Getting the Hell Outta India
There must be some kind of way outta here.
American Germaphobe India Saga (part 14.2)
This is an ongoing true story of a work trip to India where I, a spoiled, frightened, American germaphobe, desperately cling to my waning sanity by finding humor in the fear.
For those not familiar with the journey that got me to this point, the saga starts here:
Let me apologize in advance for the length of this final entry, but this account is best told in coherent form for the reader to truly appreciate the stressful execution of my exodus. So get comfy, make sure the circulation to your ankles is adequate, and let’s see if you can finish this before your housemates become overly concerned about how long you’re spending on the toilet.
I’ll grant you that the Jews fleeing Egypt in their Exodus is indeed a more spiritual read, but one wonders if Moses could have shortened his account if he had humbled himself and just asked for directions. I did, as you will soon see, and it got me to my promised land a whole heck of a lot sooner than it took Old “I Know The Way” Moses.
In my last post I detailed the stressful events of the first phase of operation “Out Of The Frying Pan,” culminating in my successful extraction from Bangalore, an on-time arrival into the New Delhi airport, and a subsequent convergence of vengeful Karma and personal idiocy that have placed the remainder of my plan at risk:
Phase two of my brilliantly optimistic plan has devolved into what amounts to desperate gamble that I can overcome all the necessary challenges to catch my flight to Shanghai, scheduled to depart in less than 45 minutes.
CHALLENGE #1: THE TERMINAL VECTOR MISCALCULATION
Now that I finally have my boarding pass and have concluded my ludicrously-timed attempt to convert currency, it’s time to get moving again. My boarding pass is telling me two things: my plane can be found at gate #20 in the international terminal, and that the estimated time to begin boarding is already in the past.
Prior blog entries notwithstanding, I consider myself to be a person of intelligence. Time to science myself up a plan.
Banking on the principle that any plan’s virtue is inversely related to its complexity, I keep my plan simple: find the entrance to the international terminal, go through whatever procedures are required to convince the local authorities that it’s ok to let me leave India and enter Shanghai, get through security with as few time-wasting extra scans and probes as can be managed, and then I should be as good as at my gate.
Fortunately, the route to the international terminal is well indicated by signs which lead me to a huge set of open doors with the words “International Arrivals” on it.
Arrivals?
Something feels amiss. Admittedly, airport lingo always gives me pause. I’m arriving here in order to depart. So am I arriving or departing? Perhaps I am arparting? Or deriving?
I’m too tired and stressed for this. The cost of guessing wrong is too great, so to avoid wasting time following my dubious assumptions, I ask myself “what would Moses not do?” and decide to ask for help.
I ask a militarily-garbed dude carrying a hefty automatic rifle standing nearby whether this is where I go to board international flights or if it is only for folks coming out from arriving flights.
With a look that subtly indicates that I have just answered my own question, he points down the long airport lobby to a much smaller sign waaaay off in the distance which reads: “International Departures.”
Tick.
I start walking toward that distant sign.
CHALLENGE #2: THE QUEUE THEORY CONUNDRUM
When I get there, there is another guard doing his best to bottleneck entry into the space beyond. His job appears to be to make sure you are equipped with the right paperwork to enter the international departures area. Given the amount of scrutiny he gives to the papers of each person ahead of me, I’m skeptical of his thoroughness but grateful that he is not adding too much in the way of delay.
I’m confident that the combination of my correct paperwork and his lack of concern for detail will make for quick and easy passage.
Alas, when I get to the front of what had been barely passing for a line, my arrival coincides with a newly-arrived drove of donkey-holes who decide that lines are for suckers and begin crowding and pushing around me trying to all get in at once. I’m now just one of several aspiring entrants amongst whom the guard must divide his attention, and he’s trying and failing to do his best to multitask.
As he gets back to looking at my paperwork for a third time, he interrupts himself once again to confront someone else who has just approached and is slipping past me to enter the guarded area. This new dude is pulling a cooler on a wheeled cart. The guard asks him to open the cooler.
Not cool, dude. I was there first.
