At the end of 2007 we spent a week at the Spanish coast. The region – Costa de Sol – is infamous for being the worst destination in Spain, thanks to large-scale urban development in the last two decades. But from Paul Theroux’s descriptions in The Pillars of Hercules I had gathered that the place would be deserted in winter. It was just the kind of beach holiday we were looking for.
Read about it in: Photo Essay – Spanish Holiday
When I first saw Joakim he was sitting in front of his cottage, plucking blades of grass with one hand and holding a thick book in another. His long, golden hair, Scandinavian features and relaxed but alert posture set him apart from the other pot-smoking foreigners I had seen so far at the guest house. The next morning I saw him walking towards the sit-out with a cup of tea and a book with letters “Idioten” printed on the front cover. It was still early, and the sit-out – with mattresses on the floor and tables made of low granite slabs, full of activity in the evenings with foreigners smoking, drinking or passed out – was empty. I followed him with my cup of tea.
Joakim was Swedish – “Idioten” was a Swedish translation of Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot”, and due to the similarities between Russian and Swedish, Joakim explained later, the translation retained the richness of prose in the original. He had been in India a couple of months now and intended to stay on until March. He liked taking long vacations in foreign lands; the last time he was in India in 2004, he spent six months touring the north of the country. He worked in the health-care industry, with autistic children; his main job was to help those children – talented in their own way – get through the day without much stress; it was hard work, but very satisfying. Hampi was interesting, beautiful. It was also inexpensive. He’d been here for a week, and intended to stay a few more before moving towards Goa.
Our guest house was in a small village next to the Tungabhadra river, on the bank opposite Hampi. The street, full of similar guest houses, was teeming with foreigners – most of them young, like Joakim, in their twenties or early thirties (A guide-book referred to them as “modern hippies”). The local economy had moulded itself around this clientele: there were small shops stocked with global brands, Internet centers, restaurants offering cuisines from all over the world, and perhaps most important of all, the place was safe: young women wearing tank-tops walked alone at night on that poorly-lit street.
This was a side of Hampi that I had least expected, but it wasn’t altogether surprising. Hampi is a destination that invites slow exploration, and it seemed natural that an ecosystem that supported this pace had sprung up. Days spent walking the ruins spread over miles of rocky terrain could be interspersed with others spent lying on a hammock watching egrets gather in the fields next to your cottage or smoking pot with friends, depending on your disposition.
We spent two and half days at the guest house, crossing over to Hampi each day to cover what little was possible with the time on our hands. An essence of what we saw is collected here : Photo Essay – Hampi
I spent a few days at Hampi during my recent India visit. The impression left by those days are intensely visual, not just due to the nature of the place itself but also because I had very few interactions with people – locals and tourists – during the trip. So it is appropriate that I record this destination through photographs.
I start with a series on Tungabhadra. The river usually does not occupy much space in typical itineraries of Hampi, but we had to cross it at least twice each day, to and from our guest house on the bank across Hampi. Each boat ride was a little adventure, especially for my parents who had to hop along a dozen sandbags to reach the alighting point, and then haul themselves onto the rocking boat. All around there was more rock than river (it was well past the monsoon season) and it was frightening to imagine the river in spate with all those rocks submerged.
Enough words. Here are the pictures: Photo Essay – Tungabhadra
The International Departures section of an airport in India is a good place to get an impression of who is leaving the country. In the year 2000, when I first left the country as an adult, I was surprised by the density and commotion outside the international airport at Chennai. It looked more like an image we carry of Indian railway platforms: the masses we associate with second or third-class railway travel had turned up, carrying their life-long accumulations and accompanied by a good portion of their family tree. It took a while to figure out the location of the entrance (well hidden by the bloating crowd waving goodbyes) and quite some effort to make my way through that crowd into the relatively less dense environs inside the airport building.
