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  The globe-trotting, highly kinetic nature of the work also meant that childbearing was put off or skipped over entirely. Admittedly, I had started to question my life choices in this regard, especially as I began to notice the abundance of single, childless, fortysomething women in my profession, sometimes referred to as “humanitarian widows,” posted in countries like Syria and Afghanistan. Women who were much braver than I was, women who had taken on the riskiest of postings with gusto, for years on end, something I had not yet done and didn’t feel I had the nerves or constitution for. It required a hardiness I didn’t think I could muster. I had colleagues who had been doing that kind of work for decades, whereas I’d only worked on emergencies for a handful of years, dipping in and out of places. But staying on for years—that kind of job takes a real toll after a while. Being stationed in a “hardship duty station” like Kabul for a longer period entailed exhausting work, though there were usually some added perks—hazard pay and an unconventional, no-holds-barred extracurricular life that usually involved sex with rugged, heavily tattooed strangers, if that was your thing. I had decided not to do the long-term field postings, as I’d started to feel some internal anxiety about the whole child/relationship thing. I didn’t feel empty or as if anything was lacking until I reached a certain age. At that point, society at large had deemed me incomplete in the most subversive way. I was feeling the effects of subtle and antiquated but very real external forces, slowly changing social structures that continue to relegate a woman to spinsterhood if she doesn’t pair up on the same timeline as everyone else (or perhaps ever, for that matter). Facebook had begun to make me feel like I hadn’t followed the right script, the one that had been laid out for me as a woman, who also happened to be the daughter of a woman who came from a country that glorified marriage. I was thirty-two, and people my age were nesting. Babies were popping up in my newsfeed, whereas all I had to offer were shots of myself in distant lands poking my tanned and windblown head out of Range Rovers while careening down dirt roads (something that surprisingly never got tiring). Neither was better or worse, but babies. Babies smell good.

  But I couldn’t argue with Pramilla. Not then, not in that state. The generational divide was too titanic to cross, the cultural rift too taxing to navigate via Skype. Besides, considering my current circumstances, this could have been the last time I spoke to my mother—ever. What if our final conversation had been about something as absurd as my relationship status?

  The following day, I was whisked deep into the heart of war-torn Swat Valley in an armored vehicle to document the dire effects of rampant flooding across farming communities in the northern parts of Pakistan. There I videotaped crackly faced farmers planting the very seeds my employer had provided and captured their beaming smiles with my clunky Canon digital SLR. I later wove all the visual magic into success stories for the donor newsletter and the corporate website, with interview quotes wrangled only after my translator, Waleed, stopped flirting with me for thirty seconds and actually translated something. I became irritated at him and then smugly pointed to the hijab encasing my head (though not expertly secured, which meant it kept sliding off as I filmed). It was the garment that was supposed to transform me from an irresistible sex object into an untouchable, respectable woman. It pretty much said, Off limits, bucko, or at least it was meant to. I certainly wasn’t encouraging him. And yet later in the day, when I sat down with some Pashto-speaking women in their cool yurt, sipping cardamom chai offered to me with exquisite hospitality, Waleed surfaced wearing his toothy grin and bearing a question I did not want translated.

  He, along with the rest of the village, wanted to know if I was married. My relationship status was all anyone anywhere seemed to care about.

  Chapter 1

  ALLOWING

  Don’t stop at the tears; go through to truth.

  —Natalie Goldberg

  A single sweet truth: growing up, I had a lot of love in my life, so I didn’t need to look for it in the form of a boyfriend or relationship. From the get-go, I had that stable, loving male figure in the form of a very present father. My parents were the epitome of a devoted couple. They never argued or yelled, which meant home was a utopian safe space, barring my older brother’s tireless pranks involving hermit crabs, batteries, and small fires. Like most people, only in hindsight do I realize how lucky I was and how much of my youth was squandered on wanting to be older. Only later did I recognize the sumptuousness of my childhood, the wall-to-wall affection and solicitude from my parents that cordoned me off from the rest of the world. We lived in an eclectic East-meets-West household in suburban Washington, inside the beltway, a large house tucked at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac where children with braces scooted around on brand-new bicycles. “I want you two to have everything,” Pramilla would say when I asked her why she came home from the office late. My father worked for Singapore Airlines, which meant we sometimes traveled first-class free across the world—to India, to Singapore, to Hong Kong—but my mother was the breadwinner in our nuclear family, toiling away as the vice president of a defense-contracting company.