Apparently my positional privilege was ruthlessly sacrificed when I was unwittingly joined to the mob still clamoring for the guard’s attention.
Nevertheless, giving the guard the benefit of the doubt, I suppose that he, being a smart and empathetic fellow, might have assumed that an unlabeled and dirt-streaked cooler on squeaking wheels pulled by a young man wearing nothing that looks remotely official or business-like could very likely contain a life-saving organ donation which, if delayed, will mean the almost certain death of an innocent young child who, having waited on the transplant list for years with selfless, saintly patience, is even now just a few last heartbeats away from bereaving his impoverished, widowed mother whose last happiness and hope in life is her only remaining son, the other six sons having each died due to organ delivery delays incurred when privileged white American travelers demanded their entitled right to be sequentially processed in a first-in, first-out queue.
As I am only but two verified miracles and one heroic death away from sainthood myself, I piously let this cooler-burdened life-giver take priority, although I confess that my confidence in this organ donation transporter theory is undermined by the cooler’s camouflage of grime, muck, filth and putrescence. One might expect an organ-carrying cooler to be more carefully maintained, but who am I to judge?
At the demand of the vigilant guard, the cooler is opened, revealing a cache of what looks like bottles of water. Satisfied that the cooler-borne threat can’t be anything worse than poorly-disguised chemical weapons, the guard waves Cooler Dude through, proceeds to process someone else’s paperwork to let him — and his wife — and his 2 kids — through, then turns to me and asks me for my papers.
Again.
CHALLENGE #3: THE COOLER INERTIAL DESTABILIZATION
When he’s finally done with my paperwork, he directs me to a single elevator in a darkened corner all the way at the far end of the hallway he is guarding, stating that I should take that up to the second level.
I note that there is an escalator right behind him. It also goes up, it is working, it is well lit, it is empty of people, and it is quite closer to me than the dark and distant elevator toward which Cooler Dude is rushing at a speed that would give continental drift hope of winning in a race.
The escalator seems like the preferred choice to me. But I’m a naturally compliant man, so I start toward the elevator, taking a few steps before I realize that I don’t have time to be blindly compliant.
I turn back and ask the guard if I can take the escalator.
“No. Only for when there is fire. Use lift.”
So informed, I consider the matter closed and the conversation concluded. But not him. He’s clearly busy — or should be given the mass of people he needs to process — but my query has awoken within him an undiscovered yearning for conversation and storytelling. As I start off again to walk toward the elevator, he halts my escape by not ending what could have been a satisfyingly concise, albeit baffling, explanation.
“That would take you upstairs,” he continues.
Um, yes. Yes it would.
There is clearly more to what he wants to say, but my impatience has now far outweighed my already-limited desire for social interaction, and I estimate the value of the remainder of the forthcoming information as not worth its inevitable expense.
Tick, tick.
As I dash off again toward the elevator, I think to myself that if all my rushing fails and I am in the end stuck here for the duration, I may come back to this quixotic Guardian-of-the-Escalator-That-Takes-You-Upstairs-Only-During-Fires to ask him why, in the event of a fire, would I want to take the escalator UP when I’m already on the first floor and right across from me is the airport exit that leads outside to safety?
(“Safety” being relative, of course.)
Now, call me naïve, but when I was given the understanding that I need only go to the second floor, I assumed that said second floor should be just on the other side of the ceiling, which, while admittedly is higher than I could touch even if I were to execute a leap rivaling the world record for white men’s high jumping, cannot be too much higher, right? I am therefore forced to conclude that the elevator must have been way up at the 900th floor, because while I’d been chewing the fat with Escalator Ernie, I’d been watching Cooler-on-a-Cart Guy who had been let through before me arrive at the elevator and push the button to summon it. By the time I get there to stand awkwardly next to this line-disrespecting potential carrier of cooler-borne chemical weapons, the elevator has still not arrived.
An eternity of 20 more seconds passes.