My notions surrounding the exclusivity of air travel to a foreign land were shaken that day. Brain-drain from the country gets a lot of coverage in the media, but those intellectuals seemed a small proportion of Indians travelling abroad. This thought occurred to me once again a few weeks ago when I reached the Departures section at Hyderabad airport. The scene had changed little: you were instantly engulfed by people and their luggage cards laden with articles aimed at creating a little India abroad; there was little indication where the queue to the entrance began; once in the queue, you walked at an agonizingly slow pace, watched – perhaps with a mixture of envy and hope – by dozens of faces; you saw people ahead in the queue display emotions typical for someone going abroad the first time: anxiety, awe, confusion about the luggage, fear of having missed a document; you also saw others trying to figure out ways to smuggle in some relatives into the passengers-only section of the airport (“My baby needs attention – please let the grandmother in!”, “There is too much luggage and I have a knee problem – can I take my brother inside?”); you watched the security personnel attempting, through their hasty mannerisms, to bring order into this chaotic universe.
Once inside, I realized I was very early: the Qatar airways counter had not even opened. I parked my luggage cart in a corner and looked around. It was a small, rectangular hall, with check-in counters lined across two of its perpendicular sides. This meant that the queues near the edge intersected with one another, which had the curious effect of straight-lined queues (at the far end of each side) turning slowly into a formless mass of people (at the intersecting edges). There were many airport officials walking about: senior ones with wireless sets who gave orders to others; junior ones who were mostly hanging around, waiting for someone to tell them what to do next; helpers whose only job was to take the luggage from the weighing scale and transfer it to a side where all check-in luggage was gathered, a task that occupied not more than twenty percent of their time. And every once in a while the smartly-dressed crew of an airline would pass by, like a flock of pink flamingos amongst a host of dull-coloured birds, and not surprisingly many eyes would follow them across the hall.
* * *
When the check-in counter opened I placed my large suitcase on the weighing scale and handed my passport and ticket across the counter. The lady looked at the scale – it showed 31.5 kgs.
“Sir, your luggage is overweight.”
“No, it isn’t,” I replied. “I have an allowance of 35 kgs – see here.” I pointed out the ‘Allow 35’ remark on my ticket.
She looked skeptical. After a few moments she said: “Sir, each luggage piece can only be 25 kgs. You will have to split this into two pieces.”
“But I travelled to India a few weeks ago with the same luggage and there was no problem. So why should there by a problem now?”
“Sir, is there no way you can move something to another bag?”
“No, I have only this suitcase – so that isn’t possible.”
She looked unsure of what to do next. After some hesitation, she spoke to her colleague, a man in the adjacent counter.
“How heavy is it?” the colleague asked.
“31.5”
“That’s fine – allow it.”
The lady processed my ticket and handed me the boarding card and an immigration form to fill. “Have a nice flight sir,” she said, with a smile.
“Thank you.”
I walked across to the nearby wooden writing platform and began to fill the form with details of my departure. I hadn’t completed it yet when a man came and stood close-by, facing me. He was short, unshaven, and wore a dull over-sized shirt that hung loose over the bony outlines of his shoulders.
“Could you help me fill this?” he asked, in Hindi.
“Sure,” I replied, and pointed to the form. “Here you write your passport number, and here the flight number – ”
“Could you fill the form for me?” he asked, lowering his voice. “I cannot write.”
He pushed his form, passport and boarding card towards me.
“Wait till I finish mine.” I said.
After completing mine, I turned to his. “Where are you going?” I asked, when I came to ‘Port of Final Desitination’.
“Sharjah,” he replied.
His boarding card indicated a flight to Dubai.
“So you are going first to Dubai and then to Sharjah?”
“Yes.”
“And this is your address – in Karimnagar?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you going to Sharjah – for work?”
“Yes, for work.”
I checked the box next to ‘Employment’ under the point labelled ‘Purpose of visit’, and handed him the form.
“Fill in your signature here,” I said.
He took the form, shook his head sideways, and made way for a woman standing behind him.
The woman – dark-skinned, slightly plump, wearing a fluorescent-orange saree over a parrot-green blouse, with shiny-red glass bangles covering half her forearms – stepped forward and stuck her passport and immigration form at me. I found myself smiling at her, reaching out to collect her form.
