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  PRAISE FOR MAN FAST

  “Natasha Scripture’s quest for independence and self-definition in the face of pressure to conform to traditional ideas of femininity will be familiar to women everywhere. Presented with brutally honest and wry insight, Man Fast will provoke readers to rethink their choices in the best possible ways.”

  —Soraya Chemaly, award-winning writer, media critic, and activist

  “A gorgeous testament to the pure power of slowing down and going deeper. Natasha Scripture has learned the divine order of manifesting: first we attune, then we attain.”

  —Danielle LaPorte, creator of The Desire Map book and planners

  “A funny, courageous, and inspiring memoir about one woman’s journey into the unknown. Scripture shows us her unraveling against the backdrop of exotic landscapes and emerges from her grief-stricken journey with a new sense of purpose and a deeper understanding of love. It becomes impossible not to root for her.”

  —Elisabeth Eaves, author of Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents

  “I was immediately absorbed by this raw, self-aware and humorous book. Natasha Scripture takes us on an emotionally charged journey, and leaves us with a greater understanding of ourselves and the world. Man Fast is a book for anyone who has worked through unmanageable grief and come out the other end.”

  —Jessica Alexander, author of Chasing Chaos: My Decade in and out of Humanitarian Aid

  “Smart, searching, and soulful, Natasha Scripture’s Man Fast is an absorbing read for any woman thinking about a change of place, or heart. Exhausted and overwhelmed by her gut-wrenching work as a humanitarian aid worker in the most devastated places in the world—not to mention everyone’s expectations that she get married and have a kid already—Natasha takes a sabbatical, and a break from men. Her travels span many exotic countries—India, Tanzania, Italy—as she searches to find herself at home and at peace with herself. She’s an engaging guide for a spirited and spiritual journey.”

  —Laura Fraser, New York Times bestselling author of An Italian Affair and All Over the Map

  “Contemporary, lyrical, funny, inspirational, sometimes painful, and always intellectually rigorous. This beautifully written book demonstrates the emotional complexities and struggles facing many modern women today, while also underscoring how women are exercising agency and continuing the solid fight against stereotypes and gender prescriptions. Natasha lends a fresh voice to the inventory of emerging feminist authors.”

  —Meghna Pant, author of One and a Half Wife, Happy Birthday!, and The Trouble with Women

  “Natasha Scripture takes us on a heartfelt quest to explore the meaning of love, in all its multi-armed wisdom and splendor. Her travels are varied and intense, but more so, her internal journey—circling around the world to find the truths within herself. Beautiful, honest, vulnerable, and compelling, Man Fast is a spiritual travel memoir for anyone who has chased after success and wondered if perhaps there was more to life and living.”

  —Lavanya Sankaran, bestselling author of The Red Carpet and The Hope Factory

  “Utterly captivating! In her thirtysomething years on this planet, Natasha Scripture has lived many lifetimes—all of them juicy. As an international aid worker in some of the most devastated regions, Natasha shares highlights of a journey that sent her swinging between the upper limbs of adrenaline and compassion and descending into the sacred depths of grief and self-inquiry. A vital aspect of her self-directed vision quest was the practice of letting go of the search for conventional partnership in favor of fully showing up for her own true self. Smart, funny, and deeply wise.”

  —Mirabai Starr, author of God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and Caravan of No Despair: A Memoir of Loss and Transformation

  “Eat Pray Love reimagined for a spiritually seeking millennial audience. Important, resonant and touching on a woman’s essential journey.”

  —Eleanor Mills, editorial director of the Sunday Times

  “We all want to be part of a bigger story, something beyond ourselves that allows us to serve the world while finding personal fulfillment and a sense of wholeness and well-being. Natasha’s journey shows us how we can ultimately transcend the idea of wanting to give or receive love—to learn how to actually become love itself, to tap into a deeper wellspring of the love, wholeness and beauty that ultimately lives within, which connects us with the rest of existence. Written with authenticity, boldness, and vulnerability, this is a remarkable story of a truly remarkable journey within, of returning home to one’s own self. A powerful, poignant read.”

  —Ananta Ripa Ajmera, author of The Ayurveda Way: 108 Practices from the World’s Oldest Healing System for Better Sleep, Less Stress, Optimal Digestion, and More

  “Scripture reminds us of the secret we can’t be told, the one we have to experience in order to know; that love cannot be found in any single sacred text or in any far-off temple dripping in gold. The love we seek and eventually find is the love we start with, that’s left unnoticed in our own heart. Man Fast is a must for any woman ready to find not just love but the source of love itself.”

  —Meggan Watterson, author of REVEAL and How to Love Yourself

  “Natasha Scripture’s Man Fast is as well-written and deeply felt as one could hope for in such a memoir. It digs deep and inspires me to do my own intensive spiritual work.”

  —Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, New York Times bestselling author of Seinfeldia and Sex and the City and Us

  “An engaging memoir with life lessons all along the way. Natasha is a great writer, and this is the kind of book you may find yourself staying up to read long into the night.”

