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Friday

While offloading other passengers and their luggage at Terminal A, the driver comes into the bus and barks imperiously Whose are those blue rolls? Gingerly, I raise my hand (these are things you lay on the tent floor to create the pretence of a mattress). Where are you going? Terminal C. Then why are they in the front compartment? By now, I'd recovered from my lapse into a second grader's encounter with a towering teacher, and managed to stand up for myself – Because I was told to put them there. Thwarted by such cheek, the driver took a moment to make sure he'd heard me right, and went off murmuring Somebody's just made more work for me.

After having stood in the Continental check-in for 15 minutes and being called to the front ahead of others, it was discovered that Continental had really farmed us out to America West; the Continental guy had the decency to walk us to the America West counter. When we mentioned that Revathi had a requirement of Asian Vegetarian food we were curtly told that this had to be informed 3 hours in advance. We neednt have bothered, as airlines are increasingly doing away with food and water – they serve peanuts. By now it had become a fairly trot and run affair to catch the plane, which wasnt pleasant while I had to offload various pieces of photographic equipment and a B&H bagful of film to save them from the ravages of the X-ray machine.

We'd bought our tickets from Cheaptickets.com, who'd figured that the best way for two people traveling together to sit would be on a middle-seat each, an aisle and two co-passengers providing adequate buffer in case the long haul of a transcontinental flight bore too much pressure on a relationship. While trying to negotiate a change of seats, I noticed that the plane would move a few hundred yards, stop for some time, again move a distance – it was like being in a backup. I figured that we were in a sort of take-off queue; one plane would take-off, and those lined up behind would move up a slot. Finally it was our turn, we were up in the skies, the seat-belt sign was taking an interminable while to turn off, people were getting restless, and we shifted to a pair of empty seats next to a young Princeton student occupying the window.

Cramped quarters and long hours turn even the average privacy-is-our-motto American into conversation-makers, and Tim being a sociology student must have picked up some sociability along the way. He was flying home to Phoenix for the spring-break. It was nice talking to him and there were lots of topics we could make conversation on. He'd spent last summer in a village in Guatemala, part of a program trying to revive sustainable farming methods in the country. He even knew of the recently published human rights report that held the US responsible for genocides there. I was telling him that when I heard about Chevron's activities in Nigeria I decided not buy gas from a Chevron station, then I heard about Texaco in Ecuador, and Mobil in Indonesia, and I figured there wouldnt be much untainted gas left for me to buy; he replied he found it difficult to buy a university sweatshirt that was not made in some hellhole sweatshop.

His Spanish was pretty good, he said, but even then it was difficult communicating with people speaking the dialect in the village where he'd worked. He had the feeling that he did not get all out of the trip he could have; maybe this year's Bolivia sojourn would be a more well-rounded experience. In India, sociology is one of those B.A. majors that brainless girls are pushed into to make them more presentable in the matrimonial classifieds; it felt like an ideal world where sociology was actually used to work in the field. By his admission, Tim was an atypical Princeton student; stocks of multinationals paid for tuitions of most of his fellow pupils – it was not to their advantage to worry about whether those stocks derived their P/E ratios from polluted Amazonian forests or murdered Nigerians.

And what about us? What work did we do? Programming. Ya, he'd read about a lot of programming activity in Asia. What language did we speak? During the trip, we had to explain on several occasions to puzzled audiences that Revathi and I had different mother tongues (hers Tamil, mine Bengali), and English and Hindi were the only languages we shared. In fact, if an Indian spoke English, his accent would tell you what part of the country he came from. In fits and starts, Revathi makes irregular but admirable progress in Bengali with help from her knowledge of Hindi; I find Tamil far more alien than French (because of some shared vocabulary with English) and Spanish (because of a structure near-identical to French).

I'd re-learnt some Spanish for last year's trip to Mexico City. Had I known I'd he back in the country so soon, I would have persevered with the language; instead, it had come down to a weekend cram (a situation familiar to Tim) of Teach Yourself Spanish to survive another trip.

Tim had taken a course on India and found it a dauntingly complex country. In the White Plains public library, there is a biggish globe with bumps and warts for the mountains; if, like me, you've lived by atlases and maps all your life, most likely you have precious little intuitive feel of relative sizes of countries. East to west, United States stretched from the tip of the thumb to the little finger of my stretched-out palm. When I shifted the palm to India and aligned the little finger with Gujarat (at India's western extreme), the hand covered half of Asia all the way to Indonesia. It's amazing how homogenous the US can be despite its size and how incomprehensibly complex India can be with an area that's a fraction of America's. So when the inevitable question about the position of women in Indian society came up, in what position was I, who'd grown up in an urban Bengali household of Hindu origins and agnostic non-habits, to speak for a girl growing up in a Muslim family in a Maharashtra village?

I have a feeling that the West underestimates alien societies' equality of the sexes relative to its own; a case in point, I told Tim, is Iran's. Yes, women do have to go around in burkhas and cant divorce their spouses at will (their husbands can), but as recent films like The Apple and Divorce Iranian Style have shown, they work as welfare-officers, harrass family-court judges, and even make movies! Where do you get to see such movies, asked Tim. Pointers to Film Forum and Village Voice were readily handed out.

Thus this conversation carried on, off and on, brief lulls finding us dive into Tim's copies of New Yorker, while Tim sought the security of his walkman and schoolwork. In six hours, we were at Phoenix, where Tim was free to go home, and we had to while an hour away to get back into the same plane to San Diego. Having been on sub-subsistence diet on the plane, we sought out a pizza stand in the airport where we bought lumpy things smudged with a layer of gooey, elastic cheese. An unvarying characteristic of all bad food in the US is it's fattening. In the third world, one is accustommed to seeing poor people as emaciated; America loves the irony of the poor being fat.

Phoenix to San Diego was a short one-hour flight and we bothered neither to get a change of seats nor eat the mini-pretzels offered during the "express beverage service".

San Diego airport seemed fairly close to the downtown, and our hotel-room had been booked by phone. It was eleven Pacific Time when we went to bed; having got up early that day to put up the pretence of a full day's work at office, we'd been up for some twenty hours.

Next Chapter: Fresh Orange Juice; also Cacti, Whales, Dunes