Returning Home

10-11-2008 Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Dehli, India

I am more eager to get home from a trip than I can ever recall. I've cancelled my last night in the hotel and changed my airline tickets so that I can arrive home a day early. Now I'm waiting here in the airport for about three hours after travelling for 12 hours by sleeper train from Varanasi and taking a long taxi ride to the airport. Then it's just 20 hours of flying and I'm home. I'm going to be painfully tired seeing as how I'm already weary.

International airports are bizzare and amazing places. They strike me as the closest thing we have to the energy and excitement that a railway station like Grand Central must have engendered in the heyday of train travel. People come and go from seemingly all ends of the earth. The destinations are scrolling off on a large digital screen above my head. Direct flights depart soon for Dubai, Mumbai, Munich, London, Shanghai, Kathmandu, Abu Dhabi, Lahore, Sharjah, Beijing, Hong Kong, Dhaka, Bangkok, Kabul, Karachi, and Muscat. I teach geography for a living and I don't even recognize all of these places.

What's more, I sit now only a kilometer or two from real poverty and desperate need. Air travel reinforces class distinctions more than any other common activity. First, it's only the rich, by global standards, who ever board an airplane. Next, the airports and airlines, even the layout of the planes themselves are all designed to encourage class separation and conciousness. After travelling in India, I can't help but see this as a kind of global caste system. Of course the difference is that no one is condemned to a lifetime or generations in coach caste, at least not in theory.

Finally, though I hate to dwell on the seemingly negative, I have to relate a story that explains well how different India is from home and, for that matter, why travel here is so disconcerting. Last night I purchased and enjoyed a thali, a box dinner, while waiting for the train to leave the station. After finishing, I collected up a small bag of the remaining garbage (a cardboard box, plastic utensils, two small plastic cups, assorted napkins and cardboard plates). I exited the train with this mess hoping, against my better judgement, to find a rubbish bin, knowing all too well that one wasn't likely to exist. I approached an officious and well-dressed security officer standing guard on the platform and proceeded to tell him, using gestures and facial expressions, that I was looking for somewhere to dispose of the rubbish. At first he couldn't even conceive of my need (of course, I'm the one who'se confused; I'm in India, after all). Then, with a shock of understanding, he walked me over to the side of the tracks and indicated, as I'd suspected, that I should throw the garbage on the ground, next to his carefully polished patent leather shoes. I tossed the mess aside, nodding to him sideways as Indians do, and walked back on the train.