Finally the doors open, revealing the elevator interior, which is empty, deep and dark. By empty I mean that there are no people inside, and yet like a disturbance in the force I sense an ominous biome lurking inside the elevator. And by dark, I mean dark like there is only a single ultra-low-wattage light bulb almost glowing somewhere behind centuries of accumulated dust and bug-shaped silhouettes reminiscent of the Mesozoic era. It’s dark enough that when the doors close, you notice your eyes slowly adjusting. Since eye adjustment of this sort invariably takes time, especially for those of an elderly disposition, the elevator designers kindly made this lift move at speeds approaching zero in a boldly futile attempt to bolster customer satisfaction.
Did I mention that the elevator is deep? It resembles a hospital elevator allowing one to fit a gurney.
Or a sarcophagus.
So here we are, me and Cooler Dude, waiting in the long, uncomfortable and dark silence for the elevator to reach either the second floor or the afterlife — whichever comes first. (As it turns out there are really only two floors here after all, not 900 as I originally concluded. The extra long wait is entirely due to the amazingly safe velocity that the lift struggles to attain.)
When level two is reached and announced with a pathetic, muffled death-rattle of the elevator bell, I turn toward the doors through which I entered this crypt, ready to dash out and accelerate to make up time on my race to my next flight.
But it is the doors on the other side of the elevator that open instead.
This would ordinarily have presented no problem except that Cooler Dude is now in front of me sauntering toward the next guarded entrance for international departures at the excited pace of a condemned death row inmate walking the last mile toward the electric chair, and there is no way to pass him by without shoving him aside and leaping over his cooler in a cool parkour move that I’m nowhere near qualified to execute.
As we mosey our way to the next checkpoint, I have time to reflect on my day so far, and I’m fairly certain that I did not pray for God to teach me patience today, so I conclude that this is totally unfair.
CHALLENGE #4: THE BUREAUCRATIC UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
We finally get through the next checkpoint after which the halls are wider. Tactically advantaged, I skirt around Cooler Dude, aggressively gun my imaginary engine to teach him a valuable lesson, and race ahead into a new section of this long hallway.
Here the wall on my left is all glass, allowing me to see into a huge room containing an immeasurably large crowd of people. This glass wall continues down the remaining length of this long hallway, serving as a virtual mural of artistic empathy, invoking a subtle undercurrent of despair designed to prepare the harried traveler for the challenges which lie ahead. Gazing into this tenth circle of hell that even Dante was unwilling to imagine, I can see security on the far side of this crowd, which means that whatever delays I’ll experience at the security checkpoint will come only after getting through this next chronological hurdle.
I follow this glass wall until I can U-turn into a doorway which places me at the far end of this crowded, cordoned corral.
This is Customs and Immigrations, a frontier of frustration where hope dies, despair thrives, and dreams are put up against the wall, shot, and piled up outside next to the recycling to be collected on Tuesdays and Fridays.
There are a number of immigration counters partitioning the room stretching back in the direction from which I just came, each with their own cordoned queue maze. The room wherein this checkpoint occurs is very, very long, perhaps as long as four humpback whales placed end-to-end. (I admit I had to extrapolate this figure based on my own estimate of the volume of the stolen Klingon Bird of Prey’s cargo hold in Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home, and so you’ll have to accept a slight margin of error.)
The first queue I come to is almost empty of people but is apparently for Nigerian departures only. I can only assume this is a special section for those lucky enough to be selected to assist troubled or dying Nigerian officials and cousins of astronauts to extricate money from their country with the help of American citizens of good character as a means to thwart the evil behaviors of their oppressive wives, uncles and/or inconsiderate Russian cosmonauts. Alas, while I actually have been selected for this honorific assistance multiple times, I cannot qualify for this Nigerian fast lane experience, having heartlessly ignored these Nigerian cries for help.
All other queues, as far as the eye can see down this long room, seem to be more or less equally chocked full of people. Although I want to find the quickest, shortest line, I don’t feel like I have sufficient time to make a careful and complete evaluation, so I start walking down the length of the room. I choose one of the next few lines I come to that looks like it could be shorter than the others, get in line, and start hoping.
