Amreeka

[flamy]

Wrote this 11 years ago.

 

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The sun was shining as bright as the eyes of the little boy who had just hatched a plan to catch his brother masturbating: mischievous and full of innocent malice. A whiff of ice-cold air whipped him and took his breath away as he stepped out of the air-conditioned airport. The sun was still as bright, only now it was snickering with delight and hiding behind a flimsy cloud. The sky was pure - more pure than he had ever seen.

 

The blue of it was better than the shades he had mixed in Macromedia Fireworks while designing those CD covers for that girl. He was seeing his own breath for the first time in his life. He tripped on his bag and got his first glimpse of the pavement. It was too damn clean.

 

The air was so fresh. He took deep breaths. It ran down his throat as smoothly as refrigerated, red wine. He was not a connoisseur of wines. He liked his wines sweet and slightly heady. The air was refreshingly intoxicating. He always got invigorated when he was drunk. And, now he was high on pure oxygen.

 

He floundered with his oversized baggage. They were too big and too many. He had taken advantage of the slackening of the excess baggage rules for students. He had packed in things he would never even take out of the suitcase. But, in all the frustration and wrist-ache, he still remembered his mother doting on him and irritating him by listing out redundant things to put in his bags. It had not hit him yet.

 

They were far way, he knew. But, the distance was not measured in miles for him. They were just a dozen dreams away. After all, it was only 20 hours before, in the airport back home, that he had bribed the security guard at the door to be let out of the terminal into the visitor’s area. It was the worst 100 rupees he had spent in his life: like paying for a bad, really bad haircut.

 

It was a mess. They were all waiting with bated breath for him to step out. His mother, father, the apple of his eye: his sister. His two cousins, their wives, their friends who had come all the way from his native village. His dad’s colleagues, his driver, his other driver. Runny noses, runny eyes, runny emotions. And all looking at him in awe for his calm demeanor. “How could you be so stoic?” they ask, in a voice reverberating between hurt and pride. They did not know, he did not know, that his heart, in its own funny way, had sealed the pain he would eventually feel by subscribing to his spirit of adventure. He was excited about reaching foreign shores: a new world, a grand journey, an initiation unto manhood?

 

And some idiot was clicking pictures, he remembered now, with a groan. He knew he would never ever touch those photos, but his mother would shove them in his face and point out that that was the day. That was the day he left the nest for the first time in 21 years. That was the time he was so brave (ha!), so gallant (double ha!) and so driven with purpose (damn!) to go away from Home. She was sentimental like that, his mom. She liked to note down dates and times. He was the same. He just didn’t want to admit it. He checked his watch. It was 12:18 PM on Friday the 4th of January, 2008. Somewhere in his head, a thought smiled. Friday was an auspicious day for new beginnings.

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He stumbled and looked around stupidly. His eyes looked around furtively for any sneers from the locals. He had made the mistake of thinking too highly of himself yet again. No one cared, he was ignored. And, for the first time, he was okay, in fact happy to be invisible.

 

As he dragged his bags, he looked around for a more convenient way of doing this. There were no men with towels around their head and red shirts rushing forward to help him with his bags. His smile broke a little bit of the apprehension he had begun to feel. He was too used to the luxury of people.

He found a machine to get a cart for his luggage. It asked for money before it would release its wards. He was annoyed that he had to pay. All this was for free back home. The coins jingled a crude tune, the levers clicked and the cart sulked its way to his luggage.

He heaved his battered baggage onto the carts and took out his phone while looking for a familiar face. The metallic voice at the other end informed him he was poor. He couldn’t believe 2000 rupees had been exhausted within just twenty minutes of idle chatter. Hardly idle, he reprimands himself.

 

His idle mind looked around and took in his new surroundings. He felt like that artist character from one of the many crappy Bollywood movies he had endured. This guy could draw people at an older age by looking at their childhood photos. It was a similar feeling for him, looking at the shapes his thoughts had taken in real life. He felt like any other foreigner on these shores: proud for having made it here, then reproach oneself for feeling proud of another country, question loyalty and even the need for such a thing in an ever converging global village, a little dizzy with jetlag and contemplation, and excited.

 

A gentle tapping on the glass door behind him and his phone ringing and vibrating his groin assaulted his senses, and in the space of a second he had thought of his father waking him up early in the morning at 8 AM, rain on his ever-dirty windshield as he drove to the various malls in his city to hang with his friends and hit on girls, Angelina Jolie, Monica Belluci, Jolie and Belluci in the rain while he and his friends approached with bated breath and their hearts ensconced in the greatest fear known to man, and his dad threatening to break down the door and rouse him from his wet dreams.

 

He brought the phone to his ears as he looked behind at the source of the ever-increasing din of supposedly innocent tapping. His uncle beckoned him to get back inside the airport. His dad’s friend looked a lot different than how he remembered him back home some six months ago. He looked sharper and more ‘local’.

 

After he wrestled his luggage back into the airport, much to the imagined annoyance of fellow travelers, his uncle came at him beaming with pure joy and a hint of pride and hugged him with his ever-ready, almost cherubic smile. He patted him on his back and exclaimed, “Welcome to America!”.

“Yeah, I guess this is it”, he thought.

 

Edited December 9, 2018 by flamy