  As a child in what was then Bombay (now Mumbai), all my mother had in her possession was a single doll and a few starched gray uniforms, part of the mandatory dress code at the private Protestant school my grandmother sent her to. The Partition of India had forced my grandparents and entire extended Hindu family to flee their homeland over half a century ago with my infant mother and scant belongings in tow. In August 1947, India won independence from the British after nearly two hundred years of Britain asserting its iron will over the subcontinent.1 This was the result of a nationalist struggle lasting nearly three decades and the devastation of Britain’s economy, which could no longer afford to hold on to its overextended empire. The outcome was two independent nation states—Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan—resulting in one of the biggest forced migrations in human history with nearly fifteen million people violently displaced from their homes. My family never returned to their sprawling bungalow in Karachi, a city on the coastline of the Sindh province in the southern part of the country. The oil paintings of our ancestors were left dangling on the walls to be caked with dust or burned along with the Persian rugs, furniture, and whatever else was too large to shove into the cars—all left behind in haste when machete-wielding angry mobs stormed down their wide boulevard with blood dripping from their hands (at least, that’s the story I was told by my relatives who were old enough to remember it).

  We were opposites: my mother was a refugee as a child, whereas I was an overindulged American with too many Cabbage Patch dolls. I had security, both financial and emotional, which made me fearless. By the time I hit my late teens, I harbored the belief that I could do anything and the world would catch me with its cushiony tongue, like some sort of trampoline. I gorged myself on small adventures: skydiving, bungee jumping, body piercing, psychedelic mushrooms. But the high from these thrills was short lived. As my graduation from New York University approached, I was anxious about what my career would be, especially as I’d been attracted to theology and designed my own college major around spiritual studies. My dissertation was focused on the rising popularity of new-age figures like Deepak Chopra, who was becoming a big deal in the 1990s, a time when the self-help industry was coming into its own. I’d been taking a compendium of philosophy and spirituality courses, but how would any of that translate to an actual job? All I knew was that I wanted meaningful adventure where I would be giving to the world instead of just taking from it.

  Journalism seemed like the right path at first because it ticked the boxes: travel, adventure, gravitas. An internship at the BBC’s Washington Bureau kicked off my ephemeral career. There, I had the unglamorous role of lugging bulky noncompliant cameras and tripods around Capitol Hill. I freelanced at CNN on The Situation Room, where I handled the intellectually rigorous role of disseminating scripts, mic’ing up guests—everyone from political talking heads to the Polish pre
sident—and on unlucky days, undertaking the nerve-racking duty of working the teleprompter, the magical device that allowed Wolf Blitzer and other anchors to read a script while maintaining eye contact with viewers. Even though I wanted to be like Christiane Amanpour, there was a ton of dues-paying that needed to happen before I was rocketed to some war-torn land and stuck in front of a live camera. In the end, nothing about working in TV news felt right; an off-putting bitterness permeated the industry. I also hated being in the control room and hearing uncharitable comments from the burrito-glazed lips of producers directed toward unsuspecting correspondents, their faces freighted with makeup as they waited for the camera to pan to them for their segment. I knew my skin was too thin, that I would have been timid and self-conscious on air, fumbling for the right words, incapable of communicating to a live audience in coherent sentences. I was an introvert disguised as an extrovert: being on live television every day would have frayed my nerves.

  When I realized TV wasn’t the way forward for me, I turned to print media. For a brief period, I freelanced in the Condé Nast Building when it was in Times Square. I navigated the crisp halls of Glamour and Teen Vogue without any ease whatsoever, cowered from the editors and their blowouts as they sashayed by, and knew I was not remotely fashionable enough to exist in that world. I left when the emptiness around me made me feel like I was hollowing out.

