To America - again

The first time I travelled to America, I did not write about it. But when I returned to India for good, after about 14 years, I wrote a column about the “returned NRI” experience for a California magazine. Now I find myself on a flight to America – heading to a foreign but familiar place.

Aparna and I had the pleasure of leaving from the gleaming international terminal of the Hyderabad airport by an early morning British Airways flight. The airport buzzed with a quiet efficiency at 4 a.m. The shops catering to merchandise for foreigners were dimly lit, the attendants dozing off. We looked at Karachi biscuits packets priced at more than twice its MRP, colorful wall hangings at Fab India and gaudy clothes displayed in a well-known city boutique outlet. We hung around the departure gate for a while wondering why the London-bound passengers looked a little different. It wasn’t until we wandered away to the adjacent gate that we realized that our departure gate had been changed and we had been hanging around the Oman Airlines flight.

As always, the flight was full of Indians of various ages, families traveling together, old couples in specially-requested wheelchairs (not for physical disability but to facilitate their transit as first-time travelers), single business passengers and foreigners returning back home after an Indian sojourn. The most noticeable passenger was a strikingly tall white man with a flowing beard and robes, wearing a dhoti and chappals.

We boarded the Boeing 767 and snuggled into the blankets after doing justice to the breakfast provided upon take-off. There were individual TV screens for each seat and soon we were flipping through the selections. I was hoping to catch a couple of English movies but my luck did not support my wish. The headset and plug did not match and I was forced to just “see” and not hear the movie. That left me with no choice but to watch something with subtitles i.e. Hindi movies. I chose to watch two comedies, separated by decades – “All the best”, a recent success and the classic “Chupke Chupke” with Amitabh et al. No surprise that the yesteryear movie continues to be a funny gem to this day while the new one is like costume jewelry, a fleeting attraction.

London Heathrow, my least favorite international airport was a breeze this time with the newly commissioned Terminal 5 where we arrived and took off after a 2 hour halt. No painful moving through crowded multiple terminals, rushing through passport control and security, tension about catching your flight as you traversed miles of under construction corridors. But the eerie quiet of Terminal 5 at the middle of the afternoon on a weekday was quite disconcerting.

Landed in Seattle on time and went through the rigors of being fingerprinted and photographed upon entry, as a visitor. I had the privilege of breezing through with a green card on previous visits. The immigration office examined Aparna’s Americcan passport and asked me how we were related. “She is my daughter” I said, instead of “Can’t you tell?” These guys are not known for their sense of humor. When he asked me a little later if I had been to America before, I simply said “Yes”.

So here I am in America – again. Stay tuned for more.