5

5

Monday.
Setting out from the rarified heights of Switzerland's comprehensibility
for the humid chaos of India's Gangetic Plain.

Arriving in Frankfort, and as I walk through the airport looking for my departure gate, I pass those for Rome and Boston, and other western cities, seeing people who decidedly resemble me.
Heading further into the airport, towards the gates labeled Teheran, Djakarta, and Delhi people no longer look quite so much like me. The occasional foreigner I see on flights to Chicago is now me.

Another thing you won't find in many airports in the U.S.; a woman mopping the floor behind me while I stand at the urinal. America could stand some loosening up.

The woman in the seat in front of me just got up to put her spongey, rubbery mat away.
The world's longest commute to yoga class.

I am reading my newspaper when an offensive odor permeates the cabin. I look around to see what it might be. Uh oh, I realize it's the smell of the Indian spices in the soon-to-arrive lunch.

So very amazing to watch the map and the plane and the names of places below me I never imagined getting even this close to: Rawalpindi, Lahore, Qandahar, Almaty, Karachi.....
I feel a long way from home.

From Frankfort I sit next to An Indian-American woman who, as she says, loves to talk.
So I talk too.
She went to America with her husband by way of an arranged marriage and he promptly has an affair after she has a son. She left him and became a schoolteacher in Houston.
Her son is grown and has married a 100% redneck, as she describes her, married without her input, no less.
That her son's wife was divorced and came with a daughter did nothing to endear her to his new wife, then the wife asked for the mother to move out. Ouch!
I know that Deb is very proud of me, that I am able to discover all this.
In fact, I am Mr. Chatty and when we part at passport control, she says that it feels like we have known each other forever.
We talked long enough for her to start out sweet and then, with a little prodding, I found Mama India.
She raised her son by herself, now she is thinking of returning to India to be with her nine brothers and sisters, saying that she doesn't want to die alone. She has made the trip back to India for a wedding, a wedding for eight hundred people!



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