“It all stems from naivety,” Binta began. She said this was the scariest story of her life.
She was statuesque, “90 percent limbs.” Her accent marked her as a Londoner, a young doctor traveling with an old buddy from medical school, Kaveesh. They had come to snorkel with the sharks nearby. They and Allison and I sat in the dark outside our bungalow on the island of Caye Caulker off the coast of Belize, toes in the sand.
Moments earlier she had tried to start the story while we ate dinner on a dock, but a voice from the night whispered, “There’s a crocodile behind you,” and we scattered. Sure enough, under the light of our waiter’s cellphone, we saw two caiman’s eyes sticking up from the water. The island was fringed with mangroves and a jade sea and so small that you could walk its white sand breadth in two minutes and its length in twenty. You never would though, because signs everywhere said, “Go slow.”
When we sat down at our place, she said that her very first time traveling outside the UK was at age 22, alone. A friend canceled at the last minute and she decided to go forward anyway. Her plan was to take as much of the Orient Express as still existed, all the way to Cairo. She was so new to travel that on the trip she realized she had never even eaten in a restaurant alone and had no idea what to do with herself sitting there.
In Syria, a Japanese couple suggested visiting a monastery near Damascus, and she arranged with a bus driver to drop her off there, through the help of a bystander who translated the Arabic. Along the way, the driver asked for more money, they argued in hand gestures, and she got off. “I couldn’t understand, of course, but he must have been saying, ‘You’re crazy!’ It was just desert.” She walked for fifteen minutes. Then a motorcycle turned up.
“Again, no English, no Arabic. It was an old man, and I figured he was saying he could take me to the monastery. I thought, ‘He’s an old man. He must have a wife and kids. It must be fine.’” So she hopped on the back of his bike.
He took her directly to his house, which was a one room shack. “We got off the bike, went in, and he turns and locks the door.” Allison gasped. “And I’m like, ‘Oh great, this is where I’m gonna die.’” Binta paused, tapping the cap of her beer bottle on the picnic table.
She started telling the old man that she needed to go. In response, he kept showing her his watch and she didn’t know if he was saying he would take her in ten minutes or at 10:00 am. “Finally, he was like, ‘Come see my garden.’” We burst into nervous laughter.
“He had fresh tomatoes and cucumbers and started feeding me, telling me I was too skinny, literally trying to force feed me. And I’m thinking no one knows where I am. So when he took me to the garden, I said, ‘Ok, so nice to meet you, but I’m gonna go now.’”
She set down the bottle cap. “So that’s how I escaped from the old Syrian man who I don’t know whether he wanted to kill me or marry me.
“So you just left?” Allison asked.
“I ran.”
The next night Allison went snorkeling while I worked. She came back wide-eyed. She watched an octopus crawl over rocks and into the inky black at the edge of her flashlight’s reach. Then the guide said to turn the light off, and in the dark, she saw seafire. Bioluminescence.
