Memoirs of a Foreigner

The following was written at 12 July 1AM India Standard Time in the Mumbai Airport…

In case I forgot what it was like here or romanticized India my trip home to India has reminded me and woken me up to the place that is… India. It started as I boarded a 747 Air India still keeps in the air. Being one of the few people of European decent, I already felt like I was home. This huge two story plane with paisley printed seats and here and there a plain blue replacement cushion didn’t bother me, but when I realized that I was being take back to my childhood with one screen to show a feature presentation to all passengers within each cabin I started to get nervous. I survive 14-25 hours of travel because I can watch movie after movie. I get to pick my own starting times and if I don’t like the movie I switch to something else. It is not about any group experience for me. I am American. I like choices.

I took a deep breath, I can watch whatever Hindi movie they put on the screen. It will be good language practice. I could read, but somehow I never feel awake enough to read on a plane unless when I board the plane I’m already engrossed. I sit down I’m sharing 78 CBA row with an awkward IT guy who is from Andra Pradesh but works in Chicago. But he’s not too bad; he helps me put my guitar in the overhead compartment and then leaves me alone. There is a seat between us. Then we started to take off, the whole thing shakes and buzzes. It is hard work to get this baby off the ground. I shutter. We hit turbulence. I think of that dumb movie were Sandra Bullock is in plane that crashes straight into a billboard. We start to fly, we getting higher. The plane shakes; I wonder what the kind of medicine my friend was telling me about taking for anxiety on the plane. The next fifteen hours including one of walking one time through a terminal at the Frankfort airport were fairly uneventful except that I made friends with this young mother and two children who lives in Arkansas but was on her way home to Gujarat. Plus there was the Dade next to me on the plane. She was eighty years old and traveling alone. It was her third time visiting her children and grandchildren in America. She was a brave woman and I know she was eighty because she had me fill out her arrival card so I looked at her passport. She didn’t read or write in English. Our interaction for the most part included her passing me things to open for her (single serving friend…)

Continued approximately 8hrs later a my flat in Delhi, a shower and few winks later

Then we arrived in India, at the airport in Mumbai. I had a five hour layover, not sure if that $100 I saved was worth it. The line for transient passengers was over a hundred people long. After about 10 minutes of waiting, they opened a second security belt scan machine for the women. Fifteen women were rushed through, but just before it was my turn a worker in a police like uniform motioned for me to stay in the long line with the men. I was confused at the logic. Then I saw that some official airline stuff had to go through security. Then I assumed that they would continue to let the women through on that side once the official things were through. They didn’t. A woman behind me tried. She was harassed. She started crying out that her plan left in twenty minutes. A guard told her to go ahead. Then the original guard saw her and barked that she go back to the other line. The lack of logic was amusing me. International minded Indians rolled their eyes with me and eventually one man yelled back at the worker, “Why don’t you open another machine?”

A man in a uniform looked at my boarding pass and told me to go to gate 4. It wasn’t posted anywhere, but I went there anyway. It wasn’t comfortable there so I tried to rest and relax up stairs. Just as I was falling asleep a man in a uniform shook me and asked me where I was flying. I told him Delhi and he apologized. People walk around calling out flight numbers and departure gates. I don’t get it.

Continued 16 July at my flat in Delhi

An hour or two later after I had given up sleeping, exchanged some money, and started to read a uniformed man walked by, “Delhi, Delhi, Delhi…” I went after him and showed him my boarding pass. “Downstairs, gate 4” He said. I went downstairs and joined in the chaos of two flights living at 4am from Mumbai to Delhi. The percentage of men to women was overwhelming. There must have been about 300 men and twenty women. On my plane there were a group of Indonesion women. They are wore these really mod- head coverings. The fabric was some king of spandex starting with a visor like piece in the front. There were also four other white girls, they were about my age and traveling together.

We get on the plane. I have in my head that I am in seat 24H—a window. I get to that place and look at the overhead compartment, it is significantly smaller than the overhead compartment on the 747. Still I think my guitar can fit. Then a flight attendant who is neither young nor beautiful comes to me and says, “That won’t fit up there.” “Is there somewhere else it can go, a closet?” “No” She said, “There is no where for it to go, you shouldn’t have brought it aboard” “I wish someone would have said that to me before, no one stopped me.” I was matching her harsh tone. She went and told on me to a male attendent. Meanwhile a few male passangers stood up and began trying to fit the guitar. It worked. The lady made some sassy comment to me. I didn’t care. I sat down in my beloved window seat—my first of the journey and closed my eyes. A few minutes later there was a discussion and the same rude attendant said, “Where is your boarding pass?” I felt my pockets. I looked in my purse. I looked in my backpack, in all the pockets. The attendant stood over me tapping her foot. One of the Indonesian girls had a boarding pass that read 24H.

“What seat where you assigned?”
“I don’t know I thought it was 24H.”
“You don’t know what seat you were assigned?”
“I believe it was 24H, but I must have it wrong,” I said, “but I don’t know where the boarding pass is. Maybe I dropped it.”
“You are going to need it once you get to Delhi!” The flight attendant strongly scolded.
I started to feel panic. Then I remembered that I had been wearing my sweatshirt when I boarded the plane, it was now sitting on my lap. I stuck my hands in the pockets and pulled out the boarding pass. 27H.
“Just keep the two women together” The male flight attendant barked. I moved to the outside seat as a man was assigned to my beloved window seat in 27H. As I sat there in seat G or whatever it was, I couldn’t keep back the tears. I needed sleep. This is what happens to me when I need sleep, food, and people rudely give me orders especially when they are supposed to be nice. Is not a flight attendant’s job to be nice?
Another push cart “light snack” later we started our decent on Delhi, Indra Ghandi International Airport. As I walked out I was never so happy in my life to see Azeem Samuel, my Indian brother. Even Mohan Singh our taxi driver never seemed so jolly before. Though the travel was exhausting, and in some ways not a lot different than my everyday experiences of living in Delhi, I am happy to be home here.