winds from the outer decks, and elaborate meals at lunch and dinner. Now that all of us were reasonably sure that the Drake Passage held no terror, we made up for our frugality last night and tucked into the meals prepared by the marvelous Chilean chef and served by the ever smiling Russian crew, who were valiantly making up for their lack of command of English with their extreme politeness. The group of students from Oregon University seemed very concerned about the assignments that they had to turn in to their professor who was traveling with them as well, though that evening they tended to all concentrate on their assignments in and around the vicinity of the bar. If there was anyone checking their id to verify the drinking age I did not see it, or maybe in international waters those rules did not apply. Later there was a full house at the showing of the “Antarctica” episode of the Planet Earth series, all of us watching with rapt attention, even though many of us had seen it before, this time though trying our best to differentiate between the species of penguins, seals and whales we might see. The different penguins, Adelie, Gentoo and Chinstrap were not hard to spot, but the differences between the Fur seals, Weddel seal, Crabeater seal and Leopard seal was another matter. The only one we were sure that we could safely identify was the Elephant seal for obvious reasons. Back in our room you went through the species charts and our plans for the shore landings one more time, quite concerned that you wanted to see and remember everything. You had this endearing habit of almost always not being able to remember the names of places we had been to, that square in Amsterdam, or the museum in Madrid, or the difficult to pronounce name of the falls in the border of Brazil and Argentina. Then you would turn to me to me for help, and I would helpfully add, “Oh, you mean the Twelve Apostles near Melbourne,” trying my best to lessen your embarrassment.
♦
In your second year in Microsoft, your responsibilities increased rapidly. The online component of the gaming console was doing very well, and was proving to be a major draw versus other platforms. It was being heavily promoted at video games’ conferences and road shows all over the country. You had to travel a few times every month, and you would ask me every time to come along, and I would avoid it even when I could get away from work. Not being a gamer, I had no interest in spending hours at video games conferences, trying out new games, or shooting imaginary characters, all of which seemed like being a trekkie at a Star Trek convention. We had an X Box at home, and even though you tried to get me hooked, I was always happier with a far more low-tech dead tree version of entertainment, the paper book. Although we would still meet Amit and Sudhir on occasion, before Amit eventually moved to Munich, increasingly it was your friends we would invite over, or go to a Sea Hawks game with. Soon we had all the three game consoles at home, and big groups of nerdy developers with long hair and muscle t shirts ‘playing’ Rock Band, and a group that wouldn’t be caught dead going to Karaoke bar, spending hours pretending to make music. Though I was only a few years older, it seemed like I was from another generation. You of course were the queen bee, though a boss at work, you were their best friend and mentor outside the office, helping everyone through their problems, especially ensuring if anyone ever came from India the first time, to make sure they were settled in comfortably in a new country. You made countless trips to the SeaTac airport, every time someone new arrived and dropped them to a hotel that you had booked for them.
“Remember you did the same for me Kim,” you reminded me, “They don’t have a guardian angel in this country like you,” managing to embarrass me every time. Even though I think you knew, I never could tell you, everything I did for you had been merely for selfish interests. I was already in love with you the first time I saw you.
♦
The Drake Passage was admirably well behaved the second night as well and we were likely to make the first shore landing that evening after an early dinner. Shelly and her expedition team had been sending teaser announcements all day to prepare us for our first landing and also to get us out on the deck more to watch the wildlife, which was rather scarce and far in between, apart from the variety of sea birds which seemed to have decided to give the ship company all the way to the frozen continent. Vladamir, the resident ornithologist on the cruise, a professor from University of Moscow, pointed about several species of Albatross’s, especially the gray headed Albatross, and several Petrels and Skuas to the hardy few who ventured out. But not until the Blue Whale made its majestic appearance did the decks fill up, with a bevy of expert and amateurs photographers dueling with their latest Nikons, whom the Captain aptly christened the Whale Paparazzi. The main deck of ship was the fifth deck, with the bridge being at the seventh level and another open observation deck above that. Some of us went to the top deck to get a better view of the whale, but we had to contend with the merciless sub zero winds of the fast approaching Antarctic Peninsula. To say Antarctic Peninsula though was a little misleading since were nearing the South Shetland Archipelago, which was a part of continent, but not actually on the mainland.
