Amrika! - Part VI

And, the last Sunday it was! I woke up with a start, brimming with happiness. A quick call home, "I will be back soon!", a quick shower, check out and there I have my cab rolling down the Santa Monica roads. I have a long journey stretched out in front of me. Sigh! the boring flight again...but yay! this time I know my welcoming incentive, and I smiled to myself.

Domestic terminals in the US are like bus stands. Everyone and everything is so laid back about a domestic flight here that you hardly feel you are going out of the gravitational force in sometime. Observation, a keen and cynic one to be precise, is a great way to pass off your time...and, so I did. Some quick observations, I jotted in my head:

1. US people are always dressed in the dullest of colors like black or brown or grey. But when it comes to their suitcases or nail colors or hair colors, they are bright ones, for example, bright red, fluorescent green, dazzling pink.

2. People here perpetually have some half eaten cake or peanut packet or rice crackers in their handbags on which they munch on when they are bored. US people, also, love carrying back a half eaten burger, or a leftover salmon fish off their plate.

3. People here move their heads backwards and forwards more than the amount of words they speak.

4. Girls here feel cold only on the upper part of their bodies. Most of them usually wear fat and huge jackets with the shortest of shorts below!

5.  Indian settled in the US are sure to recognize your Indian origin and ask you if you know Hindi...and then ask you why you are going back.

6. Kids look prettier and have better skin than any grown up in the US, anytime!

7. Americans do not talk much. Even if they are traveling with families, they either read, or knit or stare at a distance...but they just do not chat. As a result, US airports are unusually quiet places.

8. Kids always carry separate tinsy and cutesy little bags for themselves, where, I am sure, most of their clothes do not fit into.

9. Chinese food in the US is alarmingly awful! They taste sweet, ketchup-y, floury, boiled and oiled! Yes, I did try a Chinese lunch and felt like throwing up!

10. You can be very excited at the thought of getting a day extra to live while going to the US...but while coming back, you will, anyways, have to give back that extra time, when you arrive in India a day later from the actual day you calculate in the US.

Enough of observations...I was waiting at the San Francisco airport waiting to fly away. After all the formalities, I was comfortably seated in an Emirates plane. Goodbye, I waved...till we meet again!

I slept unnaturally during my flight back home...so, missed half of the food that came. Later, I went knocking behind the cabin crew, asking shamelessly for food, who was gentle enough to appease my hunger with a frankie, a packet of rice crackers and steaming cups of tea. I was tired of making friends by then, and hardly spoke to anyone on the flight. And, soon we reached Dubai. Wow! sleeping makes it fast! I now know the trick.

And, the moment I reached the waiting area at Dubai for the flight back to Hyderabad...I felt ecstatic! As the skin colors of the people darkened around me, the languages became more difficult to understand yet sounded so very familiar (what with all the Telegu, Tamil and Marathi blabber around me, I didn't understand a word, yet I felt them to be my own! It's like getting back to your lost children after ages, when you hardly recognize them, yet you feel the love), the volume and amount of chatting going higher, smell of familiar food and of course the dresses turning more colorful...I felt a sense of immense joy and comfort in me...I looked around to see people who relate to me and to whom I relate to with the most subtle yet strong way - with a common word called 'India', with the common taste for spicy food, with the common reasons for laughing out loud, with the common reasons for having tears in our eyes, with the common reason to stand up every time we hear the "Jana Gana Mana"...anywhere.

In the next five hours, I was going out of Hyderabad airport, collecting my luggage, dreading the customs and listening to random Telegu and Hindi all around me. It all sounded like music to my ears now...and when the half-asleep security bluntly explained to me the way out, I just smiled and said, "I don't understand Telegu, bhaiya...but I somehow get what you want to say."

As I sped home in the cab at half past three in the whee hours of an early Tuesday morning, I was welcomed home with a cool bout of Hyderabadi rain and random calls from friends and family all over. I wondered for the hundredth time why is it I love India so much...is it because I look like the others around me here? the food? the warmth? the cool rain? the inability to understand so many Indian languages, yet feeling proud of the diversity? the fact that I can easily wave and stop a cab or know exactly which buses go where? the comfort I get in fighting with the auto drivers if they ask too much money? the friends who all think like me? a family who talks a lot when we go out on vacations?...well, these can't be the reasons.

...I love India for the big reason that I belong to her, and I can always feel how much she is mine every time I say, "I am an Indian". It's the love a tree has for the place it has grown up in...my love for India has grown over the years...all the years I learned to walk, talk, read, write, think, live and love. My roots have grown very deep inside this land of wonders, so deep that if you tug at it, it pains deep inside the heart...and if you pull it too hard to uproot it, I will live without one.