Bombs over Pakistan
Or, how to disobey your mother and scare yourself in the process. A story about being a few miles away from the Pakistan border, in the middle of the night, in a car with a strange man and no baby.
In the middle of my second year of law school, I was miserable. I would often drive to my classes and sit in my car and cry before grabbing my bag and shuffling inside. If I wasn’t studying, I was napping. I could sleep during the day but couldn’t seem to fall asleep at night. And sometime in the past 6 months, I had gained about 30 pounds (not an exaggeration). I was having a bad time.
One winter night I was crying to my Mom about how unhappy I was and how I wanted to quit my job, quit law school, and move home. Maybe I could apply to fashion schools, follow my dreams of designing clothes.
“Before you do that, why don’t you just quit your job and focus on school?” Mom asked.
“I can’t. Your job between 2L and 3L year is basically the one way to getting a real job after graduation,” I lamented, feeling stuck in my own bad decisions.
“But you don’t want to work at this firm or do medical malpractice work,” she replied. Mom was making a good point. I didn’t respond. “What makes you happy?”
“Traveling,” I said without hesitation.
“Is there a way to combine being a lawyer with travel?”
It’s one of the most profound questions I’d ever been asked. I wasn’t immediately sure of the answer, but if there was a way to work and travel in the legal field, I was going to find it.
The next day, I quit my job at the terrible law firm. That night, I fell asleep easily and woke up the next morning. It’s one of the only times in my adult life that I’ve slept without waking up to pee or roll around for hours on end. I cried when I realized I had slept through the night (there was a lot of crying going on). It’s a high I continue to chase, never having experienced it since that night in 2009.
I then started looking for internships overseas. I applied all over the world and got into my first pick: the Southeast Asian Law Project in New Delhi, India. I was going to work at an NGO in India. Practically as far away from Spokane as I could get while remaining on planet Earth. Halleluiah.
I spent that summer eating naan and curry, learning how to curse in Hindi, seeing some of the most spectacular architecture in the world, and experiencing a completely different culture from what I was used to. It was beautiful and sad (the huge slums were difficult to take in), and so very very loud. So much honking. I fucking loved it.
But the story for you today took place after I’d gotten done with my internship and was traveling through the countryside with a friend from the NGO, Katie. Katie was from Georgia, a southern lady with gorgeous thick red hair. Quieter than me (which isn’t hard to do), but so funny and smart. I liked her immediately, which is convenient since we shared an apartment in the Safdarjung Enclave region of New Delhi during the internship.
My parents helped me pay for my trip to India, since the internship was unpaid. What I couldn’t cover with student loans, they chipped in. With one caveat: DO NOT GO TO KASHMIR. “Promise me,” my Mom had said, looking me dead in the eyes.
“I promise.” I lied.
Kashmir was one of the main pulls to go to India in the first place. However, at the time it was on the United States’ “do not travel” list and rated “red” by the government. As in: stay out.
But who was I to judge Kashmir? Maybe it was fine and the “government” was just being dramatic. It couldn’t be that unsafe. Plus, nothing bad had ever happened to me before (as long as you don’t count law school), so…. [insert shrug emoji].
I wasn’t going to miss my chance to see Kashmir and I certainly did not feel bad about lying to Kellbell about it. She was a notorious worrier. This was probably just another one of her irrational fears. Plus, it would only be like the 1,278th time I had lied to her, so….[insert shrug emoji].
With the help of Iram, the only Indian law student working at the NGO with us that summer, Katie and I made our way to Manali and searched for a driver to take us across the famed Manali-Leh highway. The roadway was known to contain some of the most beautiful views in the world, and it did not disappoint. Though it did certainly terrify.
The road is hardly wide enough for a single car and yet trucks and buses sped past us, pushing our little taxi onto steep cliffsides. I have a distinct memory of looking down one such ravine and seeing a car in the bottom. It felt very possible that we would be next.
It’s a dirt road and even though we were taking it at a speed much faster than I was comfortable with, we didn’t make the first military checkpoint before the road was closed for the night at a town called Darcha. This meant that Katie and I had to stay the night in the back of a tea shop with an elderly woman who did not speak a lick of English. She was told we didn’t know Hindi but that didn’t stop her from chatting away at us, bobbing her head back and forth in that adorable way that Indians do when they talk.
The driver told us that he would be back in the morning to get us, probably around 9AM. I freaked out. We had a schedule to keep! We were supposed to be in Leh tonight, and if we got there tomorrow afternoon, we wouldn’t have as much time as I wanted to have in Leh and then we had to leave for our final stop, Srinagar (the capital of the Kashmir region), in order to catch the plane back to Delhi. For some fucked up reason, I decided that he needed to get us at 3AM when the road opened back up. And for some other unknown, but equally fucked reason, Katie didn’t stop me from making this ridiculous demand (this is all her fault).
The driver was pretty pissed though, and looking back on it, I don’t blame him. He tried to talk me out of this decision, saying that if we left at 3AM, we would get to the beautiful lake that sat along the road before the sun came up and we’d miss it. The lake was a destination all on its own. He insisted that we had to see it. This argument continued and it only made me sink my heels in deeper. Not being able to see passed my unmedicated anxiety, I told him “tough shit.” To this day, missing that lake is one of the biggest regrets of my life.
So no one stopped me and we made this terrible decision to get up at 3AM which got us into Leh with plenty of time to do all of the things on my list, but we were so tired that the minute Katie and I got into our room, we took a nap! What the fuck was I thinking. Honestly.
