*4th May, 2008*
We left Melbourne’s neat, orderly, sparsely populated Tullamarine International Airport sometime around midnight and took the long, uncomfortable, bumpy nine-hour flight to Bangkok. We arrived early morning; the plane descended through layers of clouds of various shapes, sizes, religious denominations, and political convictions - and finally set us down on a rain-drenched runway. We may have arrived just after a heavy downpour as there was a thin sheet of water on the runway.
While checking in at Tullamarine, the (obviously) Australian lady at the counter negotiated my heinously long South Indian name without batting an eyelid. I would have thought she would clutch her throat, shout “Air, I need air, Mavis”, and then faint after seeing my name. It did not happen; she stayed calm and civil. However, there was a mild alarm (I caused myself an alarm, that is) when the scanning machine at the counter did not scan my passport. Apparently, this was due to my name being too long and not – as my fertile imagination told me – because they had discovered (after 5 weeks!) that I was a security threat to the country, or they thought I was smuggling out heroin, or they thought I was Harbhajan Singh in disguise. Take your pick.
Bangkok airport is huge and could rival that of Singapore; it seemed to be modeled on Singapore’s Changi airport. After walking what seemed like half a mile, I came to an enquiry desk, and, well, enquired about the day room where I hoped to spend the 11 hours before my flight back to Delhi. I then walked another half-mile to the day lodge. When I spoke to the women at the desk I became aware of two things:
- If you are a transit passenger, you are as good as the homeless who depend on others. You have no means and are searching for a shelter, and will be treated with the contempt and condescension reserved for such wretches.
- I was no longer in Australia – these women would not smile and greet me but regarded me sullenly and suspiciously.
“This pass entitles you to six hours, remember,” said the receptionist curtly after I had completed half an hour of paperwork. (And sure enough they would call my room exactly six hours after I checked in, to make sure that I did not take their hospitality for granted.) This meant that I would need to wander through Bangkok airport for five hours, a little like that bloke in the movie The Terminal.
I found my room, and promptly fell into an exhausted asleep, dreaming of home and mum’s cooking. I awoke an hour later, hungry and still exhausted, and wandered off in search of something to eat. Lunch was not yet ready. I communicated with the waitress in the cafeteria by means of a combination of sign language and slow English spoken with grotesque, exaggerated lip movements. She finally understood that since this freak of nature was a VEGETARIAN, yet needed to have BREAKFAST to stay alive, he would eat some FRENCH TOAST, since all the other items on the menu consisted of things that once used to run or fly or swim. She nodded intelligently and said, “Fvench Tose.”
The cost of French toast, after conversion from Baht, came to 4 dollars and 25 cents.
“I will make that five dollars”, she said conveniently, with the ease of an acquaintance who had known me from school. I sighed and smiled – I was certainly getting closer to home.
In Australia, the waitress – unless she was a grump – would have greeted me with a cheery “How’s it going”, helped me with the menu by listing the ingredients of the items so I could go back home a vegetarian, and would have counted out the exact change with a cheery “Have nice day.”
As I sat in a corner, eating my French toast alone, the warmth of my own anonymity enveloping me, I reflected that I had no reason to be patronizing or prejudiced just because I had spent five weeks in a foreign land outside Asia. These people were Asians like me, and it was our Asian-ness that united us. Just as they were not by nature wildly extroverted, well, not was I. Perhaps, this is why I was comfortable with them despite our differences. Perhaps it was because my countrymen and these people shared a slower, more philosophical, if somewhat pensive approach to life.