You though had decided to stay back in the warmth of the library rather than brave the icy winds for the first glimpse of land in more than two days. A little after five in the afternoon the hardy few who stayed outside were rewarded with the first view of the archipelago, massive ice sheets as far as eye could see. It was difficult to decipher where the ice stopped and the blue sky began, seeming to dissolve into one mind numbingly display of the enormity of ice cover. It was rather humbling to think that this was not the main continent but just a series of tiny islands forming a negligible fraction of the colossal scale of this continent. We wished we could have stayed up on the deck and marveled at this site, but we were called in for an early dinner, before a landing later that evening in Robert Island, one of numerous islands which made up this archipelago. We trudged in reluctantly, though realizing perhaps we would be sick of similar sights over the next five days.
♦
You had a behavioral pattern, which was fascinating to me at first, but which I later found increasingly difficult to reconcile when we started to have problems. For all your kindness to acquaintances and friends that you helped, you could be absolutely ruthless when you were angry with the ones that were closest to you. Through many months of the baffling behavioral volcanic eruptions I discovered besides your parents and brother, I was the only one who was exposed to these, what can only be described as, a strange show of closeness. With other people, you would perhaps avoid them if you were irked or unhappy with them, but rarely showed your anger. For the select few that you thought of as your own, it was an altogether different experience if they had done something to anger you. When we were in love, I thought these occurrences were a testament to our closeness, and felt like the chosen few with whom you would really express how you really felt, without deception or guile. Even then it was never fun, and on occasion I would find it hard to fathom why sometime a small incident would so upset you, but I still cherished the times when I made it up to you, did something silly to make you smile. But it was not easy, for after the initial outburst you would stay aloof or detached for hours and sometime days, but once we made up, there would be a complete metamorphosis into the deeply loving person I knew, and you would spend hours saying you were sorry or finding a way to make it up to me.
Increasingly the fights became more frequent, and I found myself lashing out in return, whereas once I had been the patient one, trying to understand what was bothering you. The reasons for the fight were mostly my fault. You were a person who needed to be showered with attention, hugged and made to feel that you were loved, while on the other hand I could come off as a pathologically cold person in terms of my ability to show emotion. I could cry in front of a TV if a dog was hurt in a movie, but found it very hard to express how I felt with another human being. I would try to go out of my way to take care of you, tape your favorite shows, plan for surprise trips on weekends, but I could not find it within myself ever to walk up to you sitting on the couch and give you a hug for no reason at all. You tried to talk to me about it, but I always had my own side of the story, of how I loved you, and was trying my best. You said my behavior made you feel lonely, and at that time I failed to understand why. I did not understand your loneliness perhaps because I was lonely too, or perhaps because I liked being lonely. Within the first two years the two friends I had in Seattle had moved, Amit first and then Sudhir to the east coast. I did not make any new friends, while your circle grew. You hoped I would become a part of your circle of friends and wanted that I would make your friends my own. You viewed my sheer need for solitude as a way of not being ready to accept your friends. When we first fought about this, I would still make an effort to tell you that I knew it was my fault, but this is way I was. But as time went on I got more dug in, and did not see why I had to apologize for the way I was. Why did I have to change? Why could it not be you? I felt victimized by your unnatural expectations. It was not as if I was cheating or sleeping around. I felt I was trying my best and you did not appreciate me. Maybe you would, I thought, when I was no longer there in your life.