This time it took longer: the woman could speak only Telugu and I struggled to construct basic sentences in a language I had lost touch with. Her passport was new; it indicated that she was in her mid-thirties and that she lived in Bhimavaram. She was travelling to Muscat via Dubai. Was she going there to meet someone? No – and this took me by surprise – she was going to Muscat to work.
She took the completed form back and asked where she should go next; I pointed in the direction of the Immigration hall.
I watched her walk away. Confident posture, purposeful strides. She didn’t seem dazed or befuddled with her situation – travelling alone to work in an unknown land, equipped with only the vernacular of her region. What was her story? And how would it end?
* * *
The immigration queues were long; I chose one that appeared the shortest. After a while the woman in the orange saree appeared, and seeing me standing in line, she chose the same queue and stood a few places behind me.
Our queue was moving very slowly, and after a while the woman shifted to another queue. It was a smart move; she passed through immigration in no time. But I wasn’t very concerned; I had a book with me, and standing for a while was good – there was a lot of sitting to do in the journey ahead.
The immigration officer at our queue seemed to take an inordinately long time for each passenger. It occurred to me that he had no incentive for being efficient; he had to work on a shift for a specific period of time, and whether he cleared 5 or 50 people hardly mattered to him. He also seemed to have this curious habit of sending people away on some ground. The sardarji before me was also sent away – “Get the other seal also in that document!” was what I could hear, a few feet away. It was my turn next.
The officer was an elderly man, bald and sporting an unkempt greying moustache. He wore an expression that reminded me of a strict school headmaster: a frown that could turn any moment into a growl, a general air of dis-satisfaction about the state of affairs. I braced myself for the worst.
“Where is your visa?” he asked, carelessly flipping through my passport.
“That’s the one, sir,” I said, when he came to the page with my German residence permit.
“Where are you going?”
“Frankfurt, sir. Via Doha, in Qatar.”
He looked at my boarding card, and then back at my passport.
“Where is the expiry date in this visa?”
“It is a permanent residence permit, sir. So there is no expiry date. It is written ‘Unbefristet‘, which in German means ‘Unlimited’.”
“How will I know? I do not understand German!”
“Sir, I have been living in Germany since seven years. I recently came to India on a holiday.”
“Where is the stamp showing your arrival in India?”
I pointed him to the correct page. He was not satisfied.
“I do not understand this visa. You go to my colleague in the first counter – he is the right person for such visas,” he said, and waved at the next person in the queue to come over.
The queue behind the first counter had about twenty people; I had no intention of going through the queue once again.
“Sir this is the third time I am leaving this country this year – you can see that in my passport. I do not understand why this should be a problem now?”
The officer was already examining the documents of the next person, but he addressed me: “For permanent residents there is usually a card – where is your card?”
“Sir, in Germany there is no such card. In the U.S they issue a card but for Germany there is only a visa in the passport. The only card I have is my German drivers license – ” I pulled out the license from my wallet and waved it to him, ” here.”
He gave it a cursory glance and went back to the other person’s passport. He then began to question that person. I stood my ground. After a few moments, still flipping through the other passport, he said: “Just go and show your visa to that officer and come back.”
At first I didn’t realize he was addressing me. When it struck, I asked: “Just show it to him?”
“Yes, show it to him and if he says fine then I will let you through.”
I walked over to the first counter, bypassing the long queue, and spoke directly to the officer there. I explained the situation and asked him to take a look at my visa. He took a quick look, said it was fine, and handed the passport back. The interaction took less than a minute.
Back at my original counter the officer was addressing a foreigner. I waited for a pause to break in, and told him that the other officer had found the visa alright. He did not reply, and went on with the foreigner’s document. A few moments later the sardarji whom he had sent away before me came back with his paper. “I have the other seal also,” he said, trying to hand the document over to the immigration officer.
