फर्स्ट डे इन इंडिया

(First Day in India)

My flights to India were 36 hours.

Suburban Fl > NYC (6 hour layover) > Brussels (2 hr layover) > Delhi (4 hr layover)> Bangalore

I left Wednesday morning and arrived Friday morning. And Thursday? Thursday was gone, lost in a black hole of time changes and flights. And the sun...I lost that too.

I Flew Jet Airways, which has hot towels on trays, full meals that are either continental or indian, depending on your preference, and touch-screen entertainment systems in the back of every seat with pull-out remotes. Yea, touch screens and remotes... so you can decide for yourself whether or not you want to move your hand those 10 inches. And they had The Darjeeling Limited! And I watched it. And it made me happy to be so close to the turquoise, turbaned India.

The Delhi airport had the dull, flickering flourescant lighting that is everwhere in India. Bad for your eyes, but good for the environment. It also had wires and curious tubes dangling from the cielings, half-finished. Some signs outside said something along the lines of "pardon our dust" but I wondered how long they'd been there.

Everything in India is always under construction. So is everything in Florida, (at least according to those "you know you're a Floridian when.." email forwards.) But, like everything, the construction is different here. There are no orange cones or sectioned off portions of highway...there are just piles of dirt and dust and rocks everywhere, and garbage mixed into them, and cows sometimes, eating trash. It's like the room of a child who has too much stuff and no where to put all of it, so the dolls just get piled on top of the bears and the games, done haphazard when her mom walks in. It's like nothing and no one in India has a definitive place, so things could end up anywhere. More on this later.

At the delhi airport, no one helped me find my baggage to take it to the next flight, and there were dozens of carousels with no signs abive them. But somehow other people knew where to stand. I thougt it was telepathy. I found an empty luggage cart and recognized people from my flight and stood near them, but there were so many people crowded around I couldn't even see the bags go by.

As the crowd began to thin, I got scared my bag was lost, or that if it was there, somene had stolen it, even though it was locked. I imagined a man with a grimace noticing my american luggage tag and sweeping the suitcase away, carrying it on his head into the street, and then, with his fellow gangsters swarming around him, eagerly pulling a sword from his belt and slicing my 17th-birthday-gift-suitcase in half, like a magician cutting a man. My sheets would spill into the street, and he'd shake them out for money. And there'd be nothing, so he'd curse in hindi. And one of the gangsters would beat him. And for months, I wouldn't have any underwear to wear. I imagined crossing my legs tight in taxis and getting panic attacks everytime I had to walk up stairs.

All of this went through my head standing next to the luggage carousel. This kind of paranoia--brought on by loneliness, the language barrier, American propaganda, American astetics and Indian stares--has become familiar by now, almost routine. Everywhere I go, I don't trust people. I examine them from the sides of my narrowed eyes, and haggle when the price is fair and clutch my bag to my chest, and harden my jaw. It makes life tiring.

In Delhi, I spotted a cute young American couple with curly blonde hair and clothes like I wear, joking with each other. I practiced in my head for about 10 minutues before getting brave enough to ask them to help me. "I know I don't know you, but you look nice," I said. And I felt like the white woman with the black man I saw in my dr's waiting room before I left home, who approached the other inter-racial couple and started a conversation with them about how hard it is to make cornrows in their mulatto children's hair. "We have our race in common," I was saying in sub-text. "Isn't it scary to be white and alone?"

They were brother and sister, the children of a diplomat, and they were backpacking by train to a micro-finance internship. They made me feel at home with their race and their smile, and told me their guidebook said I should take a shuttle to the domestic terminal. And then they left.

I found my bag in the pile of bags that hadn't been claimed, and spent the next 40 minutes circling the tiny, crowded flourescant airport, seeing mirages of pick-pocketers, trying to find the shuttle, or the place where the shuttle would find me. As I circled, I asked people--in and out of uniform-- for directions, and no one knew anything. I accumulated more and more stares, looking more and morelike a lost, scared foreigner, almost crying. Now I knew I'd be pick-pocketed for sure.

Finally, I ventured outside. Dozens of people stood on a curb on the ominously poorly-lit 3am, being harassed by taxi-drivers and leering Indian men. I saw a bus in the distance, and walked towards it. As I appoached, I called out, "Is this the shuttle to the domestic terminal?" Dozens of Indians ignored me, and one american accent replied, "I think so." And I felt the warmth of hamburgers and apple pie.

The accent was Dina, and for the next few hours of layover, she was my friend.

to be continued...