Another day, another flight. But this flight will take me away from the subcontinent which for the last several months, has been my home. A few hours later, I am groggily wandering in the streets of downtown Dubai, where once again I have a day to kill. But this time it is different. It is August, and the mercury is rising inexorably. Beads of perspiration form on my forehead and roll down my face, causing a burning sensation in my eyes and making it impossible for me to wear my glasses. Suddenly, I realize that it has been about eight hours since I´ve had anything to eat. I start to feel pangs of hunger in my stomach, but every restaurant I pass seems to be closed. I find a 7-11 convenience store, and ask the clerk where I can find a café to sit down, have a bite to eat, and relax. ¨Sir, it is Ramadan, all the restaurants are closed until 8 pm.¨ India had denied me some comforts while I was with her, but food was never among them. I decide to reject the clerk´s advice and continue my search. I grab a copy of a local paper on the way out. As I thumb through the pages, an article captures my attention: ¨Unmarried couple get year in jail for having consensual sex¨
[. . .]The Dubai Misdemeanour Court yesterday convicted the 25-year old Pakistani accountant and his 26-year-old girlfriend of having consensual sex. Prosecutors accused 25-year-old G.I. and his 26-year-old Filipina girlfriend of having consensual and unprotected sex which led to the maid´s pregnancy. According to court records, when the Filipina´s Emirati sponsor discovered she was pregnant he told the police.After another hour of walking I see a sight which is too good to be true: A Burger King, and it is open! ¨Is it a mirage?¨ I ask myself. I walk in and feel the welcome blast of air conditioning. I place my order, and sit down at a table. ¨Sir, it is not permitted to eat inside the restaurant during Ramadan.¨Did Allah include a little-known ´to-go´exception to the rules of Ramadan, I wonder to myself as I find a nearly leafless (and nearly lifeless) tree under which to chow down on my Whopper. A few passers-by stare at me with looks of disgust. I attempt to nod respectfully, but this appears to only deepen their revulsion.
After finishing my meal, I find an internet café and while away a couple more hours in air-conditioned comfort. I notice that this café serves coffee. I order one. It is Nescafé, a bit of a let-down after the delicious filter coffee of South India. ¨You won´t be able to drink that in here, I am sorry,¨ one of the server girls tells me. Like many of the foreign workers here, she is from the Phillipines. ¨Como esta?¨ I ask her, knowing that ¨how are you¨ in Tagalog is the same as it is in Spanish. ¨Mabuhay!¨ she responds. What´s life like in Dubai?¨ I ask. ¨It is a hell,¨ she says, grinning.
As I walk out, she warns me not to let the police see me drinking the coffee in the street. I find an alley nearby to drink my coffee in the shade of the 45 degree celsius (113 degrees fahrenheit) heat. Suddenly, a few meters away I see some armed men wearing uniforms emerge from the other end of the alley. I hold the coffee behind my back and then pretend to look for something in my backpack. The uniformed men walk toward me and one of them locks eyes with me, studying me for a moment. Then they walk past me and in the other direction. Time to head back to the airport, and for another flight which will take me back to the Western world.
Over the last year, I have stayed at people´s houses from Spain, to Morocco, to France, to Finland, to Hungary, to Turkey. Some were old friends with whom I was getting reacquainted after many years apart. Some were new friends which I hope to have for many years into the future.
In India, I learned first-hand about the benefits of having a strong family, as I came to be closely acquainted with a family that previously had existed to me largely as a concept. All of them welcomed me into their homes and treated me with great affection. I met one uncle who was a bit frustrated that I didn´t get up at the crack of dawn every day (I´m going to keep working on this, chickappa) and an aunt who entertained some of my pointed questions about culture and philosophy, and fired back with some equally pointed questions of her own to me. I met my cousins, most of whom work long and insane hours for Western companies, for a meager fraction of the salary they would earn if they did the same work in the US or Europe. Many of them spend three hours a day commuting to their jobs, in part because Bangalore has nearly doubled in size in the last 10 years and the infrastructure is struggling to keep up with the growth, and in part because in India, it is unthinkable for a young adult to move outside of the home until they are married.
I was at times surprised by how many things members of one family can have in common despite very different cultural backgrounds, and also at times how different we could be despite being members of the same family, because of those cultural differences. One thing I thought about quite a bit was the extent to which culture permeates discourse and predisposes human thought, in many cases in ways that we are not aware. Sometimes being an outsider in another culture enables one to gain insights about such things that might not be apparent to an insider. It also works in reverse, being an outsider in another culture can allow us to gain insights into aspects of our own thought process that we might not previously have questioned.
Tomorrow I will board another plane which will take me to another country with another language, its own unique culture and another family I have not seen in a long time. But this time the language is English of a non-Indian variety, the family is my parents, and the country is
