Ashoka’s lion
As we get ready to travel to India, my fiancee makes fun of the passport I travel on: She says it looks like something made at home. Compared to her sleek American passport with its built-in chip, my Indian passport is like something from another time–a cardboard book with Ashoka’s lion engraved onto the cover. My photograph is pasted-in, and to make things worse, mistakes have been corrected with White-Out. Due to some stubborn Indian regulation all my previous passports have been attached, too, so the little cardboard books have begun to resemble a small bible, tattered and well thumbed through, like the bibles owned by the crazy people I see on the bus.
And in a way, my old clunky passport is my bible. The first passport goes back to when I was 16. The entire disjointed story of my immigrant life is written into those pages: my student visas to Vassar and MIT, the endless stamps in Arabic from visiting my parents in Dubai, the change in status from “student” to “architect” duly noted. The passports even contain the story of my failed marriage to a hometown Calcutta girl. Her name is noted in the back of my passport as my next of kin, though we’ve been separated and divorced for many years now. I haven’t bothered to update it, as in a few months I’ll be applying for American citizenship. Then I’ll exchange these old tattered cardboard books for a sleek blue one with an eagle on the cover. It will be as blank as the blankness of this country, and in it I will write the next chapter of my life.
So my fiancee and I get ready to travel to India, stashing her sleek passport with my old one. I’m returning to India after six years; I havent been back since the divorce. I couldn’t bear to visit the city where I met and courted my first wife, where I was married with 400 people watching me. But it’s been too long, and my parents are getting old, and its time to go. This is probably the last time I’ll travel on my Indian passport.
The trouble starts in London, where we are stopping over for a few days. We get off the plane and India begins: a queue of Indians that stretches and loops through the cold, battered, third-world looking airport. Even the British immigration officials are mostly immigrants, West Indians with dark skin, Sikhs with turbans, and Muslim women with their heads smartly covered in imperial blue wraps.
My fiancee and I move slowly through the line until it is our turn to stand in front of the immigration official; I think that it’s lucky we’ve chanced upon the Muslim woman–surely she will recognize me as one of her own and wave me into the United Kingdom.
The woman gives my fiancee’s American passport a quick swipe and is finished. When she comes to my passport, she is more circumspect. She fingers its worn cardboard cover before opening it. When she finally does, she dives deep into it, looking at the travel stamps: Oman, Dubai, Malaysia, Indonesia, Russia. The more exotic the stamp in the passport, the slower she goes.
“My most current passport is the one in the front,” I say helpfully, but she doesn’t seem to be listening.
The woman sighs, and my heart sinks. She begins to type, slowly, hopelessly on her computer screen, turned away so I cannot see what she is doing.
“Would you please step this way,” she says. ” We need to do a secondary immigration check on you, ask you some questions.”
The woman gestures to a bench where a few immigrants are sitting: an old Sikh man with a saffron turban, a veiled woman, a Bangladeshi family on the verge of tears, fearfully clutching each other.
I don’t belong there, I want to say to the immigration official. I’m not like them. I live in BOSTON. I graduated from MIT. My work is published.
But all the woman sees is a brown face and a battered Indian passport. There is no arguing with her.
“I’m going to sit with him,” my fiancee says loyally. “We’re engaged, you know.”
The immigration official shrugs. It seems as though it doesn’t make a difference to her what my fiancee does.
We take our place on the hard bench, to one side of the immigration hall. I watch all varieties of white people go through immigration, clearing it in seconds, as though going through a subway turnstile. They saunter into the United Kingdom, and I sit on the bench and watch them.
Hopelessness floods my heart, a sort of racial hopelessness. This is what it boils down to: I am another brown face; my Indianness trumps everything. It is history: The British, who conquered my country and taught me the English that I speak, have always had the power. They can keep me out of their country, as they have been doing for hundreds of years.
I look around me. The old Sikh man is crying silently. He is clearly straight from some village deep in Punjab. He even smells of the village, a mixture of wood smoke and tobacco. The Bangladeshi family huddled together looks familiar in their smallness, like some obscure branch of my Calcutta family. In different cirumstances I could talk to them in Bengali. No doubt we’d find someone we knew in common.
A wave of emotion washes through me. I’ve gone through the panic to calm, to resignation. It feels right somehow: These are my people; I belong with them. I am Indian to the core. I will sit on this bench, and if they don’t let me into the UK, the hell with it.
My fiancee is saying something, but I can’t hear her. I’m lost in my thoughts. Then she tugs at my sleeve.
“The woman is saying we can go through. It’s OK,” my fiancee says.
The immigration official is waving my passport at me. She wants me to collect it.
My fiancee has got up already, smiling confidently, in a happy American fashion. Perhaps the immigration official saw my fiancee sitting with me and thought, “Oh, he’s travelling with an American. That’s not so bad. I could let him in.”
But I no longer want to go to the UK. Let them have their stupid, cold country. My place is here, with my people. I could sit on this bench for hours.
But of course, I don’t. My fiancee is already walking away, toward the official, toward the United Kingdom.
I get up and follow her. The immigration official gives me my old passport back, stamped with the red seal of the United Kingdom.
When I look back, I see my people sitting hopelessly on the bench. The old Sikh man is looking straight ahead now, deep in resignation.
I turn my back on them. I walk through immigration and into the baggage hall and through customs into the cold, rain-scented English air. I take deep breaths of it, as though I’ve surfaced from some old, deep place.
Just after my wife and I got married we went to our first DMB show at Great Woods. The Iraq war had just begun and there were several service men in our section getting ready to ship out. Dave pointed at them early on in the concert and said,”Be safe.” I was impressed. I also found his music (dramatic violin and sax solos mixed with acoustic guitar and compelling poetic lyrics) riveting. There was also something in his on-stage humility that struck me as unusual. After each song, Dave has always had the habit of addressing the crowd with a simple, “thank you very much.”