  —Sharon Salzberg, author of Real Love

  “Man Fast is a delight: honest and funny, truth-telling and wise. And it’s a salve and a guide for any of us who are questioning who, how, and when to date or marry. Scripture reminds us that it’s simple: look inward and you will find what you need.”

  —Elizabeth Flock, author of The Heart Is a Shifting Sea: Love and Marriage in Mumbai

  Text copyright © 2019 by Natasha Scripture

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Piatkus

  ISBN-13: 9781542091183 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542091187 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542091190 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542091195 (paperback)

  Cover design by Adil Dara

  First US edition

  In loving memory of Mark Rowland Scripture

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  You must give . . .

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’

  —Wisława Szymborska

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have relied upon my memory of these events from this time of my life to the best of my abilities. However, I have changed the names of some places, and the names and identifying details of many individuals to protect their privacy.

  Prologue

  “Any cute boys?”

  It was midnight in Pakistan. My
sixty-four-year-old Indian mother was at the other end of a choppy Skype call some seven thousand miles away in a cushy suburban enclave of Washington, DC, doing her usual interrogation around my love life. She was wearing her favorite paisley kaftan, drinking orange Gatorade out of a Redskins glass, and reclining on the living room sofa with Law & Order on in the background. Her cozy setup seemed a far cry from my own precarious situation as I suffered through a bout of dysentery made worse by a nonresponsive air conditioner, evidently only placed in my tiny, airless room for aesthetic purposes; the mushroom-colored machinery perched lifelessly above my bed almost in derision. These two happenstances had the combined and unwanted effect of making me lose what seemed like half my body weight in sweat even as I raced to catch up by chugging what some might consider an alarming quantity of water. At the same time, CNN International was airing breaking news about a kooky American pastor in Florida threatening to ignite a bunch of Qurans. Not the best time to hold an American passport in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. As I considered my circumstances, I felt a nostalgia for the days at Glamour magazine in New York, when I was a freelance fact-checker and the biggest threat to my existence was getting busted pilfering cosmetics from the beauty closet.

  But that was at least eight lives ago.

  The year was 2010. I’d been dispatched to Pakistan as an emergency spokesperson for one of the United Nations agencies after heavy monsoon rains caused floods that ravaged swaths of the country and uprooted millions of people. As is standard on these types of assignments, my job was to work the communications front lines: answer questions at press conferences, fly around on deafening military helicopters with story-chasing journalists and deep-pocketed donors documenting the delivery of supplies, traipse across flood-gouged areas to take photographs of the wreckage for use in digital fund-raising campaigns, and churn out press releases to raise awareness of the lack of basic necessities—water, shelter, food—and the money required to pay for them.

  The needs always outweighed the available resources, at least at the beginning of any humanitarian disaster, so everything was always harried, tinged with desperation. An aid worker’s body carries a certain angst, too, a heightened anxiety folded into its bones, but I was accustomed to skidding into survival mode, able to function all day on nothing but the ever-reliable supply of Pringles, lukewarm Fanta, and cigarettes to quash the hunger that rose at the most inopportune moments. Yes, the human body is incredibly resilient and adaptable—at least mine proved to be. While I never felt prepared enough, somehow I moved through the intermittent showerless, foodless situations as if they were my new normalcy, which they were for a while. This did not come naturally but rather was a useful skill I’d picked up months prior when a huge earthquake rocked Haiti and I was deployed to Port-au-Prince for several sleepless weeks with thousands of other aid workers and journalists (followed by an entourage of celebrities and donors). That was the job: gritty, unpredictable, intense. But it was worth it. At the time, it felt like the most meaningful way to spend my days.

  Yet in Pakistan there was an uneasy feeling I couldn’t shake. I was technically in my mother’s birthplace, where my ancestors had lived for centuries, which meant I thought I would feel at home, like I was returning to my roots.

  But no.

  The anxiety I felt was likely due to the bomb blast. We lost five colleagues when our Islamabad office was the target of a suicide-bomb attack the previous year. While I hadn’t known any of the victims personally, when it happened I was assigned the grim task of writing the press statement from headquarters, which made it feel more real than it would have otherwise felt—two degrees of separation from death, or maybe even one degree? The idea that this could happen to people who shared the same email server on which I fired out hundreds of emails across the world from my BlackBerry daily had a disquieting effect, even though I was safely lodged in Rome at the time. We’d since moved to a squeaky-new building in the Diplomatic Enclave where austere-looking security guards sporting spiky facial hair routinely waved metal detectors under our vehicles. We used our fingerprints to enter the building after proceeding through airport-like security and pat-downs, but there was still the underlying sense that danger was lurking, even in a city as subdued as Islamabad.

