What I said at the beginning about my paranoia and desperation before running away like Melville’s Tommo from the Taipai and Cabeza de Vaca from the natives of Galveston Island was true in a way–it was true in my crisis state of mind. But there was a reason I’d traveled to Pakistan twice, and it wasn’t business: The first stage of my experience, the “honeymoon or tourist phase,” was wonderful. During my first two-week trip, I was giddy with the novelty. The Pakistani people are far more hospitable than Americans, and whole families adjusted their schedules to entertain me, shuttle me around, and hold dinners in my honor. Even going from shop to shop, the merchants would hardly talk business without getting a boy, always perched nearby, to run out for tea or soda and maybe a few cookies. Each morning I woke to living poetry as the Imams delivered the call to prayer from the loudspeakers at the mosque. I leisured in the tropical breezes of open, old-fashioned houses with tilework and screened walls built in geometric patterns too ornate for hasty American construction. Traveling about town rivaled a day at Six Flags as the tut-tuts, three-wheeled taxis, hugged corners and swung around peddlers carts at high speed with one wheel in the air. And the food! To be awash in spices is the gourmand’s dream, and I bathed my fingers and tongue in them at every meal. Dessert followed with fresh fruit fully ripened, so unlike the cardboard produce of the American industrial food chain. Such oranges and mangoes! I wanted to convert and stay, maybe get married; I even had a suit of Pakistani clothing tailored, the puffy white shalwar-kameez.
 
 
After washing up on Galveston with the other survivors of the Narvaez expedition, Cabeza de Vaca had some trepidation that the natives would sacrifice or eat them. Instead, the natives cried for the pitiful condition of the Spaniards and brought them fish and roots to eat, acting in every way as good hosts. Cabeza de Vaca idealized the character and life of the natives. He sounds much like Melville’s Tommo.
 
But paradise doesn’t last forever, and all honeymoons come to an end. Stress reactions, cognitive fatigue, role shock, and personal fatigue all begin to wear down the sojourner, and things no longer look so rosy. This is the “crisis or culture shock” stage.

I began this essay with a recounting of my own crisis period. Melville’s Tommo and Cabeza de Vaca went through the same dark night. Worse, they were actually captives. Tommo was a permanent guest by the chief’s order, and he lacked a practical means of escape because of a recurring, stress-induced, psychosomatic leg injury. Cabeza de Vaca went from an honored guest to a slave.

He does not say how his status changed, but it seems his mental state, cultural ignorance, and lack of Stone Age skills reduced his value. He acted like a slave and became a slave. Other than relating that he’d been deathly ill, and feeling ill used by the manual labor he endured, Cabeza de Vaca did not relate anything of his inner life. But, surely, the honeymoon was over.
