Just a little over three years ago, I was chained to my desk at People magazine, working sixty-plus hour weeks. Yeah, I got to interview celebs and blah blah blah, but to me it was all just a day job. I was too wimpy to quit to pursue my real dream, filmmaking. And then I met Navdeep. A hardcore traveler who’d lived in China and backpacked overland through Tibet into India. An adventurer who scoffed at the idea of staying in one of the fancy pant palaces converted into hotels in Rajasthan (as my sister and I did on our trip there). He thought nothing of sleeping alone in a tent in the middle of God-knows-where in Mongolia. I didn’t know it then, but his free spirit (and indie travel bug) were about to rub off on me, big time. Now, at 30, I’m a fulltime freelance writer with all the instability that implies. Journalism, unfinished novels, screenplays gathering dust in a pile on my bookshelf.
I’m not sure exactly when the idea of a three-month long honeymoon jaunt in India started to percolate between us, but for the longest time I didn’t take it seriously. We both had strong roots in the country, but for me, a trip to India simply meant being shuffled from one relative’s house to the next in Delhi. Besides, who really quits their dayjob to pursue something as amorphous and unstable as writing fulltime—let alone pursuing the fantasy of filmmaking? Even with the clips from those glossy magazines everyone picks up at the newsstand, the decision was impractical at best. Besides, shouldn’t we be thinking about serious married-people things like health insurance and 401Ks?
But the idea just wouldn’t die.