♦
The shore landing to Robert Island almost got cancelled. The wind had picked up and the zodiacs were getting thrashed around. It was difficult to get on or off the zodiacs from the small landing, at the bottom of the gangway, connected by foldable temporary stairs, which itself was getting blown about by the wind. But there was high level of enthusiasm about our first landing, having been cooped up in the ship for two days, and we were ready to brave the conditions. We landed on a stony pebble beach about hundred yards long, which extended inland for about 30 yards before it rose into a series of small rocky mounds, followed by never ending sheets of ice behind that as far as we could see. It was just below freezing outside and not as blustery on the shore as we had been expecting. As I dropped off the life jackets that we had to wear for the zodiac ride, I switched on the still camera, which luckily for us doubled as a pretty effective video camera, wanting to capture your first reaction to the penguins. You had been really looking forward to this, and for the past three days you had been incessantly questioning the expedition crew.
“How many penguins would we see?”
“Thousands”
“Can I touch them?”
“No”
“Can I please touch them a little bit?”
“Absolutely not”
“What if they come up to me and want to touch me?”
“Move away at least five feet.”
After sometime you had given up, determined to continue this verbal jostling another day.
There was a relatively small colony of Adelie penguins here, going about their merry way, absolutely comfortable and to completely oblivious to this sudden intrusion of the crowd busily clicking away at them. It took me fifteen minutes, about thirty still pictures and multiple videos, before I could coax you from the narrow patch of black pebble beach where we had landed and convince you to move to the rest of the island. I would drag you for a few feet, and then you would stand again, transfixed, giggling “Oh my god” like a little girl with a new doll, over and over again. As we finally moved ahead there was a group of about five Elephant Seals lazing about, blocking our way, soaking in what to them must have been the rays of the warm austral summer to them. One of them had just come up from the beach and was making its way to the group, and was making what must have been a herculean effort to move a few inches at each lunge. After each attempt it would wait and rest for about a minute, look at us in apparent boredom and then make another lunge. After watching its antics for a few minutes we returned the sentiment, and walked to the other side, which had another group of penguins, shrieking into the heavens in unison at frequent intervals for no apparent reason. Large sections of the black igneous rock in this part of the island was covered with a orange coating of the Antarctic Lichens, which looked like a layer rusted metal on these rocks, these lichens being the only plant life that was able to grow in these extreme environs. The zodiac ride back to the ship turned out to be pretty eventful as well, with the waves drenching us all, the thrashing on the gangway managing to make more than one of us to loose our footing, and on the whole pretty happy to get back into dry clothes and rush to the library for a cup of coffee, exchange notes and look at each other’s pictures. We spent the next couple of hours in the library, with you looking at the videos repeatedly on the laptop, having gone back to your customary giggling as the penguins in the videos waddled by and sometime giving a quizzical look at the avid filming in progress.
♦
What had seemed inevitable to both of us for a long time, finally happened. There was not much drama at all. You had said a few weeks back that you were looking for options, since the opportunities for growth within a stable product team were limited and you wanted something more challenging. I had not expected that you would ever consider working outside the Seattle area. I was perhaps thinking there was a way this could still work. But then one day, we had just finished dinner, and were still sitting quietly at the dinner table staring at the TV, not really listening, when you said “Kim, I’ve found a job in Philadelphia”. I had not known how to react. I kept looking at the screen, motionless, and you looked at me, expecting me to say something. But I had not had the faintest notion that you would move away across the country, thousands of miles away. We sat there for a while, and then I moved to the couch and slept there that night and for the next three weeks that you were there. You had explained, in what were mostly one sided conversations, since I refused to participate, that it was best that we separate for a while, that it was not working and making both of us miserable, none of which seemed like real reasons to me, just plain made up generalities. I had dug in with the tired notion that you did not appreciate what I did for you and you would soon realize your mistake. Three weeks later you were gone. You did not take your car and most of your stuff. It was decided that I would drive them over once you settled in. Despite everything, in my mind we were still friends and you could ask me anything I would still do it for you, and I believed you would do the same for me.