Tick, tick.
As I’m waiting in this slow-moving queue, I notice that there is a girl ahead of me filling out a form. It occurs to me that immigrations officers like forms, and I have no such gifts to offer. I start looking around and notice a number of other folks holding on to these same forms.
Uh-oh.
I ask the girl where she got that form and she points me toward a bunch of people standing outside of the glass wall dividing this room from the rest of the universe, all gathered up at a mini-desk filling out forms.
Somehow I missed this.
So I exit the line, go all the way back to the entrance through which I entered the room, reverse that U-turn, and go back up the hallway to the first of these counters.
There are lots of folks filling out forms but I cannot figure out where these forms are coming from. There are plenty of discarded, partially-filled-out forms lying about, but no empty forms.
There are more counters farther up the hall so I keep going in search of a form. More of the same. I continue going up the hall, very much aware that every step I take going away from the immigrations room is a step I have to take the time to backtrack.
Finally I come to someone standing at a booth with a sign that reads “Immigration Information.”
I know “real” men aren’t supposed to ask for directions, which may be a contributing factor to Moses’ popularity, but I’m gonna do it again. I’m a desperate fool at the end of my pitiful rope. Cut me some slack.
Asking Immigration Info Dude where I can get these forms that everyone else but me seems to have yields a look of baffled confusion. It occurs to me that perhaps English was not at the top of his list of academic achievement awards, so I move on to plan B.
I point to the people filling out these forms. I mime a look of concentration and pretend to be writing on my hand. I point to the people filling out forms again. I then emphatically point to myself and give him a look of hopeful desperation.
My non-verbal communication skills seem to successfully cut through the confusion. With a look of proud comprehension, he responds, “For Indians only. You no need one.”
I really want to like that answer, but I can’t get past my fear, uncertainty and doubt.
I think that maybe I should fill out one of these forms anyway — just in case — but (a) he isn’t offering me that option and (b) he also doesn’t seem to have any of these scarce forms in or around his booth. So in the interest of making the most of my quickly dwindling time, I recklessly decide I’ll chance it and fall on the mercy of any immigrations officer who asks me where my form is.
After all, bureaucrat kindness is world-renown.
Tick, tick, tick.
CHALLENGE #5: THE SOCIAL ANXIETY OVERRIDE
I go all the way back down that glass-walled hallway, U-turn to re-enter the room, start walking all the way back into the long-length of the room, and choose another line that looks shorter than the one I left. With nothing more to do but wait, I look at my phone and see that (a) the remaining battery capacity is getting frighteningly low and (b) it is now 2:15am. I take the next five minutes to count the number of people in line ahead of me (a disheartening 28) and how much time it takes for each person to move through (a devastating two-to-three minutes).
Fear turns to panic.
I hate doing this — I really dislike talking to others, much less asking favors from strangers— but I have no choice. I start asking the people in front of me if, given that I should be on my plane right now, if they would mind if I moved ahead of them. One guy several folks ahead of me hears my desperate plea before I get to him and turns around, announcing what amounts to “your feeble efforts to save yourself by sacrificing others will avail you nothing since there is no longer anyone at the booth this line is queued up for anyway.”
I look up toward the counter.
The now-empty counter.
Tick-tick-tick-tick.
I exit this line and start heading up the length of the room again, looking for a line that is (a) shortish and (b) populated with an immigrations officer who looks like he’s not about to pop off to the loo to deal with the unfortunate consequences of dinner. When I find a line that looks right enough, I immediately whip out my most pathetic look and again begin asking if folks would mind if I moved ahead given my predicament. I’m overwhelmed at the fact that I didn’t even get a single dirty look. Everyone all the way up the line was willing to allow me in front of them, some even with a sympathetic nod or comment.
I must have looked sufficiently desperate — or perhaps dangerously psychotic — to warrant a general policy of charitable capitulation.
Immigration Booth Dude takes his three minutes with me, asks me no questions (so I tell him no lies), and passes me on through to security.
Whew.