Now there were three of us at the counter, a situation that would be impossible in the West – at least in Germany. But Indians are adept at multi-tasking. Shortly after I arrived in India on this trip, a visit to the local medical store brought back awareness of this trait I had almost forgotten about. The person managing the medical shop would simultaneously process requests from five customers: he would take money from one, ask another what he wanted, reply to the third that his order was not in stock, walk over to the shelf and pull out medicines ordered by the fourth and the fifth. Such a virtuoso performance could leave the Germans gaping. It could also, at times, be a source of frustration for those who feel inadequately attended to.
I repeated my statement to the officer. He collected my passport, looked again at the visa. He then got up and slowly walked over to the the officer at the first counter I had spoken to. I saw him bend over that counter, then immediately stand upright again and walk back.
The officer came back to his seat and completed the formalities.
“How can we understand if they print things in a foreign language?” he asked.
“That is correct, sir,” I replied. “They should put such basic information in English.” And it was true – there was no easy way for him to ascertain the validity of a visa printed in a foreign language.
He placed my passport on the counter and turned towards the sardarji: “What do you want now?!”
I picked up the passport and walked towards security check.
I’ve been in Germany a few hours now, and it occurs to me that the silence will take a while to get used to.
At Hyderabad I woke up to the calls of street vendors announcing their wares: kaaela wallah, Paaeper, and other constructions I stopped trying to decipher after a while. Then, as the day wore on, noise from the neighbourhood filtered in through the walls: boys playing cricket, traffic moving by with honks and screeches, tempos with loudspeakers announcing something, housewives gossipping across balconies. At night, the watchman in the neighbouring building would switch on the radio to keep himself (and, consequently, the neighbourhood) awake, and the Gurkha patrolling the area would come by every hour and blow his whistle, indicating to us he was working so we had better keep that baksheesh ready. Then there was the gift of Diwali: crackers that assaulted all senses without respite.
Now, back in this small German town, alone in my apartment in a quiet neighbourhood, the silence is unnerving. Do people live here at all? I’ve switched on the stereo to generate some noise and energy (it is presently playing Dard-e-Disco from Om Shanti Om) but the pause of a few seconds in-between tracks creates a void so intense I feel I’m suspended in space – there is nothing around me.
It was in the train that the contrasts began to strike me. Three weeks previously, before I left for India, the leaves were just changing colour; now they had all fallen. The wintry landscape through my window was dominated by bare trees, grey skies, and people in long coats.
Then there were the cars speeding on autobahns, fast but disciplined. A relief to eyes that ached in the chaos of Indian cities.
The announcements in German brought to ears the sound of blunt syllables I’ve grown fond of over the years.
Back home, I found copies of Financial Times stacked neatly (probably by a kind neighbour) next to the post-box. Flipping through its pages, I found myself relishing the balance and maturity conveyed there, and yet, another side of me was missing the emotion and masala I’d experienced in the Times of India, with Bollywood and Cricket news extending their reach into the front pages.
Two different universes, really. It will take a while to make sense of all that I experienced and encountered in the last three weeks. Until then, here is a quote from Paul Theroux’s The Elephanta Suite, a collection of three novellas set in India:
…India was a land of repetition, a land of nothing new. You couldn’t say anything in India that had not been said before, and if you succumbed to India’s vivid temptation to generalize, all you could do was utter a platitude so obvious it looked like a lie – ‘The poverty’s a problem’ or ‘All these cows on the street’ or ‘It’s real dirty.
Like a living, billion-strong festival of futility, India was the proof that you could not do anything here that was not done before.
The day after I arrived in Hyderbad I drove with my parents to the university campus. It was a Sunday evening, and my father remarked that the traffic was moderate. “You should see it on a weekday,” he said, “The city is beginning to resemble the nightmare that Bangalore has become.” To me, the streets seemed to bustle with activity in a pleasing sort of way. Perhaps it was the effect of light: the last rays of sunlight that penetrated the maze of closely-spaced buildings conveyed a golden tint to everything in their path. I took pictures whenever we stopped at a traffic signal.
