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."
