Last night I dreamt that I was having people over, and the doorbell kept ringing. Every time I went to spend time with the guests who had already arrived, the doorbell would ring insistently and I’d reluctantly tear myself away from a newly started conversation in order to somewhat peevishly go let another guest in.
When I woke this morning in the sterile beach resort that is the ‘Transit Room” of the Indira Ghandi International airport in Delhi, I realized I had been the crazy American girl down the row, ensconced in a carefully embezzled ‘Jet Airways’ blanket from my last flight, curled up on the uber-modernist designed metal and black foam lounge chairs, chattering to myself (and my guests) in my sleep. I was spending the evening in the holding pen where cheapskates like myself, who would rather have a cheap ticket than a good night’s sleep (or a direct flight) come to pass as many as fifteen hours sprawled out on a long, single row of industrial-style lounge chairs that run the length of a single, glassed-in room, lit brightly as a tanning bed by the combination of overhead lights, gleaming white tiles, and spotless glass (which I’d spent my last trip here watching get cleaned…for eight hours).
The lay of the lounge (to give it more credit than it is due) gives one the feeling of being amidst a long line of lounge chairs at the beach, but with the beach in a tanning bed…in an airport…in India. Looking through the glass once in place on the chairs one sees one of the many central hallways of the airport, complete with young Indian professionals walking briskly past on their way to something more important than a motley crew of white bideshi (foreigners, in Nepali) curled into crazy pretzels and wearing whatever they brought in their carry-ons (Mickey Mouse beach towels, dressy women’s scarves, several different pieces of clothing wrapped around different segments of torso, and most comically, their heads…) to try to stay warm, make it dark enough to sleep, and generally just wile away the hours. The cumulative effect is of being on a highly sterile beach, on an industrial-quality lounge chair, looking homeless, feeling desperate, and being a zoo exhibit for those Indians bored enough to glance inside and laugh at the spectacle.
For a $1,145 roundtrip ticket to Nepal, however, worse things could happen.
After glancing around this morning to make sure no one had been too perturbed by my irrational, increasingly annoyed sounding babble to the guests who just wouldn’t stop ringing my doorbell (which, as it turned out, was actually the little bell that chimes before an announcement over the public address system, which goes off constantly!), I took to the bathroom to get washed up and brush my teeth before my final flight segment, a one-and-a-half hour jaunt over the border and into Nepal. I was and remain oblivious to the time of day, as it is dark outside and my watch is still on New Haven time. I do know for certain, however, that it is 7:38pm Tuesday, May 26th, on the US east coast.
Now, about this bathroom. I have fond memories of this bathroom because on my first trip to Nepal, in March, I stumbled into this bathroom late one night, drunk with jetlag and eyelids sticky with contacts left in too long, and was pleasantly surprised how nice it was. Literally, with a chaise lounge or two, it could be the bathroom for a three or four star hotel in New York City. Well-lit, with elegant marble, clean surfaces, and an attendant (I always feel bad for attendants – imagine if your job was to listen to women poop all day, without any natural light?), it was pretty glam for the Indira Ghandi, I thought. Pleased by the overall appearance but focused on the task at hand, I, in my pseudo-intoxicated state, staggered into a stall, shut the door around my large and ungainly backpack, and was appalled to find, to my great shock, nothing but a little hole in the ground. I grin now just recalling how utterly floored I was, and wish there had been a video camera handy to capture the look on my face. The fanciness of the bathroom had prevented me from anticipating anything other than a western-style toilet, and in my groggy surprise I tripped backwards over myself, out of the stall, and stood by the sinks, contemplating my next move. It was only then that I realized the stall doors had little silhouette diagrams on them, indicating the type of commode inside.
So today I made a beeline for the “toilet” stall, did my thing, and stepped outside to change from glasses into contacts before the final flight. The attendant stood by watching with the kind of death-by-boredom that I associate with calculus class until I took out my lens case, and began fishing around with carefully cleaned fingers for my left lens. Suddenly, she was riveted. This lovely young woman, probably about twenty, stood not a foot and a half from my arm, silenced by the language barrier we had failed to overcome when I said hello, and stared in absolute rapture. I’m taking mouth open, eyes wide and shining with interest, not moving. Maybe not even breathing – I’m not totally sure.
All of which, of course, made it that much easier for me to put my contacts in. Nothing like a crowd to get lens-weary eyes to accept sticky little spheres of barely-breathable plastic. After five minutes of trying and a second dip in the lens solution, I did eventually succeed in inserting the source of my vision, and looked over through saline-rimmed eyes in a moment of triumph – although to my slight surprise and disappointment, my audience didn’t clap. I think she contemplated it, though.
As I moved on to brush my teeth, glancing nervously over and smiling through a mouth of foamy white wintergreen flavoring, she kept on staring, until she realized I had no analogously bizarre apparatus to apply to my mouth, and two other Indian women walked in. But it’s the moments like these that make travel so fun, and so interesting, and these that I relish most.
-M-
