The “lost wallet syndrome” follows me to India.

The “lost wallet syndrome”: if I do something like lose my wallet, I think, “If only I could find my wallet, how happy I would be!” And when I find my wallet, I’m ecstatic – for about thirty minutes.

There are many events surrounding the wedding we’re attending, and our hosts suggested that for the actual wedding ceremony, we wear traditional Indian clothes. They took our measurements ahead of time and gave us saris for the women and churidar kurtas for the men to wear. A wonderful, generous treat.

Because one guy in our group from New York wasn’t with us when we received our packages of clothing, I grabbed his present along with ours. No big deal.

The evening before the wedding, we switched hotels for a single night. Our hotel was very far from the location of the wedding, and we wanted to be fairly close by, because the ceremony was scheduled for 6:00 a.m., an auspicious time.

We arrived at the new hotel and I realized that I must have left my friend’s package back at the first hotel. I was very annoyed, because it’s so unlike me to do something like that.

But when I called the hotel and asked them to look for it in our room, they reported that it was nowhere to be found. Uh oh.

Was it in the lobby? Had I taken it that far before forgetting it? They looked there. Nope.

Now I was really starting to panic. After our hosts had gone to so much trouble to provide these clothes, I’d feel terrible if I somehow lost my friend’s outfit. But where could it be?

Then I thought of something I might do – not that I remembered doing it, but it seemed like the kind of thing I would do. I asked the person from the hotel to go back to our room to look in our big, square suitcase. Perhaps, in a fit of tidying, I’d stuck his bag in there. And there it was.

Now that the clothes were found, someone had to drive the package from that hotel to where we were staying. At 11:00 p.m., it was allegedly on its way, but hadn’t yet arrived. I was so angry at myself -- all this effort and money to fix such a stupid mistake.

The hours slipped by. But around midnight, the Big Man got a message on his Blackberry: our friend had received the clothes.

When I saw him walk into the hotel lobby at 5:45 a.m., dressed in an elegant, cream-colored churidar kurta, I felt a rush of relieved happiness. Phew! Finding that “lost wallet” meant that I had an especially wonderful time that morning.