  In desperate times, I did a handful of reporting assignments for financial news outlets—a subject I was totally unqualified to write about given my kindergarten-level grasp of anything related to finance. It also made me feel like I was treading the margins of some shadowy world. When I miraculously landed at National Geographic for a yearlong editorial stint, I thought it was the first step toward my new dream job of becoming a photojournalist, but quickly realized my role was entirely desk based and consisted of writing photo captions. I had a windowless office with a single overhead fluorescent light. I hammered away at my job until I found out that the traveling gigs were for veterans and I’d have to put in some serious time—like a decade—before I saw an African savanna or a melting iceberg. I was an idealist in my twenties; what I really wanted was to be in the world, active in it, not to read about it passively, not to be inside an office withering away when I had much to offer—or so I thought.

  In between journalism jobs, I floated. I started an MFA in creative writing in LA before realizing I was too inexperienced to write anything poignant. I moved to San Francisco to work at a start-up just when the internet bubble burst. I went to India and studied Hindi. I was a paralegal for the US government for four drawn-out months with big plans to become a human-rights lawyer, but quit once I realized (after perusing a colossal book entitled LSAT for Dummies) that trying to pass the Law School Admission Test, and the eventual bar exam, would be a joyless endeavor.

  I was restless and itinerant—that’s for sure. My free spirit thrived on constant change, was addicted to not knowing what was next (it was more exciting than committing to one thing for a potentially interminable time frame). Every time I left a job that I could have stayed at, I felt tsunami-sized ripples of anxiety at the thought of being unemployed forever, but in the instances when I didn’t have something already lined up or cooking, it felt as if I had to leave in order to figure out what I wanted next.

  I later realized the discomfort many of us feel when we are in between places is actually the most fertile ground. Those unchartered interludes when I felt lost and insecure were when I grew and expanded the most (sadly, you don’t grow in the same way when you’re happy or insouciant).

  During this time, I had a few overlapping relationships with men who were older than me. It began with an off-and-on, long-distance relationship with my first-everything—a soulful thirty-year-old British surfer named James, a fellow free spirit. I’d been interning for a music festival one summer in Paris as part of a yearlong study-abroad program. A break-in at my apartment in Le Marais caused me to move out, break up with my not-serious French boyfriend, and backpack south through the deepest parts of Spain and Portugal. I met James in the Algarve. He lived near Oxford where he was an electrician by trade and the lead singer in a popular local rock-and-roll cover band. He had come to Lagos on a surfing trip with his friends. We fell madly in love on a beach, and I gave him my virginity in Paris weeks later in the middle of a star-spangled summer night with la tour Eiffel in the background. We stretched out our unconventional relationship for three years and met up in different parts of the world—London, New York, Baja, Mexico, Los Angeles, Verbier, the Florida Keys, Biarritz, and San Francisco—sometimes for weeks at a time. Our relationship ended, ironically, on Valentine’s Day in Paris, when I realized I had outgrown him, or us, and I couldn’t pretend anymore. He spent the whole night curled up in a ball on the floor crying, and even though I still feel guilty about the way things ended, I knew I had to live honestly, even back then. Another Englishman came into my life for a period of three years, a divorced advertising executive fifteen years my senior, whom I met while temping in San Francisco. Ashley was sexy and smart, loved dogs, and had a taste for the finer things in life. That relationship eventually ended, however, because he was cold and standoffish, which I later realized were symptoms of being afraid of emotional intimacy; besides, at twenty-five, I still had a bad case of wanderlust that precluded me from settling down. There was also a fling with an eligible bachelor in Mumbai that comfortably transitioned into an enduring friendship. And there was Niall, a rugged, poetic, old-souled Irishman I’d met in New York. He was a twenty-nine-year-old certified public accountant and part-time rugby player I’d met through a friend, and the one person who could look at me and see the whole of me, even when I could not, who knew who I was before I did. But at the time, I wasn’t looking for that; I wanted to go off deep into the belly of the world instead. I was too young to appreciate when a person could see more of myself than I could, who loved me without overquestioning or overcomplicating things or fearing my free spirit. It was a rare, pure, grounded kind of love that wasn’t imprisoned by expectations.

