Acacia: Acacia

Chapter 3: Valedictory voyage

- 17 - “Want to go see theTaj Mahal?” A classic opening line! Three weeks after graduation, back home in New Haven, when I was starting to miss Tony so much my body was retaliating physically to his absence, he called. “Tony!” I bubbled with unchecked enthusiasm at the sound of his voice. The way we had parted had been wrong on so many levels. Surely we could do better than that. Something about the wayTony and I were at graduation had convinced his father that I had no aspirations of becoming anAntonio wife. Needless to say, the revelation made him infinitely more congenial about our relationship. So genuine and complete was his father’s transformation, in fact, that on seeing how disheartenedTony was after he moved home for the summer, he offered to finance a holiday for the two of us anywhere in the world.A cure forTony’s melancholy camouflaged as a last hurrah before medical school took over our lives. I had always wanted to see theTaj.Taking over twenty years to complete, the mausoleum built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their fourteenth child, is an iconic tribute to love and loss, separation and sorrow.Tony could not have picked a more relatable destination for our valedictory voyage. Though we only had two fixed destinations, theTaj and the GreatWall, - 18 we drifted around South East Asia for weeks.With only our backpacks for luggage, we took our time, staying in lodges and cheap motels, and choosing to traverse vast territories by bus, or train, and even rickshaw as much as possible. How strange we must have looked, the pair of us. I was connecting with my inner rock star with long twisted braids and red highlights.And in a bold and flabbergasting move,Tony had traded his unbending Polocatalogue veneer for a buzz cut and three-day stubble.The scruffy G.I.Joe look made me see him in a whole new light. I must admit, it was quite a view! This was not exactly whatTony’s father had in mind when he had made his offer. I’m sure he was thinking more along the lines of hotels with maids and room service, guided tours of Italy and Greece, and of course, mandatory visits to the family’s European relatives. But it was our trip. We did it our way.And we loved it. I wondered if Tony was finally going to “declare himself” to me while we were on our travels.Away from home, in an exotic and stirring land, perhaps he would be imbued with a foreign bravery to ask me to be his. So it was that, as elated as I was to be with him again, I embarked on our expedition with a shield of apprehension around me, dreading the moment that I figured was inevitable. I had a perplexing power over Tony, a power that I did not want. He yielded to me so readily that sometimes I doubted if I knew,or could ever know, who he really was. He only suggested travelling to Asia because he knew how much I wanted to see the Taj. Nikolas Antonio was way too pernickety to genuinely enjoy squalid accommodations and mystery meats. But that was how I wanted to experience China and India. So he did it. For me. Tony would have done anything for me, but instead of melting in his arms, all I wanted was to escape. He could not persuade my heart, and becauseofthat,Icouldnotrespecthimasaman,lovehimasaman,instead of only as a brother.What is love without respect?Without a healthy dose of awe and magic? I was young and stupid and craved excitement. His - 19 worth was wasted on me. Odd as it sounds, I would have readily sacrificed my life forTony’s, and yet I could not offer him my heart. It breached the bounds of sense and reason, but I was sure that I could not be his in the way he longed for me to be. I could not confine the many passions that raged within me to the temperate boundaries of his conservative heart. On our expedition, I remember I spent a lot of time thinking about my grandmother. Mbuya, as I called her in Shona, came from Zimbabwe to live with us in Connecticut when I was two years old. My grandfather...