All of this had happened very quickly. Just before we were to leave for our yearly December trip, this time to Argentina and Brazil, and were doing the research on places to see and things to do, we discovered the cruises to the Antarctic leaving from Ushuaia, and had animatedly fantasized on how amazing it would be if possibly made such a trip ourselves. The cruises weren’t cheap and they were all rather long and very difficult to manage with the amount of holidays we could take. We had already been having trouble, and while I did not even know what I was doing wrong, I desperately wanted to find a way to move past all this and correct everything that was going wrong with a big gesture. So on the eve of our flight to Rio I surprised you with the reservations for our cruise next December. For that day and for the next two weeks of our trip we forgot our troubles and I hoped this would tide us through. But these distractions to our every day lives were only transient, and Antarctica was still a year away. I had not worked hard enough to understand what was causing this relationship to crumble, hoping material things and distractions would fill the void. But in the end, they were not enough and by the second week of March, you had left.
The arrangement was that I would drive over in early April and drop off your car and the rest of the belongings that were still with me. You still knew, and this realization made me feel there was somewhere something left in our relationship that could be salvaged, that you could ask me to drive across the country for you. Then in the last week of March my Nana, my only surviving grandparent, passed away, and I left for Pune in a hurry, and stayed on in India for a month to help Dad to take care of things. You said that was fine, and that Siemens where you worked now, would pay for a rental car for a couple of months and I should take care of everything in India properly, which I did. When I got back, I was sucked into activities for the end of the semester and it only in the last week of May, around Memorial Day, when I was be able to drive your car over. Over the past couple of months we had spoken once or twice a week. We had been cordial, civil, both of us perhaps cognizant of fact that we did not want to betray any weakness. We wanted to sound like adults, perfectly at peace with what had happened, and moving on with our lives. Regardless the conversations were short and meaningless. It would start with how each of us were, which was seldom answered by anything other than that we were each fine, and then moved to work, with was always fine as well, and then moved to a few perfunctory facts about having had lunch or dinner, how the weather was and then ended with us deciding to talk again in a few days. While I was in India, I was busy in the events unfolding there, but once I got back to Redmond I was miserable, I would sit for hours in the empty house, not able to read or watch TV. I suspected you would be missing me as well and just putting up a brave face. I was sure that once I went over there, and we realized how much we missed each other, we would be able to work out our differences, whatever they were. I drove for two days, with only a solitary night stop at a motel outside St Paul. It was a little after two in the morning when I drove up to your apartment building in Malvern. You were up, waiting for me. We decided to leave the things in the car and get them the next morning. As I entered the apartment I could see you had been crying. Drawing on all my strength to remain composed and not let you hear my voice crack up, I calmly asked you if you were fine.
“You must have something to eat,” you said, avoiding the question, and over my protestations, heated some rice and rajma for me. You had cooked. I had never known you to cook, except for brief periods when the bug to learn cooking would bite you, primarily to prove your mother wrong, who would jokingly needle you endlessly about it.
“You cooked?” I said smiling, “Are you sure it’s safe. Maybe I should first get a taster to see if it’s safe,” wanting to keep saying something irrelevant, anything, to lessen the tension. You smiled back weakly, and sat down facing me. You waited a few minutes, as if trying to find the right words.
“Kim there is something I need to tell you,” you finally said, as I sat working there through the food, “and I know it won’t be easy for you, it’s not easy for me, but I know you have moved on, and I need to move on too.”
I just kept the spoon down on the plate, and stared at you, searching in your face for an answer of where I had moved on. You spoke slowly, looking down at the table the whole time, visibly upset, but without tears or any tremor in your voice. You said were seeing someone else, you did not want to say who it was, it was early days anyway, but you thought it was best I knew. There were not too many details, not that I wanted to know the details or could handle any. It seemed you had practiced the words many times in your head, perhaps trying your best to find the words so as to not hurt me, but at that time it did not seem that way. The rest of the food remained untouched.
