Hello Motherland – It’s Been A While:

11 June 2010 - 11:19am

It’s the season before the monsoons, and like the lovers of yore I have returned after a ten-year long viraha. It doesn’t seem like I’d ever left. It doesn’t seem as if I’m in a different country. Surprisingly, it feels completely natural: from the lota usage in the morning (although, some things are easier to do with a lota than others – and I’ve never used a lota before this morning), to aunty’s aloo paratha with makhan and chai, to the cold shower, to sitting on the bed in the 35 degree Celsius heat with the fan humming.

Hello Ghaziabad/Delhi.

I arrived at the airport after a 24-hour journey at 1:45am. By the time I got through customs, which took longer than it should have because of my customary post-airplane washroom break, and got my luggage it was 2:40am. I had to wait for a friend to come pick me up, so I sat in the arrivals lounge and wrote in my travel journal. By the way – these posts will be quite different from the journal, for obvious reasons, but will draw from my journal entries as needed. Anyway, my friend showed up at 3am, and after a scare that involved me thinking my suitcase had been stolen, we headed to his house in Ghaziabad. It was a pretty cool journey. Imagine Delhi at 3am, completely quiet except for truckers on the road. I saw this one truck full of small red potatoes, another full of chickens. I’ve never seen a live chicken before. Now I’ve seen hundreds. Poor chickens. They were all squashed up in tiny cages. Their bills, is that what you call them? The flappy thingies. I’ll call them bills – you can see how ignorant I am about poultry – anyway, the bills were this bright red colour. Well, they looked bright red in the hazey darkness.

Once we got to his house, he showed me to the room and I went to sleep – or at least tried to. I started freaking out because I saw a mosquito in the room (more on my mosquito hate/love relationship later). It was also really hot, so he turned on the A/C and the fan. I tried going to sleep, but couldn’t. I can’t sleep in noise, or light, or heat. Looks like I won’t be getting much sleep while I’m here…

Anyway. So after about an hour of trying to sleep with the A/C and fan on, I turned them both off – and woke up, sweating (because I also can’t sleep without a blanket) at 6am. I had to go to the washroom, so I went – and then decided to turn on the fan (even though I have this fear of fans falling on me while I’m asleep – I’m weird. Yes. I know). I went back to sleep and was woken up by my father texting me at 9am and aunty ringing the bell as she did her morning pooja on the landing outside my room. I brushed my teeth, ate aunty’s wonderful aloo parathas with butter and had a really amazing cold shower. Having grown up in V-city, where it’s cold and rarely over 27 degrees Celsius, I’d never experienced the amazing-ness of cold showers in the heat. Oh. They are simply amazing. Culture shock? Not really. Cultural amazement? Yes.

Before I finish up this disjointed and somewhat random post, one last thing. As a Canadian, I have this thing about following ‘the law,’ or ‘the rules.’ We Canadians do it a bit much, I think. But anyway, it’s ingrained in our systems. I was leaving the airport and had some things to declare. I didn’t really want to, because the monetary amount was significantly less than the maximum and because I didn’t feel like dealing with Indian bureaucracy as soon as I had landed (and while I was still semi-groggy from sleeping on the plane). I asked one of the airport ‘officials’ – this really friendly-looking 20-something year old lady- whether I had to actually go through ‘customs’. She looked at me, smiled and sort of laughed. Her answer was fascinating. She said,

Why do you want to trouble yourself? Don’t go through it. If they want to stop you, they’ll stop you. Otherwise, why take the risk of having to deal with them? Just go through the ‘nothing to declare’ line.

It made sense, and Canadian passport in hand, I went through the ‘nothing to declare’ line, handed the official (a lady in one of those khakee saris) my declaration form, saw her put it into the pile without even glancing at it to make sure it had been filled in, and walked through the doors into the arrival lounge.