This is what it means to be an adventurer in our day: to give up creature comforts of the mind, to realize possibilities of imagination.
—Hib and Kika, Off the Map
Creature comforts of the mind…those things that keep you from just walking out the door, locking it, and throwing the key into the gutter where you know you’ll never find it. Where you know some child who is watching you from behind the trash heap will scramble down and retrieve it. Where you know he will wait, consult with his pack, and then in the silencing heat of early afternoon, when the housewives of this quiet street are cooling in their sweatdamp beds, or steaming cool water off their arms hanging laundry in the back courtyards, he will bring his streetmates and enter, picking carefully through at first for valuables, then, finding them all there, left behind as if gifted to him (and they were, yes?) a rapturous frenzy of collecting everything, not just the gold ring that your grandmother gave you and the dollars you kept in case and the kitchen appliances you bought when you first moved in, but every little thing, a treasure to him, a meal he may have tomorrow or next week. Your clothes, your suitcase, your mosquito coils and the anti-malarial pills that make you queasy.
You imagine his delight and it fills your soul as you walk neighborhood to neighborhood, onto streets you’ve never seen until you know you cannot find your way back even if you try. But instead, you make up rhymes with the signs you see, and wonder why the signs are there and what they are telling you. You let the sari trail behind you, you will give yourself to whatever comes, it will be your gift to a god whose name you do not know, but who, as you walk away, you feel filling you step by step, until there is nothing left but freedom….