We had been invited by Professor Ujar, a friend of our family, to watch a play being staged by the university students. It was a play by Harold Pinter titled, coincidentally, ‘The Homecoming’. When I had learned of this opportunity last week while still in Germany, I had asked father to block our seats immediately.
Entering the campus was a bit like leaving behind a dusty desert for an oasis, green and quiet. Professor Ujar, who in his greying baldness and wide-rimmed glasses looks every bit the distinguished academician he is, welcomed me with a warm hug and introduced us to other friends he had invited. We soon found ourselves walking through the campus towards the auditorium. Along the way a few passers by stopped to greet the professor. One girl came up to him with a plea: the show was sold out and she wanted very much to watch the play – could he help?
The auditorium was small – which is always good for a play – and the props – a sofa set, some chairs and a table, a coat stand and a stack of drawers – were set not on but below the stage, right in front of the audience. (We were to learn later that the stage was in a state of disrepair, hence this shift in platform).We sat in the front row – a privilege offered to friends of faculty – but in the narrow space between us and the beginning of the actor’s area were a few rows of mattresses where students soon settled down, chatting and giggling merrily.
The play began fifteen minutes past scheduled time, and ran for two hours across two acts. Although the amateurism was evident in places, it was a spirited, enthusiastic performance. The larger problem, I thought, was with the theme, which didn’t seem to fit with the background of the actors; I’m not sure if a play like this – with characters from the working-class in London, speaking a tongue that was hardly respectable and having strangely disrespectful and inconsistent attitudes towards women – can be performed effectively by Indian-looking-and-speaking actors. It was a bold theme, and I was surprised at the ease with which these young students handled some intimate scenes. Consider this extract from the play (at this point LENNY and RUTH are in each other’s arms, kissing):
JOEY goes to them. He takes RUTH’s arm. He smiles at LENNY. He sits with RUTH on the sofa, embraces and kisses her. He looks up at LENNY.
……
He leans her back until she lies beneath him. He kisses her. He looks up at TEDDY and MAX.
…..
LENNY sits on the arm of the sofa. He carresses RUTH’s hair as JOEY embraces her. MAX comes forward, looks at the cases.
……
JOEY lies heavily on RUTH. They are almost still. LENNY carresses her hair.
…………..
JOEY and RUTH roll off the sofa on to the floor. JOEY clasps her. LENNY moves to stand above them. He looks down on them. He touches RUTH gently with his foot.
Sitting next to my parents, a part of my mind was dwelling on their reaction to all this on-stage intimacy from youngsters. In the end, father liked “the eloquence of speech” from the actors, while mother found the whole thing “strange”.
On the walk back from the auditorium Professor Ujar explained the reason for the delayed start: some students, mostly from the backward-caste category who had been admitted through the reservation quota, had insisted on watching the play even though it was sold out, while the students in the organizing comittee were wary of the trouble these students could create while the play was on. The Vice Chancellor of the university had to step in to resolve the matter, and after a caution the protesting students were let in. “The students who staged the play,” explained the Professor, “are from the more elite sections of the student population, and they are not too comfortable with the other sections.”
The local Times covered the event, and the article that appeared two days later had only nice things to say about the play (which is probably what the young students need, to motivate them further). It was a short piece, and one sentence instantly caught my eye:
“An existentialist play by Pinter would never be the easiest thing to stage. So, they decided to get it off the stage, and performed in the gallery!”
The coming weekend another group of students from the university is performing Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana. That sounds more promising, somehow.
When you land in Hyderabad, after immigration your hand-baggage is passed through a scanner. The intent here – unlike the scanning that happens during security-checks – is to identify items on which customs duty can be charged. When my turn came, the official appeared to raise his eyebrows a little. “Do you have a camera there, with a long lens?” he asked. “Yes,” I replied. “I have an SLR”. He took my customs declaration form and scribbled something on the reverse.
After gathering my suitcase from the belt I tried to pass through the ‘Green channel’ but was stopped by the person at the exit. He asked for my customs form, flipped it over, and then directed me towards “counter 2” at the ‘Red Channel’. The man at the counter took the form, and asked me to open my bag and take out the camera.