  No doubt, beyond travel, beyond romance, I was also searching for something greater—a sense of purpose, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing exactly. I was equipped only with a vague sense of the direction I was going in and that it would involve writing in some capacity, the only thing that came relatively easily to me besides sleeping.

  In retrospect, being a refugee’s daughter had instilled some things in me: a deep connection to others facing hardships comparable to the one my mother’s family went through, and a feeling of having to do something with the education I’d been given, the relative life of privilege I was born into. Even though she had no firsthand memories of fleeing the newly created Pakistan because she was only a baby at the time, the story of my family’s sudden departure was repeatedly told to me by her older siblings—one of her older brothers and my beloved late aunt Devi, whom I lived with in Mumbai after college—and it had a haunting effect.

  Also, I had been exposed to poverty at a young age, not as a victim but as an involuntary bystander during my childhood trips to India, a country where destitution goes largely unconcealed and is often more conspicuous than in other parts of the world. I remember wondering why people were living in the alley behind our apartment in Mumbai—half-clothed families sleeping, bathing, and eating on the street in squalor—and why we could see them doing all of these intimate activities from our balcony. As my brother devilishly pelted pomegranate seeds at any pedestrian who had the misfortune of walking underneath us, I was uncomfortable with the disparity I was witnessing, even though I obviously didn’t understand any of it back then.

  As nonsensical as it sounds, in the years after college, I’d reached a point in life where I was trying to step out of privilege and into suffering. While suffering does not discriminate based on socioeconomic status, I knew that I’d never really experienced deep suffering in my life, that I was too protected in my upper-middle-class b
ubble. It was almost as if some part of me craved, or needed, the entire human experience in order to feel complete. I wasn’t looking for something as simple as love and a happy marriage—those things were too benign. In a way, I felt undeserving of them because I had already been given more than my fair share of fortune, and deep down I knew they wouldn’t complete me in the way I wanted to be completed; they wouldn’t round me out with the experience I needed to grow. For reasons beyond intellect, I needed to suffer and then, eventually, hopefully, make sense of it all. Or at least try to.

  Eventually I was drawn toward humanitarian work. The United Nations soon rose to the top of my list of places to work, and I needed more qualifications to get a job there, so I moved to London where I got a master’s degree from the London School of Economics (LSE). While Pramilla wanted me to focus on finding an eligible partner in grad school (LSE, attended by the sons of dignitaries and the well-to-do from all over the world, could be viewed as prime hunting ground for women who were ambitious that way, which I was not), I rebelled by dating a self-described entrepreneur who didn’t go to LSE, an English guy from Essex—someone who was sharp yet mysterious in a sexy-dangerous way. I was pretty sure he worked for British intelligence. My parents met him when they came to visit and were not impressed, with Pramilla remarking after one particular dinner that he was “a master of fiction.” In any case, that relationship fizzled out when I left London and tried to get a job at the UN in New York, which involved many failed attempts in spite of industrious networking, a bit of social capital, and a (quintessentially American) belief that if you want something badly enough, you will get it if you persist, especially if you come from the privileged place of having an expensive degree. I eventually made my way into the World Bank in Washington, DC, as a consultant and finagled an assignment that sent me to Lima. A couple of years later, I leveraged my experience in Peru to get a job in Rome at the UN. In Italy, I was a spokesperson liaising with the media against the backdrop of the deepening economic crisis of 2008, which meant the cost of food in many countries had skyrocketed and pushed the total number of hungry people in the world to over a billion. Angry mobs were rioting, looting bakeries and food trucks from Haiti to Bangladesh. It was a global crisis. I hit the ground running, challenged on every single front—intellectual, emotional, physical, and even spiritual.