Fortunately security is not too backed up because of the amazingly good job that immigrations is doing keeping people waiting farther up the line. Still, it takes perhaps five minutes, and when you have a severely limited amount of time (it’s now almost 2:30) and you’re not sure when they will close the doors to disallow any further entry on the plane, every second of that five minutes passes viscerally like the last few drops of remaining blood leaving your body before your unplanned exsanguination mercilessly concludes.
CHALLENGE #6: THE DUTY DIMENSION TRAVERSAL
Once through security I cannot breathe a sigh of relief because I still have to make it to gate 20.
And there are no gates in sight.
What I do see are all of the cleverly placed duty-free stands and shops one is forced to go through before getting to the actual gates area. I can see the end of the duty-free area a mere 50 meters away but among the several walkways branching off from security into the shops there is suspiciously no clear-cut short route between me and the gates. I desperately search for the shortest path through to the other side, aware that discovering such would be an achievement no mortal has attained in almost a century.
I am at The Duty-Free Challenge.
I must find the shortest route. There is no longer any margin for mistakes.
Ticktickticktickticktick.
Many a naïve traveler stuck in the duty-free shopping area of an international terminal has fallen into the simplistic trap of thinking that the shortest path between two points is a straight line, and thus the exit can be found by consistently tracking along one’s entry vector, but this possibility was mercilessly extinguished almost 70 years ago by the US government. It was in the late 1950s, and the unregulated airlines were recklessly focused on making air travel a satisfyingly enjoyable and luxurious customer experience. Concerned about this trend getting out of control, the US Senate commissioned the Federal Aviation Agency (it was only years later renamed to the Federal Aviation Administration), adding to its charter a secret directive to increase airport customer frustration by extending each traveler’s stay in the international duty-free shopping areas.
Thus commissioned, the FAA squirreled away an elite team of physicists, mathematicians and perfume sample pushers in a secret government laboratory and tasked them to revolutionize the design of airport duty-free traffic flow. Months passed without progress until a brilliant young physicist was able to bring recent advances in quantum mechanics to bear on the problem. He realized that by applying more than three spatial dimensions to the physics of duty-free design, he could route the flow of traffic through a duty-free shopping area along a path that would traverse every possible point on a two-dimensional grid while appearing to the observer as a nearly-straight line.
Unfortunately, the name of this fiendish physicist remains in obscurity, as he and his team were accidentally sucked into an early prototype stocked only with liquor, chocolate and perfumes, and were presumed to have died from alcohol poisoning, diabetes and the deleterious effects of excessive perfume sample exposure. Even today, duty- free shopping design is not an exact science, but the FAA, operating on the principle of “good enough for government work” terminated further R&D funding once the probability of civilian loss reached an acceptable 2% in their best duty-free architectures.
It is with this knowledge that I gaze upon the duty-free area ahead of me, and despair. I don’t have time for this. I don’t want to run because I’m carrying a heavy backpack and dragging a carry-on suitcase whose wheels can only take so much more abuse, plus I’m old and overweight. Running will be risky. But I’m close to doing it.
Tick.
I compromise and power-walk my way through the duty free zone.
I think I set a record, but there is no time to record the achievement.
Tick.
CHALLENGE #7: THE GATE CLOSURE SINGULARITY
As I exit the duty-free area, I approach a security guard and ask him how long it will take me to get to gate 20. I’m thinking that if it is long minutes away I’ll see if there is one of those beeping senior citizen airport cars he can use to get me there faster.
He responds to my query by pointing. Just pointing. Not a talker, this one.
Defeated, I power-walk on.
It takes about a minute of near jogging speed to get to where I can even see any signage of gates. I come to a T intersection which divides the gates unequally but thankfully in my favor: I have only four more gates to traverse. Of course, each gate is like 45.72 meters (150 feet) apart. There is a moving walkway that helps, though, and I choose that, thankful that the crowds that would otherwise have congested the moving walkway to enjoy the thrill of moving while standing still are still all stuck back in the customs and immigration queues.
Glory to the bureaucracy!
