Here’s a holiday reprint for your enjoyment and edification!

On one of the strangest Christmases I have ever spent, when I was all alone on the island of Penang in Malaysia, I received an unusual but intensely valuable gift: a clue that led me toward my destiny.

This was during the period of my life when I lived and traveled overseas for thirty-five years. I had been living in Nepal, had met a woman from New Zealand, and had gone with her to her home country. When we broke up, I flew back to my home town of Seattle via Los Angeles (where I briefly visited another ex-girlfriend). After an interlude with my family in Seattle and a brief flurry of work to raise landing funds, I was ready to be off again. My mother worked for Pan Am Airways and was able to obtain tickets for me at ten percent of cost, so I flew from Seattle to San Francisco to Hong Kong to Jakarta. In Indonesia I joined an Australian friend on a road trip across the island of Java to Bali. When I returned to Jakarta, I flew to Singapore, and after spending a few days in that idiosyncratic city-state I took a train to Bangkok. There I moved into a communal home with other young travelers and taught private English lessons.

All went well until I’d been there almost a month and my visa was about to expire. To renew it I had to take a train ride to the Malaysian border and back. I was making enough money for self-support but I couldn’t afford the visa trip. What to do?

The answer came out of the blue. A Thai film production was looking for foreign extras to appear in a Thai-language movie. Since one of my roommates knew someone on the crew, she managed to get several of us hired. All we had to do was dress up like hippies and walk in a bedraggled bunch through a section of the Bangkok Airport concourse, where we would appear as background color behind the main Thai actors. For that brief appearance, the other foreign extras and I were not only taken to a fine restaurant and treated to normally-unaffordable cuisine, but also paid enough to cover my round-trip train ticket to Penang and back with enough left over for food and a few nights at a hotel.

And here’s the holiday tie-in: my visa trip happened to take place over Christmas. There was nothing I could do about it. If I waited to celebrate the holiday with my friends, I wouldn’t make it out of the country in time and would risk getting penalized for overstaying my visa.

So it was that on Christmas day I sat at an outdoor cafe in George Town, Penang, perusing an English-language newspaper travel supplement that someone had left at the table. And in it, there were two human-interest articles about India. I had already spent a few years altogether on the Indian Subcontinent, in India and Nepal and Sri Lanka, and I loved it. It was one of my most favorite places on Earth, and if it had not been for the ubiquitous visa vicissitudes, I might have been there yet. One of the articles, I recall, was about an isolated island in the Andaman cluster where primitive tribes were protected by law from civilization. I forget the details of the other article. The point is that they got me thinking about India and how much I missed it. I decided then and there that when I got back to Bangkok I would somehow raise the money to return. As I made the decision, I burst into tears.

Destiny indeed. For on that next visit to the Subcontinent, I would eventually meet the Greek woman who would become my wife and the mother of my five children. All in all, at that cafe in Penang on Christmas Day, I made one of the best decisions of my life.