“How much does it cost?” he asked.
I thought for a while, and then said: “It is an old model I bought three years ago. It would now probably cost about fifteen thousand rupees.”
“What about the lens? The lenses are quite expensive, isn’t it?”
“It is not a zoom lens, so it wasn’t very expensive. I paid a hundred Euros for it. But why are you asking all this? These are my personal belongings, and I always carry them when I come to India. In fact, I’ve carried it with me on my last three trips to India.”
“Did you pay duty on any one of those trips?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then you should pay duty once,” he said, shaking his head. “Pay duty once, sir, then it will all be fine.”
“But look this is unfair!” I protested. “The form says I can carry Rs.25,000/- worth of items, and I’m not carrying so much.”
“What is in the suitcase?”
“Some chocolates and clothes.”
“What about your mobile? Show me your mobile, please.”
I took the mobile – a Sony Ericsson – out of my pocket and gave it to him.
“How much does this cost?”
“Nothing.”
He looked up at me.
“I took it with a two year contract, and with such contracts some models of mobile phones come free of cost. This was one of them.” I explained.
“Ok, so how much can you give me?” he asked, without meeting my eyes.
This was an explicit request for a bribe. I thought about it for a while. If they checked all my belongings, I could be in trouble. The camera was worth much more than the price I had mentioned, and I was also carrying my iPod.
“I can give you 500 rupees. But this is very unfair, let me tell you.”
He gave a toothy smile, and shook his head. Perhaps he thought my offer too small?
“All that I am carrying are my personal belongings. I don’t think you can charge duty for that.” I repeated, although I wasn’t too sure of what “personal belongings” were allowed.
“It’s okay, sir,” he said, and handed my the customs form after putting his signature there.
I picked up my bags and walked out through the ‘Green Channel’. Just when I came outside the airport building, I heard someone calling me from behind – I turned around to find the customs officer walking towards me.
“You’ve left your mobile at the counter, sir,” he said. “Please come and collect it.”
He wasn’t carrying the mobile with him, and the reason became clear soon. “You could give me that five hundred now, sir.” he said. I looked a bit surprised at this turn of stance, so he added, with a sheepish grin: “If that is okay with you.”
He had my mobile, and I wanted to get out of that place; I relented. He pocketed the five-hundred rupee note in a flash and walked back inside, picked up my mobile from his counter and gave it back to me.
Back home, I decided to check the customs rules (a subject I had been blissfully ignorant of upto now, thanks to the smooth passages through the ‘Green Channel’ all these years). After digging through parts of the Central Board of Excise and Customs website, I found a page dedicated towards the customs duties applicable to different categories of passengers. In summary, it said that for ‘tourists’, articles allowed free of duty include:
1. Used ‘personal effects’ and travel souvenirs, if: (a) These goods are for personal use of the tourist, and (b) These goods, other than those consumed during the stay in India, are re-exported when the tourist leaves India for a foreign destination. [The phrase ‘personal effects’ had a link that did not work]
2. Duty free allowances applicable to Indian Residents.
The second point referred to another section of the document, which mentioned that “Used personal effects (excluding jewellery) required for satisfying daily necessities of life” are duty free. What those “daily necessities” could be was open to interpretation.
This showed that I could carry with me any amount of ‘personal effects’ as long I declared them as artifacts I would carry back to where I came from. However, my experiences with immigration and customs officials on my way out of the country did not involve anyone checking my passport to see if I had declared some goods on my way in. So it wasn’t a foolproof system. Nevertheless, with all this homework done, I could now prevent myself from being bulldozed by a customs official. (He must have had quite a laugh about “these gullible rich types who live abroad”).
If you are a regular follower of this blog, you’d perhaps be wondering how all this could have happened when the Wife was around. You see, she isn’t with me on this trip to India – she intends to visit her parents in the U.S. during the same period – and when I narrated the incident on the phone later that evening she was quick to remark that this would have never happened had she been there. To her, it is not about knowing the rules – it is about showing that you know them.
