Anniversary in Samland : Part 1

Memoirs of a Journey

It was a sunny New York afternoon a little bit more than a year back when the businesslike immigration official asked me for my thumbprint for the record and I knew I had been formally let into a new country, which I was to call home for the next five odd years. Four if my visa wasn't renewed. It didn't feel like much. Hundreds of my kind made this trip every year. I had known I'd be coming here for quite sometime. The language was the same as the one I had grown up reading books in, and even speaking quite a bit. The people, the sights, the colors weren't particularly new either : a staple diet of Hollywood movies and t.v. programs (all Indians I have spoken to agree that Hollywood is much more representative of American life than Bollywood is of Indian life (perhaps there is no single homogeneous Indian way of life? ) and a lot of hearsay had all led me to vicariously forming a certain mental picture to which things seemed to truly correspond, right from the overtly friendly air crew to the overtly businesslike immigration official. To think that so many people have made livelihoods and reputations crafting prose about the alienation engendered in the crossover experience, or even the lighter side of the culture shocks stemming from the inscrutability of a foreign society!

Newark airport was easy to negotiate. Raised in a country where jostling with crowds is the order of the day, the orderliness of western civilization and the smooth efficiency of its ways are bound to impress. We stood in neat queues to get the trolleys we would need for carting our luggage. I used my first American currency to get a trolley for myself, a couple of quarters I think it was. The socialist Bengali in me couldn't help complaining that what was free at Dum Dum or Sahar was rupees 20 here. I am very bad at figuring out how things are done at the first go, and what further exacerbates my problem is a certain social shyness that prevents me from seeking assistance very readily. Two things,I found, would greatly help my likes out here. There were written instructions, directions, maps, signs, how-to-do-s all over the place....turn this knob to get water, pull that crank to release a trolley, put a coin here, press that button...it was wonderful for the self-esteem of a mechanical-intuition-challenged person like me. America as I found out on that very first day was a very verbosely communicative place, not in the sense of the backslapping freestyle social interaction of a Bangali adda, but in an unpretentious formally friendly way. Americans write reviews online for things that they buy or places they visit, and others decide what to buy and where to eat after reading those usually objective reviews. Information is valued. A lot of things that we in India would do from intuition and gut feeling is spelt out exactly here. In India there is method in madness. Here there is a madness for method. Suits me fine I think. It is only when things are carried to an extreme when people begin to attend courses to enrich their love lives or when a student needs explicit instruction to do things which the faculty called common sense should readily suggest, that this overt mechanization begins to irk me. The other thing was the social friendliness of the people. I have all along heard stories of broken families, of extreme individualism and the self-seekingness of an unapologetically capitalistic society, of a concomitant capacity for violence, all of which are perhaps true. But my first impressions of the social dynamics in the public space were entirely favorable. People were polite and offered help readily without being too intrusive. After the rough behavior of the overworked immigration clerk in Mumbai I welcomed American good cheer like a breath of fresh air. If individualism was all about respecting the personal spaces of individuals, I decided, I was all for it.

The first "culture shock" was that our US Airways flight from Newark to Charlotte,NC had been cancelled. My impression ("vicarious") of western culture was that things run dot on time and people overthrow governments if there are exceptions to the rule. But here there were cancelled flights left and right and irritated but very resigned American faces everywhere, an expression I used to think would suit more the flood-ravaged Bihari farmer stoically resigned to his inescapable Karmic fate. But stuck we were and I was a bit desperate to find a way out, for however much I hate to admit it now, there was a slight fear of the unknown working in me then not unlike when my schoolbus had marooned me in my seventh grade. Even inquiries to be made of airlines people need you to stand in queues and I made my first cardinal faus pax when I strolled across to the counter paying scant regard to the orderly queue that had formed some way off leaving a sort of clearance in between. A dispassionate and tailor-made reprimand and a few more queues later, we were told by US Airways that we would be accommodated on a Delta flight next morning that would take us to Atlanta. The luggage we had checked in already would be accordingly taken care of. The efficient damage-control measure notwithstanding, my faith in western efficiency was shaken a bit.