But Leh was incredible. Like the desert had a baby with the moon. It’s hard to describe. We toured around, saw a temple and found a young man to drive us to Srinagar the next night. All of the official buses and taxis to Srinagar were full. We didn’t know that they required advanced reservations (I had been in charge of all of this stuff and figured it would be fine to book when we got there, my bad). So the “driver” we found was just some Indian man who said he was going to Srinagar and that he’d take us. His fee made me want to scream, but we had to get to Srinagar to catch a flight so….[insert shrug emoji].
Not only was he charging us out the ass for the ride, but was this even safe? Not a licensed driver. No one knows where we’re at (it’s 2009, we didn’t have smart phones and we hadn’t posted anything on socials about where we were going because our parents had to be kept in the dark). What if we’re killed, either on purpose or by accident? Would someone tell my mother that she was right?! Also, she thinks I’m in Delhi so when they find my body in Kashmir, I’m gonna need someone to tell her I’m sorry (I’m not, but if someone could tell her that, that’d be great. The 1,279th lie?).
Pretty sure Katie and I spent dinner that night talking about how this was a terrible idea and we’d probably be sexually assaulted and dumped off a cliff, but then we laughed and drank more beer and forgot to be worried.
That next night, right before sunset, we met the driver on the side alley where he’d said he’d be and were so relieved to see that there were two other passengers: a young man and his baby boy. Katie leaned over and whispered to me, “thank god. A baby. I feel so much safer.” We truly did. A baby meant that these men weren’t weird or creepy and nothing nefarious would happen to us. I mean, who would murder two young girls with a baby in the car?!
With that, the five of us set off on our journey, which would take us about 12 hours, overnight through a mountain pass and down the other side to the capital of Srinagar. Another narrow dirt road, another bumpy, hair-raising ride. But remember, we’re safe because there is a baby with us.
About an hour into trip, the driver pulled over and the two men started speaking in animated Hindi, laughing and hugging across the center console. Then the man with the baby got out, and started walking away. With the baby. So, turns out, no baby. Our symbol of safety was unceremoniously carted off by his father, leaving Katie and I with some guy whose name we’d forgotten. Fuck us, right?
Katie and I exchange a worried glance but kept our mouths shut. The driver didn’t speak great English, but he knew enough to sell us the trip in his car, so we figured that our conversation wasn’t going to be private.
Somewhere along the way, I fell asleep and was awakened by the sound of the engine cutting out. The driver had pulled over on the side of the road and was motioning for Katie and I to get out of the car.
“Well, it was nice knowing you,” I said to Katie. Her eyes were wide.
“Where are we?” She asked. I had no clue. The driver had turned off the headlights and it was the darkest dark I had ever seen. It must have been a moonless night.
The driver was standing on the passenger side of the car, his face to the sky. In broken English, we gathered that he wanted us to look at the stars. So we did. And my god, they were spectacular. The most stars I had ever seen in all my life. More stars than I thought existed in the universe. My eyes had adjusted a bit and I could see him smiling at us. He had given us this gift - the stars in this vast expanse of sky - and the three of us stood there smiling and taking it in. I was certain in this moment that the driver wasn’t going to kill us. What a relief. Until…
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Followed by three quick flashes of orange light. I stumbled backward into Katie and we grabbed onto one another.
“What was that?!” I screamed at the driver.
The driver was still smiling and looked amused at our terror. His head bobbed back and forth (the beloved Indian head bobble) before he answered, “it’s just some bombs. We are about six miles from the Pakistan border and they bomb each other sometimes at night.”
Just. Some. Bombs.
We stood there, a strange collections of humans, on the side of a dirt road somewhere in Kashmir, and watched as Pakistan threw a few more bombs toward India, and then vice versa. It was so surreal that neither Katie and I said another word until the next morning.
At day break, we were out of the mountains and into a gorgeous green river valley. You could have told me we were in Plain, Washington and I’d have believed you. It looked so much like home. My hometown, Cashmere, was named by a Christian missionary who had traveled to India and the Kashmir region. He said the two areas looked alike, and named the town Cashmere in its honor. He was not wrong.
Srinagar turned out to be a beautiful, but scary place to visit. Men in Military fatigues roamed the streets armed with AK-47s and a bored look on their faces, as if in any moment they might just decide to have some fun with their very real gun. We also stood out a lot more in the capital than we had in the more touristy town of Leh. Two white American women, without a male chaperone, just there to see the sights. We felt like fresh meat and were both relieved to leave the beautiful city and its sparkling lake behind us.
Those few days traveling through Kashmir are some of my favorites. Katie and I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, and luckily, we got out of there with nothing more than memories.
When we got back to Delhi, I called my parents on Skype and told them that I’d just made it back from Kashmir. Kellbell and Scotty, like, totally freaked out at me [inset eye roll emoji]. “God damnit, Lindsey.” and “You promised me!” and “You lied to me!” and “What if you’d been killed? We wouldn’t have even know where you were!” Yeah, but like, it was fine, so…. [insert shrug emoji].
I guess the moral of the story is that your mother probably knows best but if you listen to her, you’ll miss out on life’s adventures. And we wouldn’t be difficult women if we did what we were told. What’s more fun than breaking the rules and pissing off your parents in the process?! When you’re in your 20’s: nothing. It’s pure bliss.
Stay difficult and remember to question authority.
🤷♀️
Insert shrug emoji…