Um, well.
It is less than six months since my last visit to the U.S., but I’ve forgotten what an adventure getting into the country can be.
The experience begins during check-in, where the friendly but firm German official behind the Lufthansa counter asks me if I have a machine-readable passport. It is an unexpected question, one that I have not been asked before, and I hesitate. He repeats: “Do you have a machine-readable passport?”. I tell him no, I have a U.S. visa; if one has a visa, a machine-readable passport is not needed. He says he has to check that, and starts searching for something on his computer. After a while he is still not sure, so he turns to the young blond in the next counter and asks her if there are any exceptions to the machine-readable-passport-rule. She replies without thinking: when someone has a visa.
After check-in I proceed towards security check. There is a long queue, winding endlessly through the hallway. I join the line, and I’m followed immediately by a middle-aged lady wearing dark glasses, who shifts to the side to get a better look at the length of the line and mutters something under her breath. At that instant a man tries to get into the position behind me; the attempt is immediately rebuked by the lady who tells him sternly, in German: “Behind me”. He falls in behind her, and she turns around and addresses him:
“Do you know why I’m so impolite?”
“It is a long line,” the man says.
“Yes, and I have been in transit for eighteen hours, and these officials at Frankfurt airport have sent me from one gate to another, from one counter to another. Utter incompetence!”
They talk about the declining standards in airports, and she says she has been living in the U.S., where things are much better. In the conversation that follows, she frequently visits the how-Europe-is-falling-apart theme, and at one point refers to the book ‘While Europe slept‘. My mind immediately springs to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir Infidel, and an interview where she refers to the book ‘While Europe Slept‘. I make a mental note of buying this book in an airport bookstore. If I have time before departure, that is.
The queue moves slowly. Along the way, some even jump across when the tape demarcating the lines – unusual behaviour in Germany, but human behaviour in large crowds is seldom usual. When my bag passes through the scanner, the official places it in a different queue which means it has to be opened. The lady who looks at the snapshot of the X-Ray says there is a pair of scissors; I can’t remember putting any scissors into the bag, so a search begins. It takes a few minutes until she finds the offending object; I smile at her and say “Sorry!”. She smiles back and throws it into the waste basket, amongst dozens of other similar scissors. Despite the crowd the atmosphere is relaxed, which keeps the experience from being unpleasant.
After security check comes the passport check, and then near the gates there is yet another security check – an identical routine, only the officials are different. It is already past boarding time for my flight, and I can sense the anxiety in some passengers around me. When I reach the corridor that leads to my gate, there is another queue: a final passport check. The American citizens can’t believe it; “But we just had our passports checked!” a lady cries in dismay. Others shuffle uneasily in their positions, ask people in front if they are in a later flight, and some even try to squeeze into the middle of queues.
It is a relief to get into the flight: the greeting from the stewardess seems more welcoming than usual. I have an aisle seat, and next to me is a young man reading what I later find to be a book on Thomas Aquinas. Across the aisle is a lady reading Haruki Murakami in a language I cannot decipher. The man in front is reading Die Zeit, and the pages strike me as luxurious: it is the effect conveyed by the font, layout and graphic design. Just looking at those pages makes me want to read them.
I pick out my book (an excerpt from Herodotus’s Histories), plug-in my headphones to Lufthansa radio (playing Schubert), and push back my seat. The eight and half hour flight passes quickly.
At the Newark liberty international airport the immigration queue is a short one; when my turn comes, I am asked a few routine questions about my visit. I answer them, including one about any previous visits to the country, which I answer with a vague “earlier this year”. This prompts a repetition of the question, now in a tone that appears to demand specificity. “I was here in April this year, and stayed for a week.” I reply; the officer stamps my passport and hands it across the counter: “Welcome to the United States.”
