The Suitcase

When one spends a lot of time in an official role as a worker for God, one gets in the habit of accomplishing wonderful things and sometimes it is hard to know where to stop. I remember a suitcase…

It was the first time I had traveled in India. While we had been in the middle of our annual term of teaching ESL in Bangladesh, June and Dori, my very good friends, had convinced me to go with them to India at the end of the term. I went along for the ride, you might say. To be honest when they first proposed the trip, they didn’t make it sound very exciting.

Their opening line went something like this. “We want to visit that orphanage that Melvin Baugher told us about when he was here visiting. We’re really interested in seeing his work there in India.”

I know orphanages are exciting, and all of that, but, remember, we had spent a fair amount of time in a really poor country, and poverty was no longer a tourist attraction to us… but after that, they said, we would train across India. I imagined India was just a bigger version of Bangladesh, flat fields and hazy skies, and the travel did not appeal so much either. The fellowship of my friends did, however, and I said I would go along. It was all in good faith.

We promoted this “encouraging the believers” venture as a do-good trip, just so no one authoritative would squash it and none of our penny-pinching, pleasure avoiding consciences would squeak up. So… when this Melvin Baugher contacted Dori and requested that we bring some of the 101 Bible Story books and other literature that our teams stocked, what could we do but say yes?

The morning we left Bangladesh for India, I cut out of the apartment under desolate skies and dashed down the streets to the guest house where Dori and June had spent the night with their teaching team. I felt extremely light and free in the sort of fatigued way that you do after a quick, restless sleep and an interesting last week in the village. I was shouldering a backpack, and it wasn’t that heavy. Behind me, I had shed sixty pounds of offensive earthly goods into the open arms of my helpful team who were departing for North America that night.

Footloose and fancy free, I had reckoned without the books. Heavy, beautiful, shiny, hard-bound books… Seventy or a hundred or perhaps a thousand of them… Dori had packed a tattered Suitcase, no petite item, full of 101’s and SALT manuals for the orphans and other needy people.

Some of the remaining team rose to see us off, and one of the gentlemen obligingly said he would take the Suitcase down to the entrance for us. He lifted it… or tried to… grunted, paused… and then heaved the way you heave your bureau when you houseclean.

When he had staggered back up the stairs, he said to us, “Girls, God has a plan for that suitcase… God can take that thing, and the Word can go out. Let Him spread the books. There is no need for you to strain at the gills. Let that suitcase in God’s hands, right there on the street.” His gestures were distinctly evangelical, but we were stiff-necked etc., and heeded him not.

And so… we left for India while there was magic in the morning. June and I joined hands and dragged the Suitcase about ten feet. The wheels made one rotation and refused to budge evermore. Steve, a team leader who had come out to say good-bye, offered to ensure it got to the end of the street at least. He does landscaping for a living and is not a dramatic man, but when he stove it into the little CNG taxi, he looked his doubt.

When we reached the bus station, we were on own. Again, we joined hands and pulled. The Suitcase emerged grindingly from the CNG and thudded to street. There it stayed while we stood and looked at it. An energetic porter rushed over, and thus began the little ritual.

Everywhere we went, we were hailed with assistance. Apparently assuming we had over-packed a lot of heavy-duty cosmetics, one and all, bus boys and CNG drivers, rickshaw wallas, tea shop owners, and bystanders rushed to our aid, shouting to be allowed the privilege. After all we were foreign females, and the odds that we had ever done much work were visibly low.

We never argued. One and all, they bent to lift (no dragging for them), and as his hands slipped off the handles, our newest porter would eye the item as if it had been cemented to the street. Leaning into it again, he would grunt, his cheeks would bulge, he would blush fervently under his dark complexion, and slowly, slowly, it would swing upwards. One Hercules carried it on his head for a couple of minutes across railroad tracks and up an incline after two other porters had helped him saddle his skull while we trotted, breathless and amazed, in the wake of his steam.

Within ten minutes of leaving for India, Dori, June, and I were unequivocally sick of the thing. We tried abandoning the Suitcase in public places, hoping someone would take the hint and steal it… but Asia had a contrary streak of honesty that day. No one touched it.

Finally, at the Indian border crossing, we deposited it at a ticket counter and went off to swell our concave bellies with some rice at a friend’s house. When we came back, it was gone. We followed tracks in the dust for three and half feet at the end of which stood the Suitcase with a little Bengali keeled over beside it. (Okay, not really.)

Late in the evening, arriving in Calcutta among the bewildering flurry of Indian train stations, June and I were fresh again. Dragging the Suitcase, we hurtled across the platform, shoulder to shoulder, thankful for slick, concrete floors on which objects slid easily.

A skinny, little Indian man was coming the other way just as fast, and he tried to go around to the left by June, but there was a pillar. He bobbed to the right around me and there was a dumpster. He dove between us, met the Suitcase which was really traveling fast, all eight hundred and fifty-three pounds of it, and for three seconds, he back-pedaled frantically and then evaporated somewhere.

June and I laughed hysterically as girls do after a day on buses and trains and crossing borders dragging a Suitcase. The humor was a much-needed respite because as we entered the street beyond the train station, we encountered a huge market complex, swarming in the best Asian fashion. Emerging, gasping from a river of people the length of a warehouse, we located a taxi, and I crawled in beside the Suitcase flopped belly-up on the backseat and banged my forearm against the wheels.

“Ow.”

The wheels were smoking hot. I examined them. The wheels had overheated from the friction so much that they had melted into half-moons.

It wasn’t till the next day when we were eating lunch with the family that we had come to visit that we told them about the Suitcase. Local elections had made it dangerous to travel in the rural areas that day, and we had given up our plans to visit the orphanage and had been wandering around sight-seeing and shopping.

“Books!” said Melvin. “I forgot all about them… You mean you brought some?”

We exchanged glances. “Well, we did… bring some…”

He appeared perplexed. “What should I do with them now that we’re not going out to the orphanage? …I guess that was unnecessary effort…”

“Oh, you have no idea,” we said and told him all about the Suitcase. In fact, we elaborated until the tears rolled down our faces and our sides ached from the expended mirth.

The weight of that suitcase had taken on hyperbolic significance to us by that time, and we had built a sort of legend out of it. I figured we had exaggerated the story so much that by the time Melvin picked it up, he would be a little let down and say it wasn’t that bad after all.

He was let down. He was let down, in fact, nearly to the floor, and we watched the sequence of the Suitcase one final time.

He paused… heaved… and staggered out of the room. The Suitcase was gone from us forever, to live on in infamy in our memories.