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Overland: When the journey was the destination
We stood around a plaza in Delhi, India, near a post office or visa office, some sort of public building with space out front where young travelers gathered. The details blur. What remains in razor-sharp focus is how my eighteen-year-old self felt when I saw her; brutally smug.
She was probably in her early thirties an age I dismissed as too old to be wandering aimlessly around Asia like a lost flower child. She wore a long skirt, one of those woodblock print styles sold at street markets in India but also, by the mid-1970s, at every suburban mall. Stacks of silver bracelets clanked on her wrists. Around her neck hung several strings of glass beads. Her skin appeared sallow skin, her hair wild and in need of a wash. Young men far outnumbered women on the road, and she did not go unnoticed. I stood and watched her drift from one group to the next like a dandelion seed on a breeze. I couldn’t hear what she said, but I saw how each man shook his head no.
Was she asking for directions? For money? A few days earlier, a young German couple stopped my boyfriend and me with a sob story about needing a ticket home for a family emergency and we were pulling out cash when a passerby warned us they were known heroin addicts. The aging hippie chick had a similar gaunt, unkempt appearance. As she approached our huddle, I whispered to others that she…