“Ina” referring to you by name, which I hardly ever did, reserving it for times when I wanted you to feel that you were very distant from me, “I think may be I should bring up your stuff now. It’s best I take the morning flight.” Even though my flight was booked for Monday morning, three days away, I needed to leave right away. I spent the next hour bringing up your suitcases, boxes full of journals and papers. I did not say a word, after you stopped speaking, even when you kept saying “Kim are you all right?” and “Can’t you stay back just for one day?” But the physical activity of moving the things was the only thing keeping me sane. I had to keep moving. I could not sit and think about what your words meant, not there, not in front of you. Once the cab got there, I transferred my bag to the cab, went up to you, handed you the car keys, kissed you on the forehead and left.
♦
It was almost midnight but the lounge and the library was still buzzing with excitement, especially for those, like you, who had landed on their seventh continent, a level of wanderlust not very common in any other collection of such diverse people, but was the majority in this group of hardy travelers. The college crew, as we were calling the students from the universities, were still up at the bar, you with them somewhere, not quite the queen bee yet, given it had only been three days, but had managed to gather quite a few loyal subjects. For once I did not feel like turning in early either. It had been a great day. I had seen you genuinely happy, in something we had done together after a long time. It was not like old times, I reminded myself. This was temporary. This would end in few days. As I sat back remembering that night in May, in your apartment, listening to your words, but not quite believing what I was hearing. It had to have been expected, but I had been fooling myself the whole time. You called me many more times the next day, but I had not answered, and finally after a week I had sent you a text message saying I was alright and would call you sometime. But I never did. I played your statement over and over in my head about me moving on and never grasped how you could have ever deduced that. I had not moved on, and I did not intend to either. I could not just dismiss my love for you, pick up the pieces and simply move on. Over the next few weeks your younger brother, Ashu, called me regularly, checking if I was alright. I was very fond me of Ashu, and he thought of me as an elder brother, and saw no reason why that should change because of what had happened. He forced me to call your Dad, whom I had met in India and before this happened, would speak to occasionally to wish them for Diwali or New Year. They were worried about me too, and so I spoke to them to assure them I would be fine. I was touched by their concern. Through them I still felt as if I had some remaining connection with you. Even though they would be sensitive enough not to go in to any details, through them I would find out that you were doing fine. I felt the urge to call you every day through those months, but I did not know what I could have said. Any words I would utter would either be to act normal as if everything had gone back to the usual staid every day existence, or it would be to spew all the pent up anger and rage about what had happened. Neither was an option for me. The one day in early September you had called, suddenly, without warning. I was rushing out of the gym and picked up the phone without checking the number, and you said “Kim, it’s me. Have you thought of what to do with the cruise reservations?”
I had not thought of it at all. We had paid up in full last December to get a better discount and in the ensuing months it had not crossed my mind at all. As I stepped into the car, my mind was racing on multiple different tracks. Why were you calling me after so many months? Why did you want to know about the trip? Did you want to go with someone else?
“Hi Ina,” I said in an effort to stall.
“Hi. Is this a bad time, I’m sorry I should have probably let you know I wanted to talk to you.”
“No of course not, did you want me to check if Quark would the change my name and add someone else,” by now reasonably certain in my head, that you wanted to go with someone else. I just wanted to do whatever it is that you wanted, end the conversation, and stop the explosions going off in mind head.
“No Kim,” you said, with an inflection in your voice that seemed to suggest as if none of the past few months had happened, “There is no one else. Can we talk about that some other time? It was just that I heard the other day a colleague was taking a Quark cruise, and it reminded me of our reservation.”
And then you paused, as if waiting for me to say something.
“I meant, maybe you can check if we can cancel it,” you went on, maybe noting my hesitancy, “No point wasting the money, right?”
“Sure Ina, I hadn’t thought of it, good you reminded me,” and by then with my voice distinctly cracking up, I said, “I hope you’re doing fine. I’ll talk to you later, ok?” and hung up.
Quark was very appreciative of the situation, but no, they would not be able to cancel it without a fifty percent penalty, though yes, they would be able to change one of the passengers of the twin cabin we had booked. I waited for a week, trying to figure out what was the right thing to do. What did you want? Were you or were you not seeing someone. Did you want to go with me, and if so, what did that mean. Or did it mean anything at all. After a week of vigorous debates with myself, and arriving at no conclusion, I dialed your number.
