After the hugging and crying were mostly done and just before I had to board, my father had approached me with the familiar long suffering look of patience, mixed in with a heavy dose of dubious hesitation. “Alka, this is your passport. Keep it safely, and hand it to U when you get there, immediately!” He waited for me to nod, and carefully tuck it into the pocket specifically designated for Important Documents in my new Married Woman Leather Purse. I followed his instructions with appropriate seriousness because I knew any lack of respect for the occasion would just add to his conviction that despite being qualified to perform abdominal surgery on patients and get married, I was still a careless brat who had filled his third best ink pen with lemon juice to experiment with invisible ink. And what I had done to the stereo was best left to the imagination.

I have made several journeys alone since then, but always with someone at the airport on either side, carefully printed copies of itineraries in sensible hands, clear research and purpose behind the trips, and very often, soon after landing, my passport tucked away by more “responsible” hands. I was the one with playdough, coloring books, slinkies, snacks, day by day itineraries detailing carefully planned lists designed to accommodate my early morning starts (yes, my poor children would have to wake up and get going by nine latest, usually to a museum because I found it easiest to zombie lead them at that time).

Three years ago, in one of my fits of interesting myself in the kids’ homework, I had picked up an English comprehension passage about the Second World War. It described the battle of Iwo Jima, and I remember I had shaken my head at the level of detail in that passage. The number of American casualties and the strategic significance of that battle was something completely new to me, our Indian version of events had not really dealt with such minutiae, more important events of local history overshadowing what was happening on tiny islands in the Pacific. So this was where Iwo Jima was, a tiny dot in the vast darkness of the ocean, where people had desperately fought, valiantly defended the honor of their country only to add to the cost benefit argument for the use of the atomic bomb. As the daughter of an Air Force officer, I have a peculiar relationship with politics, somehow knowing the soldiers and generals as people, uncles who joked with me, and cousins who teased me, this personalization makes the political motivations for war somehow monstrous. Would I, could I, fight for the “honor” or “defense” of my country knowing most such conflicts have cost benefit analysis sheets with detailed collateral damage listings?

I love to wander because I read. Because someone just like me was there, with a belief and faith in something that was then so important to preserve and defend. And in valiant courage, one can often see desperate need to validate one’s life, to be somehow important, to matter, the haunted eyes that hold the knowledge that it was necessary to vehemently insist on one version of truth and vilify every other, or else this is all just ephemera.

So with my passport in my backpack (I think, I’m not going to check, I know I must have kept it safely), I peer into the darkness below to identify Iwo Jima and Okinawa. To courageous stands on tiny islands, which often come back to bite us.

-alka