A flight unlike any other

After so many flights to sundry far-flung corners, the whole experience of flying had become second-nature....get to the airport on time (but not a minute too early), prepare the carry-on, check in, security.....read or try furtively to sleep, and then....the beckoning lights of a new city, and time to land. But the flight from Sharjah to Bangalore was unlike any experience I've ever had flying...

It started as I boarded the crowded bus which would take me from the gate to the plane...I saw a sea of South-Indian faces. "How many of these people will be my neighbors, my fellow Bangaloreans?" I wondered to myself. Many of them looked at me too, and my not-so-South Indian visage. They seemed to be thinking to themselves "what is this long-haired fair-skinned looking fellow doing on a flight to Bangalore? Shouldn't he be backpacking in Europe or something?"


Me in India, 1989 (far right, seated next to my dad)

In 48 hours I had slept less than two hours, but I couldn't fall asleep on this flight. Not with the thoughts racing through my mind as my destination drew near. The last time I was in India, in Bangalore, was in 1989....1989, when my parents bought their house in the house in the burbs (or the xurbs), the Berlin wall was teetering, and the nine-year old me was getting a crash course in a culture that was strikingly different than that of the staid Midwest. For six weeks, my grandparents, aunts, and uncles, took me out on the bustling streets and showed me off to all of their friends, I instantly received everything I asked for, I ate all kinds of new foods, I pissed on the side of the road when traveling by bus and drank juice from a freshly felled coconut hacked by a man wielding a machete. I got a fever and nausea. I wanted to go to McDonalds. And then it was time to go back to America and a more comfortable, predictable existence.

Except it was never possible for me to see my existence in the same way, in the same terms as my counterparts. It was now clear that Cincinnati was only one very small part small part of the world, and that in other parts of the world, things are very very different. And I always wanted to go back to that different world....back to India....and explore and discover. Eventually my desire to explore would propel me to Europe, where I would spend a year as an exchange student in Sweden, and Mexico....and Spain....but as the years went by, I never found the opportune moment to make it to India. It was always just a little too far. You can't go to a place like India for just a week, or even two weeks, especially after such a long time. You don't spend just a few days in a different world. So the years rolled on, and the perfect moment never came......

Until now. The engine of the aircraft shifted to a now-familiar whine, followed shortly by the announcement that we were preparing to land. I looked out the window, and saw city lights. The lights of Bangalore. How odd it seemed, I thought to myself, that the flight from Sharjah to Bangalore had lasted just three and a half hours. After 21 years of waiting to return to India, it seemed like the flight should have lasted ten, one-hundred, one-thousand hours. It was hard to believe that the lights that I was seeing were the lights of the capital city of the state where my father had been born,and grown up, and where most of his siblings, and their children---my aunts, uncles and cousins, not to mention my grandmother, now lived.

As I walked through the airport, I was nervously giddy. The Bangalore airport was quite similar to all the other airports I had been to, if only a bit dimmer, a bit dustier. I walked to the immigration desk and pulled out my recently minted PIO (Person of Indian Origin) card, along with my US passport. This was the document which would entitle me to live in India, and work, own property, essentially do everything but hold a government job, vote, or declare myself a candidate for the India's parliament, the Lok Sabha (Rahul Gandhi could rest easy for now).

The immigration officer stared at the PIO card and then looked at me. “You are having family in India?” He asked. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if he was inquiring about my plans for procreation on the subcontinent. “You are having family here?”, he repeated. “Yes, uncles, aunts cousins, my grandmother.” He dutifully placed the entry stamp in my passport.

BENGALURU INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
DEVANAHALLI
16 JANUARY 2011
BUREAU OF IMMIGRATION

I walked out of the airport. "James!", they shouted. There were my uncle, two of my aunts, and my cousin. My aunts and uncle looked essentially the same as I remembered them, if only a bit grayer. My 19 year old cousin wasn't born yet on my previous visit. When I asked them how they recognized me so quickly, they all said "you're way of walking is just like your dad's."

A Day in the Desert

When I arrived from Istanbul to the United Arab Emirates, I knew I was closer to India almost as soon as I stepped off the plane into the airport. I had a fourteen-hour layover, long enough to leave the airport and see what the United Arab Emirates was about. But to leave, first I would need to be granted a visa.