♦
I had been wrong about predicting that we would be fed up of this landscape quickly. Over the next five days we spent an average of four to five hours ashore, and many more getting in and out of the zodiacs, in and out of the many layers of clothing we wore every time we went ashore. We spent even more time discussing what we had seen, the penguins fearlessly running around the sea leopard lazing on a floating block of ice, or the massive tabular ice bergs as went deeper into the peninsula and even the “Casino” that the residents of the Argentine Esperanza research station built as perhaps their only means of recreation in this desolate part of the world. On Christmas eve we spent a couple of hours out on the zodiacs, cruising slowly though the pack ice, past the towering ice bergs in a myriad different shapes and shades of blue, and then dressed up warm for a barbecue dinner out on the deck in temperatures barely above freezing. It was a little after seven and the sun was still shining brightly over the horizon. Despite the sun, the conditions were far from comfortable, but the gathering was bound together by the warmth and camaraderie of this varied group of people who had acquired a kind of kinship, which was transient no doubt, but very real for the time we spent there together. On Christmas day, our last shore trip was to a long abandoned nineteenth century whaling station, built on the edge of a submerged volcano crater in Half Moon Bay. For once not it was not for gawking at the wildlife, even though a few penguins and a seal looked on as the hardy among us took the polar plunge in the freezing waters of the bay. The expedition crew, using every possible psychological mind game and trumped up past polar plunge statistics, managed to induce more than half of the group to partake in this seemingly inane exercise, which turned out to be the most fun we had had on this trip.
Christmas dinner had been planned as a special affair but the oncoming Drake Passage had put a dampener on most spirits. The voyage back across the Drake Passage would start sometime in the middle of the night and perhaps this time we would not be so lucky. Our trip too was coming to an end. If this trip had a special significance to you, besides the obvious, I still did not know. If it did mean something more to you it was still a mystery to me.
♦
“May be then we have no choice but go, at least one of us has to go, isn’t it?” you had said when I called to tell you what Quark had said, “Or did you want to go with someone.”
I knew what you were getting at, maybe I even blamed you a little bit for it. I thought you were being opportunistic, maybe you were using me. You knew very well there was no one, no one else I would want to go with.
Yet you said, “Kim, tell me if you want to go with someone else, that’s O.K. with me.”
“No, you can use it,” I replied, a little annoyed by now.
“Would it be so terrible if we went, together, as friends? We are friends, aren’t we?”
“Yes Ina, we are friends,” I said.
I said it because that was what you wanted to hear. We were going because you wanted to go. We spoke a few times after that, never for more than a few minutes, always about the planning for the trip. Air tickets had to be bought, visas to be done, and weeks of searching online for bargains on the appropriate clothing. As usual I would find out what need to be done in terms of preparations and you would say to all questions, “Whatever you think is right Kim.” We never spoke about what was going on in each others lives, besides token comments about our work. I did not for a moment believe the comment about being friends. I did not want let my guard down again. This trip was a promise I had made to you and I intended to keep it, regardless of how much pain it caused me. But I was not prepared for it to be anything more than that. I knew there was no future to us beyond that.
♦
The passage was rougher the first night back then on our way over here, and at breakfast we heard the forecast was for rougher conditions for the next twenty four hours. Scale nine to ten winds were expected, so we were advised to eat quickly and go back to our cabins. The decks were declared out of bounds. We had taken the sea sickness pills the previous night and in the morning and were lying on our backs on our bunks, a position which felt the most comfortable when the ship rolled about. We had nothing else to do but stare at the roof of our cabin.
Just when I thought you had dozed off, you said, “So what have you thought,” in Hindi, your favorite line which you always spoke in your mother tongue, especially when you wished to confront me, and always with that all encompassing seemingly general query.
“Thought about what,” parrying back, having been part of these exchanges with you many times.