By the time I get to the gate, ticket and passport in hand, they are in final call and clearly preparing to close the doors.
I barely made it. I am literally dripping sweat. I feel bad for the poor sucker(s) who will sit captive beside me for the next 5 hours.
That said, I’m in India where deodorant is apparently optional, so I take comfort in the hope that perhaps I will now blend in with the indigenous and thereby evade Karma’s relentless attempts to undermine my escape.
Finally through the gate and onto the gangway, I take a much needed deep breath, ignore my own body odor, and relax.
Universe: Wait for iiiiiiiiiit….
CHALLENGE #8: THE LUGGAGE QUANTUM SUPERPOSITION
Long minutes later as I’m sitting on the plane, waiting for us to push off from the gate, basking in the jet of air coming out of the ceiling vent (at this point only barely concerned about its quality), someone in airport garb approaches.
“Are you Scott Hamilton?” he asks.
I can feel Karma laughing maniacally.
I reply with a fearfully expectant “yes.”
He asks me for my ticket stub to prove it.
My mind is scrambling to guess at reasons for this unusual and unexpected invasion into my drip-drying procedure. I’m thinking that if he believes me to be in the wrong seat he would likely be accompanied by the poor sap whose seat I have just sweat-drenched, but his inquisition is a solitary effort, so what manner of trouble am I in now?
I almost certainly left a trail of slime and sweat through the airport — was that wrong?
Has Escalator Ernie caught up with me, wanting to continue our aborted conversation and explain the nuanced procedures of the “fire emergencies only” escalator?
The guy looks at my ticket stub, then at some papers he has on a clipboard, and then sets me with a serious and suspiciously sympathetic stare.
“Mr. Hamilton, I’m sorry to have to inform you that your luggage isn’t going to make it.”
My first thought is that, given the many circuitous routes and bureaucratic steps I had to go through to get this far, my luggage has little in the way of plausible excuse to have not made it.
But arguing the point isn’t going to solve the problem.
I’m not really sure what the appropriate response is to this revelation. “Ok…” I respond, trying to exude an appropriate amount of shocked sadness. I worry that if I don’t appear sufficiently bereaved my reaction could be used against me later as I’m scapegoated in the inevitable luggagicide case. And were I to say, “No, kind sir, that’s unacceptable, please go find it and put it on the plane” would the guy be like “Doh! I wish we had thought of that. I’ll go and fetch your luggage now, sir, shall I?”
With nothing useful to say, I stare at him, waiting for him to make the next move.
“When you get to Shanghai you can ask them when it will arrive.”
At this point I’m tired, it’s almost 3am, I’m sweaty, and other than a successful take-off I’ve completed all of the challenges necessary to make it to the next leg of my Asian Adventure. As long as I’m told that my luggage is somewhere and that it will eventually get to where I will be, that’s fine. (In retrospect I’ll realize that they never actually told me that they knew where my luggage was, just where it wasn’t.) I prepared for this contingency, purposefully packing a few necessities in my carry-on. In fact, for those wondering why I’m travelling with two suitcases and a backpack that impede my ability to run through airports, THIS IS WHY.
So while I could get all worked up and stressed out about it, I do not. I sit back in my newly sweat-stained seat and relax, inasmuch as it is possible to do so in a seat cleverly designed to prevent comfort, relaxation and circulation of blood through your butt and legs.
And with that, the plane and I begin our 5 hour trek to the world of the Orient.
The casualty rate was admittedly higher than I would have liked, but I declare operation “Out Of The Frying Pan” to be nevertheless successful.
Life is an unending — and unyielding — presentation of challenges. Doubly so in India.
I don’t like it.
People have on several occasions tried to console me by telling me that whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, and although the donut comes to mind as an obvious exception to this rule, perhaps there is some truth to this aphorism. My week in Bangalore has exposed me to so many uncomfortable changes and threatening biological encounters that I am inclined to think that I’m ready for whatever Shanghai can throw at me.
Universe: Did he really just say that?!?!
Stay tuned… Shanghai is on its way.
