Back to the Box

7

Sunday

After a six-hour bus ride, we reached Chihuahua past midnight and checked into the noisy Hotel Bal Flo. The time-zones mystery we never quite solved. Lonely Planet made a big deal of Creel being one hour ahead of Los Mochis – if you were careless, you could miss your Copper Canyon train, they warned; however, everybody in Creel was blissfully going around with Los Mochis time – the Casa Margarita manager firmly asserted "Lonely Planet is wrong" (heresy!). Chihuahua had its clocks an hour ahead of Los Mochis, as we expected; however, at the Chihuahua airport, an electronic display put Mazatlan and Tijuana at the same time, 2 hours behind Chihuahua, which was completely wrong. La hora Mexicana!

Approaching civilization, I tried to catch up on the worries of the world by poring over the Spanish newspaper on the Chihuahua-Tijuana flight. Papa Juan Pablo (Pope John Paul) wished his people well on the occasion of Easter. Bar-graphs were plotted tracking the hottest Semana Santa destinations for Mexicans who could afford them. Javier Solana was revving up the NATO F-16s for bombing Yugoslavia so that Lockheed Martin workers could put food on their tables.

Tijuana is the only domestic airport where I've seen baggage being examined on the way out – again, an attempt to choke the drug routes to the US. Places like Tijuana make you feel like an illegal immigrant trying to sneak into the land of milk, honey, and opportunity. The recorded message playing interminably at the crossing does all it can to enforce that feeling – Any attempt to enter the United States of America by fraudulent means will result in arrest pending federal proceedings, deportation, and being debarred from entering the country for upto ten years. Please have your papers ready. Any attempt to... Accustomed mostly to processing minimum-wage Mexican workers crossing over to San Diego for jobs too menial for Americans, the INS agents found us — H1-B, "technology" workers, doing jobs too high-tech for the American education system to fill — too hot to handle. However, it was us, not the INS, who took the heat – standing in 3 queues in tropical midday sun, being bounced around windows by officers who barely knew the rules and sometimes hardly spoke English.

Having had enough of tourism, we made straight for the San Diego airport, though there was plenty of time before our flight left. We were hoping to inform America West three hours in advance that Revathi needed Asian Vegetarian food on the plane, only to be told I'm sorry sir, you must let us know 72 hours before the flight, because you see, the food has to prepared.

Monday

"The day dawned cold and grey on the New Jersey turnpike, exceedingly cold and grey..." I wish I knew an urban-desolation Jack London to quote; instead I have to make do with this shoddy parody-misquote hash. The Olympia bus from Newark to Grand Central skywayed over the dead flat marshes of New Jersey, the horizon peppered with soul-numbing factory sheds and cardboard cutout Manhattan skyscrapers. Passing through the featurelessness of the Lincoln tunnel, we surfaced into mid-Manhattan, with its ugly unpainted building blocks, and sunless streets walked by soundless automatons determined to obliterate themselves into their heavy, black coats. The effect was depressing beyond description.

I took weeks to pinch the reality into me that this was reality, that I had to drive myself to work, brake at STOP signs, respond to insincere litanies of How are you today? Goood. Thank you. Have a nice day. You too.

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