“Kim, you know about what,” sounding serious, almost pained. Were you crying, I wondered.
“Are you crying?” I said.
“Have you decided what to do with your life?” you said, your voice breaking up, “You cannot just waste away your life because of what happened. Every time I speak to Ashu he seems to blame me for it. He doesn’t say it, but I know. You don’t go anywhere, you don’t make any friends. How long is this going to go on?”
I lay there a little stunned. I could have easily said, “Why did you care after all this time.” After all, it was you that had left. You had never asked how I was before. But I knew you asked because you cared, you were worried. I knew that much about you.
“I haven’t thought anything,” I said, “I am not really sure I what I am doing, and I’m not sure I really care”.
“You know we have never spoken about this, may be we should some day. But what happened was not my fault or your fault either. We are the way we are. Neither of us can change each other. We have to leave that behind, in the past.”
By now the ship was rolling wildly, but I sat up in my bunk and looked at you. Tears were flowing down your cheek. I reached down to the box of tissues that had fallen to the floor, and handed you a tissue.
“But that does not mean we cannot be friends,” you continued, “that does not mean I don’t need you as a friend. Doesn’t this trip tell us know that we can be around each other and just be friends and be happy together, and happy for each other. Is that too much to ask Kim?”
I was not sure if you were right, but I wished you would stop crying. I could not see you crying. I went over to your bunk and held you, and said, “Its O.K., we can be anything you want us to be, don’t cry”.
We held each other for a long time. The ship was rolling violently from side to side. It was almost like trying to sleep in a roller coaster. I thought how unfair I had been to think that you had come to this trip for yourself, that you were using me. You had come to this trip for me, for us. After a long time, still holding me, you said “So what have you thought, mister. Didn’t you like any of these college girls?”
♦
The sea finally calmed down when we entered the Beagle Channel, about five hours from Ushuaia. Our trip was over. We hadn’t had either lunch or dinner the whole day. We opened up a box of cookies and a bar of chocolate we had been saving up. We spoke through the night. You told me about Alex, and how your relationship with him had ended, how you had begun to doubt yourself, about where you had gone wrong. I was able to listen to you talk about having fallen in love with someone else, calmly and not have a violent physical reaction to it. I never would have thought that would be possible.
Years ago, out of the blue one night, you had said jokingly “You know Kim, you are my family. I will tell Dad to adopt you”.
At that time I had joked, “So what do I get for my becoming a part of your family?”
“Dad will give you ten lac rupees,” you had replied.
We had had that conversation many times after that. Whenever you were miffed with me, you would say playfully, “I will tell Dad to disown you. You won’t get the ten lacs.” It became a running joke between us, getting the ten lacs was a test if I had been good.
As we spoke you reminded me of that conversation. You said you had realized, when we loose something in life, when we are sad, when every turn seems like a dead end, all we have left is our family.
“And Kim you are my family. Maybe sometimes we will fight, maybe we are not meant to be together the way we had thought we could be. It will hard to us to accept that. But I believe in my heart we are always meant to be friends, more than friends, we are meant to be family.”
When the ship docked in Ushuaia, it was snowing and still quite early in the morning. But everyone was already up. The lounge and library was full of people saying goodbye, exchanging address and email ids. Many of us gathered in the dining room, happy to get something to eat after we had endured the Drake enforced fast. The storm had gone up to scale 11 that night, one of the highest she has seen, Shelly said. As we left the ship, I was sure you and me would see many more storms as well, may be weather them together. Yes we were family, though I wasn’t yet feeling magnanimous enough to ask you in return if you had liked some guy on the ship as well. But what you called a family had no social definition. It was a bond only in our hearts, difficult to articulate, impossible to explain to other people in our lives, and balance against their expectations from us. It would be tested by time, distance and by others who will invariably become part of our lives and those we will learn to love anew. But as I was beginning to realize, and as you said it best, when everything else would deserts us, at the darkest hour, when we would needed it the most, we would know that we would always have us, this memory of us.