The seat numbers in a Deutsche Bahn carriage take a while to figure out. Walking along the aisle, you see 44, 46 on your right and on the opposite side there is 42, 48; one step further you find 43,45 on the right and the ones opposite those are 41, 47. I try not to think of logic; pattern recognition serves me better. On this journey to Brussels, when I finally sighted the number I was looking for, it was occupied by a bald man calmly flipping through a pamphlet. I checked again and it was correct: I had the window seat.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I have a reservation for that seat.”
He looked up with a puzzled expression, and said nothing for a few moments.
“Ich habe eine Reservierung. Fenster Platz,” I said, pointing to the window seat.
“Ah, you want to sit at the window!” he said, getting up from the seat. “No problem.”
“Thank you.” I said, and squeezed myself between the edge of the seat and the table.
For the next few hours I was lost in the pages of Paris to the moon, Adam Gopnik’s collection of essays on Paris, and didn’t think once about this man in the adjacent seat. Then, a little while before Aachen, on a whim I turned around and asked: “Are you travelling to Brussels?”.
“No,” he replied. “I will get down at Aachen, fifteen minutes from now. And what about you?”
His English was slow and halting; the accent was German but it had a tone unfamiliar to me.
“I’m going to Brussels.” I said.
“Do you live there?” he asked.
“No, my Wife lives there, and I usually visit her during weekends.” I said. “Do you live in Aachen?”
“No,” he replied. “I live in Zurich. My girlfriend lives in Aachen.”
“So we share the same plight.” I said.
He hesitated a bit, and said: “It is a long distance – very far.”
I let it be. Over the years I’ve learned – in conversations with Germans – to stick to constructions of English that are simple to understand, and to avoid making quips one might throw around in a conversation with a native English speaker. But sometimes such remarks slip out, with unpredicable consequences.
“So you have been travelling from Zurich?” I asked.
“No, actually I was at Kassel, for a super eight festival. I am interested very much in super eight movies”
It was now my turn to hesitate, to try and understand him. I knew nothing about the “super eight” he was talking about; it sounded like series film, and some posters of the “fanastic four” I had seen recently came to mind.
“What is this – super eight?” I asked.
“It is a kind of film,” he said. “8 mm, and it is used for short movies.”
“Interesting,” I said. “I hadn’t heard of it before.”
“Actually it is quite well known,” he said. “It was very popular some decades back, but then the video format took over.”
“So this festival was about movies made with this film?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “It was a festival of detective films made with Super 8 film.”
The conversation then drifted to detective novels. He was a fan of Georges Simenon, a Belgian who wrote detective novels in French. Simenon’s stories, he said, were set in common households and communities, not among middle or high-class people. It was easy to see why he identified with that; he seemed one of those “common” people, shabbily dressed and carrying a soiled cloth bag. His spectacles, large, pointy, with a thick black rim, reflected a style that probably went out of fashion decades ago. He was middle-aged, but looked like a character in the black-and-white movies from the fifties.
“So were you at this festival to watch these movies, or do you also make them?” I asked.
“Yes, I make Super 8 movies,” he said. “I also act in my movies – I do it with a friend, so when I act he shoots and when he shoots I act.”
“How long are these movies?”
“Very short – around ten to fifteen minutes.”
This reminded me of the “The short films of David Lynch” I had seen recently. I mentioned it to him.
“Do you like David Lynch?” he asked.
“Very much,” I replied. “And these early films already indicated his ‘strangeness’, and that was interesting to see.”
“Yes, I see.”
“Why do you use Super 8, and not something digital?” I asked.
“Because I can feel it,” he replied without hesitation, rubbing his thumb and fore-finger. “I can cut it, mix and match it with my hands….you see….it is physical….I can feel it. That is very important for me.”
The train was slowing down; we had arrived at Aachen. He picked up his bag, hung it over his shoulders and shook hands with me.
“It was nice talking,” he said, and gave a wide grin.
“Nice talking to you too,” I replied.
We were out yesterday evening, walking in and around the Grand Place, taking in the essence of this city through images. No interactions yet, only images. So the only stories of Brussels I can share are those I’ve gathered through photographs.
Parmanu 