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People do die.

We die of heat exhaustion on the train from Bombay to Delhi.

We die in a taxi cab short of making it to a hotel where we die of despair.

We die of a broken heart. Betrayed. By ourselves. By our stupidity!

I lay on some deluxe deathbed in some beige hotel room somewhere in that suffocating gray limbo called New Delhi and for two or three days I drank blood red orange juice. Where did I find the money for a 3-star hotel? I thought I was broke.

As empty as I was—or perhaps because I was so empty—the image of the beggar in Bombay haunted me. No arms, no legs, not much left of him at all, he was beyond defeat.

The scene won’t quit my head even now. Not sure what I’m seeing as I remember him nudging his begging bowl with his forehead through a thicket of legs, a gauntlet of feet and fumes and cattle and cart wheels and spokes and grime and dogs and shit and broken asphalt. There is no Bombay for me above the knees of that miraculous city. I am down there with him getting trampled and I can’t escape.

At some point it occurred to me—I’m not taking a trip, this trip is taking me.

I was no less curious than the fly on the wall of that hotel room about what would happen next, and how far a person could run on empty.

I’m sweating again on a Delhi street so thick with smog you would be excused for thinking the city had exploded. I’m looking for the offices of British Overseas Airways (BOAC) because I have to escape this blessed country. Where did I get the money to buy an airline ticket? I must have held a few traveler’s cheques in reserve. I can’t remember.

Who can remember everything that happened so long ago? And yet I sometimes remember things I’m not sure I ever saw. The beggar, for instance, whom I saw for only a minute, what I remember about him changed my life.

As the 707 lifted off and banked on a trajectory for Hong Kong I would have been thinking of that beggar. Even as I swore to never ever ever ever set foot in India again, I was carrying him with me. Oaths notwithstanding, I would return to India four more times over the next 20 years.

Why? Because I was looking for answers?

How far can you run on empty? And what happens when you get there?

Hong Kong. What a relief. Clean, efficient, sensible, and above all polite. They were very, very sorry. The Immigration official, he was sorry to tell me that I could not enter Hong Kong. No onward ticket, it hadn’t occurred to me. “Very sorry you come to Hong Kong with no money, so sorry.”

He sent me to the BOAC agent who looked at me as if I might have had a begging bowl protruding from my forehead. He was manufacturing a ticket before I’d finished my sob story. A ticket entirely bogus. Immigration stamped my passport, they were perfectly happy.

I applied to the Canadian High Commission for a loan to see me home. After all, two-years of volunteer work on Zambia’s rivers had left me with schistosomes cavorting in my blood stream, and what’s more my funds had been “stolen” in Bombay, so that here I was running so precariously on empty that by this time tomorrow I would be begging for my supper.

You have to admit, that’s not a bad pitch.

But the High Commissioner wasn’t buying scripts for TV movies. “You have parents,” she explained. “They’ll wire you money.”

While my SOS telegram did its nasty work, I retreated to an offshore monastery.

I didn’t know much about Buddhism or Zen except that the philosophy was Stoic and the life was Spartan. You enter a monastery, you leave everything behind. Fine by me, there wasn’t much left of me. A bamboo mat on a slab in a stone alcove, fine by me. Small log for a pillow, why not?

Oh, yeah, and next to the pillow—a wooden bowl.

The universe was working overtime trying to tell me something.

It’s pretty obvious what the purpose of a monastery is. The silence and simplicity presents a challenge to the monkey-mind. Thinking soon proves pointless, in the aftermath of which things just are. Three bowls of rice a day were a miracle. If they were trying to empty me out, well, I was already losing my urgency to get anywhere.

My final destination might not be a place, after all. Maybe it’s a new way of seeing things.

After a week I returned to Hong Kong to discover that my telegram had not been delivered. “Recipient not home.” I returned to the High Commission and was told to “get a job.”

One Hong Kong dollar—I remember this detail—it was all I had to underwrite my next move. I entered a bar. Was I seeking darkness? Or to speak with someone. I can’t remember.

I found myself gabbing with a friendly face, another Canadian, a round-faced farmer from a small community not far from my home town, as it turned out. I told him of my African sojourn and of my blunder in Bombay and the gift of the beggar and the monastery and being told to get a job, and as we were laughing he ordered us another round, and he slapped some dollars on the table and kept on slapping to the tune of 600 US dollars. I didn’t know him from Adam.

“Pay me back when you can,” he said.

I never saw him again.

I’ve heard it said that the gift seeks the empty place. I suppose emptiness ensures that the gift will be used, consumed, not hoarded but spent. The giver by giving becomes empty and is now in a position to receive. And around it goes like that.

Arriving in Vancouver, I needed $35 dollars to fly over the Rockies to Alberta. A friend from university came to the rescue.

What do you make of all that?

Have you ever survived on empty? WRITE A STORY ABOUT IT! We love stories about people getting run over on the road less traveled. It seems you have to almost die to hear the heart of the world beating.