  Fortunately, the basement bar of the Marriott hotel helped take the edge off. It was one of the spots where non-Muslims could legally drink without a special license. A jumble of aid workers convened there on buttery August evenings for alcoholic beverages alongside the hotel’s usual suspects, mostly foreign businessmen. The liquor was numbing and helped burn down frustration, apprehension, and any general malaise. We all drank way too much, generally, in this line of work. I definitely did, though I am not sure why (fear? habit? thirst?). On the nights I abstained from Johnnie Walker Black, however, I was back in my room in a nondescript guesthouse, which I’d been placed in for security reasons. I could never really remember where it was located, because every day, the van that picked me up would take a different route to the office, just to be safe, and would also come to take me and my colleagues home at different hours so that our schedule was not predictable to whoever might have unfriendly intentions toward unsuspecting foreigners. While I appreciated the extra caution, it was all pretty disorienting, and the only thing that grounded me was Skyping with my parents at night to let them know that I was safe, even though I couldn’t be sure that I was. With the shudder of each vehicle outside my guesthouse, the whole place quivered, its foundations seemingly as weak as a stack of graham crackers. This would invariably cause several geckos to dart across the cracked ceiling, where a dust-coated fan cranked in lethargic circles, drowning out Christiane Amanpour’s voice in the background.

  “Tashie?”

  “I’m here, Mom.”

  I knew what she’d say next. It was just a matter of time before she mentioned his name, but it always came up.

  “I just don’t know why you can’t meet a nice guy like Federer.” She sighed.

  And there it was. Through no fault of her own, my mother, Pramilla, lives in an imaginary world where handsome celebrity tennis stars are easy to come by or in a Nora Ephron movie where good-looking people bump into each other at the tops of skyscrapers or in bars when they’re least expecting it. That had actually been her reality. She never searched or dolled up for hundreds of awkward dates with virtual strangers; instead, she chanced upon a fine-looking Yankee in a now-shuttered DC lounge called The Cave, on Valentine’s Day, of all days, when she was only twenty-four—a freshly minted immigrant to the US. My parents fell madly in love and became one of the first generations to intermarry, in spite of the fact that they lived at a time where diners in places as close by as Virginia refused to serve my mother because of her skin color.

  Their love story was, in a word, storybook.

  My path, however, had been more of a zigzag. Not one big story but rather hundreds of nonsensical romantic threads that led nowhere except to greater self-reliance (which of course is nothing to sniff at). In any case, the likelihood of me encountering a Swiss tennis star, or anyone remotely like that, where I was headed the next morning—a former Taliban stronghold, the very place where Malala was shot in the head by a gunman two years later—was kind of slim.

  The charismatic, menthol-cigarette-wielding woman who birthed me in the latter part of the twentieth century only wanted to see me “settled” and happy (preferably to a kind, sporty multimillionaire who never seemed to tire of procreating). I get it, as antiquated as it is. Parents of that era, especially the immigrant ones, still want their daughters espoused, for protection, security, and companionship. Yet her obsession with Roger Federer had created tension between us as she compared every potential love interest I had to him. Put simply: nobody made the cut with the bar so high.

  Clearly the stars align on the romance front for some; others have to slog their way through a bunch of misfits and hope that the person who makes sense, who feels right, will eventually emerge (someth
ing that has become, ironically, notoriously difficult with the advent of dating apps and the proliferation of choice). Like any other woman who grew up on a gargantuan, nonpaleo diet of rom-coms, which included both Hollywood and Bollywood, I assumed everlasting romantic love would find me eventually. Reaping the benefits of feminist inroads from generations past, economically I didn’t actually need a partner, and like many women, I had an emotionally rich life already, with deep friendships and healthy relationships with my own family and with colleagues who’d become like family (there’s loads of bonding among expats, especially among the aid-worker crowd). Pramilla, on the other hand, had strong, unsolicited opinions on the subject. “South Asian men have unreasonable expectations of their wives,” she chimed into the silence, as if she had experience being married to one. As if at that very moment, in that hot, dreary guesthouse amid the crumpled packets of rehydration salts, I was considering a marriage proposal from one. I was too preoccupied to explain to her, for the umpteenth time, that it was nearly impossible to find a husband while doing short-term stints in refugee camps, war zones, and natural-disaster areas, and that I wasn’t looking for one anyway!

  There were always men, of course—Norwegian water-sanitation experts, Italian logistics officers, Kiwi photojournalists—but the kinds of romantic trysts that transpired in these environments were often as short lived as the postings themselves. These men were often married, or in open relationships, or vagabond James Bond types always after the next fix, kind of like I was. We were already married—to adrenaline. We were seeking momentary connection, but not much beyond that.

  That’s a result of all the transience and instability that comes with being an aid worker (or working in any industry that demands near-constant uprooting)—relationships tend to fall by the wayside. At the time, it hadn’t felt like a sacrifice, because the work itself was electrifying. It had an addictive quality that deluded those of us who did it into thinking we were saviors of some sort. As if we were actually saving the world. In a way, some of us probably did it, at least in part, out of self-interest, because it made us feel good and important. Not that we didn’t care—we definitely cared—but many of us were also trying to escape something: a pedestrian life, our own stuff, stillness. I didn’t realize this then, but that is what people do and why some lives are bursting with chaos and distraction. We are uncomfortable with how naked stillness makes us feel. Instead of slowing down to look inward, where all the real work casually waits to be done, it is much easier, much safer, to run away from quiet.