I had a contact in NJ, a third cousin who does software, whom I decided not to bug. My travel mate ( more on him later) and I decided to tide over the night in the very comfortable and clean looking airport. That decided it was time to look for food. This was the land of dollars, and on top of that an airport, and food things seemed exorbitantly priced. I think I decided on some Chinese, somehow I felt the oriental sense of money's worth would ensure a more satisfactory meal. It was near about the food place, that a middle-aged Indian-looking lady I had spotted earlier in a queue, befriended us. She had probably figured we were lost-looking jetlagged just-off-the-boat people and decided very kindly to treat us both to cups of tea along with some friendly conversation. It turned out the lady and I spoke the same native tongue for she was Bangladeshi. Her flight to Boston had also been delayed. Conversation and polite farewell exchanged with a foreign woman of the same native tongue in a mutually and truly foreign country (ah the wonders of identity politics!) later, we were spread out on chairs trying to sleep out the night, as the airport grew colder and more deserted. I had a host of books for company......Amitav Ghosh with his artsy treatment of identity was appropriate but Douglas Adams more so. He was so right in declaring airports to be the most boring places on earth in Hitch hikers Guide. But alas I did not have Douglas, I seriously could have done with a good laugh or two.

Things run smooth next morning. I get to call home from Atlanta. This airport has a rather ingenuous design with endlessly long and claustrophobically narrow aisles for terminals. More waiting. My friend and travel-mate Gaurab, a fellow would-be-physics-grad-student at UF from Orissa is a lively person with an interesting background and in no seeming urgency to inform his family of his whereabouts. While I look for the public phones, he hunts for a place where he can light up peacefully. I share a smoke with him. Trained to be an electrical engineer, he has worked in microfinance in Hyderabad, before that with an NGO in the Chhota Nagpur tribal belt and now he wants to do particle physics armed with only a year's experience of assisting physicists with computer simulations in an Indian research institute (this place where I have done a summer's work is a favorite of mine as well). No wonder he has an interesting wellspring of experience to draw upon. His only defect is his anecdotes sometimes seem to focus on himself a bit too much and drag on a bit too much as well, but I soon learn to optimize my attention levels between him and a book to get juicy bits out of both. But I do have an unreserved respect for people who follow their passions, particularly if that happens to be physics, and so I decide we get along pretty well.

The plane that ferries us to Gainesville is not a jet but an old-fashioned propellor-driven craft. Small and not very comfortable. The air conditioning is weak and the air hostess walks up and down the aisle fanning passengers with a magazine! Unlike India they don't serve meals on board in domestic flights here. I feel so thirsty that I have to request an extra glass of apple juice. Among cranberry, orange and a few other kinds of berry juices they have, I had already decided that apple was my cup of tea. Gainesville from above seemed just like a giant expanse of green. I was already planning a few hiking expeditions into the woodlands when we touched down. The harsh Floridian sun of August greets us but we had already been singed by the 104 F (40 C...a minor culture irritant alongwith ddmmyy) Georgian counterpart. Early fall as we learnt later is the hottest time of year here.

Ritesh and Vivek, my seniors from IIT Kanpur are there to receive me at the airport. Gainesville seemed less romantic from the surface. Odd buildings here and there, all one-storied and long and flat-looking, empty looking roads, unremarkable sceneries. I am ferried to Vivek's apartment in Ritesh's car. Ritesh da is big and strong and effortlessly lifts my suitcase on his shoulder to carry it up a flight of steps. Vivek is the one I had been friends with at Kanpur and he's going to be my host and mentor here....a "baap" in the iitk tradition if you like.

The apartment is furnished, clean and spacious. Vivek lives alone unlike most Indian students here for reasons that are still shrouded in mystery for me (nor shall they be mentioned anywhere in this blog). He has this quiet assured air about him, a sort of languid efficiency that is at once becalming and re-assuring. Directly across his living room from the main door to his apartment is a large window overlooking a parking lot and a basketball court where some Latino men play futsal. The window faces west and lounging on Vivek's sofa with a glass of tea in my hand I witness a glorious sunset. A strange sadness grows upon me for all that I have left behind and a romance that did not quite blossom (my apologies here for the flippancy I showed earlier towards crossover fiction). I have since been in love with that window of his. All apartments in Gainesville and I guess the US have large windows, but there are only a few that offer a vista which is distinctive and eloquent and a bit off the beaten track of American homogeneity.