I followed the signs to the immigration control area, and beheld a sight unlike any I had seen at any immigration control I had passed in Europe in the past few months. On one side there was a desk marked "GCC Countries." There was no one waiting in the line. On the other side were fifteen desks marked "other countries" and each of them had a lengthy queue. In fact, the whole room was packed, and about 90 percent of the people who were waiting with me appeared to be Indian (or perhaps Pakistani). I had read before about the United Arab Emirates using cheap laborers from the Indian subcontinent to build their post-modern artificial oases, but now I was seeing it for myself.

I got on a bus from the Sharjah airport to Dubai. The driver was an Indian. I sat in the front seat and watched the faces of passengers as they boarded. Nearly all Indian. Several Indians made various inquiries of the driver in Hindi before boarding the bus. To my left sat a beautiful young South Indian girl, wearing a blue flowing silk sari, and appearing slightly startled. She was seated next to a South Indian man who I took for her husband. What kind of life would Dubai hold for this young couple, who likely had never left India before? Would they make enough money to send back home to their family (and perhaps save for the future?) Would they be exploited by their employers? These were the questions perhaps all three of us were asking ourselves as the bus glided down the palm-lined highway into the asphalt-coated desert.

I went for a stroll around Dubai for a couple of hours, and took a taxi to the beach. After having heard so much about the Persian Gulf over the years on the news, I wanted to go for a swim in it... The cab driver was another Indian, from Kerala.

"There are lots of Indians working in Dubai," I commented to him.
"Yes, too many," he said, appearing not to be joking.
"What do you think about life in Dubai?" "It is great, the money is good," he said. He asked me where I had flown to Dubai from. When I said Turkey, he responded "There are many Turks in Dubai, too many Turks!" Then the conversation shifted to my destination. "What are you going to do in India?" "I am going to look for a job," I responded. "You are going to look for a job---", he responded, his voice trailing off in a now somewhat familiar incomprehension... The total fare for the 25 minute cab ride was the equivalent of four dollars.




The white sand and blue water of the Persian Gulf was an impressive sight to see. I sat down near the water, and glanced around. Suddenly the Indians were gone; they had been replaced by an assortment of Europeans of the type you could find on any decent Mediterranean shore in September. To my right, were some Italians, to my left, Germans. Having lacked the foresight to bring swim trunks, I stripped down to my boxers (if the obese sixty-something Englishman could wear speedos surely my wearing boxers would not be such a grave breach of etiquette) and jumped in. Only a bit cold; not bad for January. I came back to the beach and stretched out on my towel, and started to dose off, hearing in the background the sounds of the ocean and the soft patter of conversations in English, French, and Swedish. There are too many Europeans in Dubai.

I woke up nearly sunburned from the January desert sun, and headed back to the city. I went to an outdoor shisha cafe, puffed for awhile, and returned to a collection of South Indian short stories I had been reading. Seated at tables around me were affluent-looking Arab men, and a few smiling Europeans. I looked up from my book and noticed a nervous-looking woman woman draped in black cloth and wearing a black hijab walking towards the cafe. With one arm, she cradled a baby against her chest. For a second I wondered if she, too was going to smoke some shisha, but as she approached a nearby table, I realized that with subtle hand gestures, she was asking people for money. I felt tremendously sad for this woman, and wondered what kind of social programs a State like Dubai, awash in oil wealth, might have for people such as her.



I walked around for a couple more hours, taking in the massive skyscrapers. If peak oil and Indian toil had created this strange place, what would happen when the oil ran out....would it dry up and blow away, leaving behind only these monuments to a time of artificial splendor? The sun was now beginning to set on what would be for now and perhaps forever, my only day in the Middle East.

I caught the bus that would take me back to the airport and watched as we passed seemingly endless rows of recently constructed shopping malls. The bus slowed, and then nearly stopped as the 10 lane freeway became clogged with shiny new SUVs. I was getting a bit nervous about the time and got up to talk to the bus driver.


As I approached him, he was talking to someone else already on the phone. "Een samachara," I heard him say. This was a language I could recognize. "Were you speaking Kannada?" I asked him as he got of the phone. "Yes," he said, and he began to grin...."How do you know Kannada?" "Kannada is my father's language," I told him, I don't really speak it, but I recognize some basic expressions. He was delighted. "Have you been to India?" "Just once," I told him, adding, "Actually I am going there right now, to Bangalore." "You are flying to Bangalore, that is where I am from!" Just in time, the bus rolled up to the airport, and I got off. "Good luck!" the bus driver said to me, grinning once again, as we waived goodbye to each other.