We hadn't heard from Lisa Ray for a few days, and when she didn't respond to Hanan's insistent messages, it was time for me to send a one line email from India. 'Are you on the roof?'
'No,' came the response. 'I guess I'm in the basement, since everything's upside down here.'
'Where?'
'South America.'
As you can tell, Lisa and I often email as if we're telegraphing each other in 1929 and every word costs a fortune which irritates Hanan as it leaves her without the detail she likes. What she had gleaned is that Lisa had decided to fly down to Buenos Aires when Dr Kattan had instructed her not to, and that meant that Hanan was now on the roof, and not in a good way. To calm her down I bundled her onto a TED bus to visit a Tibetan Buddhist monastery outside Mysore. What could be more calming than a long drive towards 700 chanting men in robes, right? Well, the first person we met on the bus was a charming woman. She asked where Hanan was from.
'I'm Palestinian,' Hanan replied.
'Really?' she responded, excited. 'I'm Israeli!'
I considered throwing us both out of the window before another Middle East conflagration engulfed us all, but our new friend was charming and open-minded, and she and Hanan spent the three hour round trip banging out a new peace process. We took a well-earned break to see men in saffron dresses, and we took photos with the monks and then got our karmic payback when an enormous family of Indians crowded around us to take a photo with me and Hanan. We were in quite a rural area and I somehow doubted they were 'I Can't Think Straight' fans. Actually, I think they just wanted to take a picture with the weird-looking Indian girl.
Back at TED, Hanan was noticing that we were sharing a campus (Infosys) with 10,000 young Indians, 5000 of them good-looking young Indian women, who all looked better in a shalwaar kameez than me. She also revelled in the lunches and dinners, all with plenty of Indian food (although, I suppose in India, it's just 'food') and asked me why, when I loved cooking, I couldn't cook much Indian food. I was sensing a theme here, a delicate comparison for her Indian-heritaged wife to the true Indian women here, and I wasn't coming out well...Luckily, we were taken off the Infosys campus for dinner, which made everyone happy, as the campus is very beautiful but very dry, and I don't mean it lacks rainfall. A long-awaited glass of wine in the lush garden of a beautifully lit palace hotel, while the South Indian rain poured down was a stunning sight. And the people we met were quite something. From the man who invented a needle that self-destructs after one use (saving 300,000 Indian kids from death by infection every year), to His Holiness the 17th Karmapa (a young 2nd in command to the Dalai Lama, who Hanan marched up to and shook hands to his glee and to the consternation of his Tibetan entourage), to an indomitable Indian grandmother in a sari who belts out Gershwin standards like Ethel Merman - it's an extraordinary mix of people who are all passionate about what they do. As everyone was roused to clap along and dance I realised that, apart from lacking the ability to wear a sari, and cook a good daal, I was also possibly the only person of Indian descent who has no sense of rhythm whatsoever. By contrast, I was married to the only Arab woman who could do a decent impression of Aishwarya Rai tossing her hair and dancing around to Bollywood beats. Seriously. I am jet-lagged, surrounded by non-Indians dancing to Bollywood choreography, meeting monks, Swamis, and tech geniuses, listening to the most intense lectures, eating four plates of daal a day on an alcohol-free campus and Lisa is in the basement in South America. If this is how it feels to be sober, will someone please send me a bottle of Bordeaux?!