The Second Longest Day of Our Lives

The title is a bit of a lie, since these events technically occurred over the course of two days (or three, depending on how you interpret time relative to time zones and traveling). But it wasn't the longest day of our lives--that would come at the end of our trip.

I gave up on making this a short post about three paragraphs in, so forgive me. I'm trying to overwhelm you.

The day of our trip to India began at 6 am (Central time) on January 14, and was unlike any other for a lot of reasons--not least of which being that we woke up in the living room. We had spent the previous day packing our suitcases but also moving all of our bedroom furniture into the living room so that our landlord's handyman could rip out the carpet and put in laminate while we were gone. A good idea in theory, but so inconvenient on top of trying to take care of everything for our trip.

We double-checked our luggage and hand baggage against our mental and actual lists, and weighed it to be sure we wouldn't go over the limits. We packed the worst of our underthings (t-shirts, socks, underpants, etc.) so that we could throw it away before our return trip (and make room for souvenirs and gifts!). All told, both of our checked bags were just under the weight limit, and we each carried a change of clothes, basic toiletries, most of our equipment, and other essentials in our hand baggage--and fervently hoped our suitcases would make it to Mumbai when we did.

Thanks to Aaron's mild paranoia, we got to the airport at least four hours before our flight was scheduled to depart, which meant we had a lot of time to kill. Going through security took a total of eight minutes, and then we were free to wander the terminal. We hadn't eaten breakfast, and it was nearly lunchtime, so we bought large, overpriced but delicious sandwiches and made cards for Airport Bingo. The concept of the game is simple, in that it takes people watching to the competitive level: you make a long list of visible characteristics you think you may see wandering around the terminal, and randomly select enough to fill the squares of your bingo card. Then you wait, watch, and mark your card, which requires confirmation from your competitor that you saw an adequate representation of the trait. Some of our favorites were Cop Mustache, Double Baby Stroller, and Snook-a-like (we didn't end up seeing the last one, though).

As if we didn't have enough entertainment to pass the time, one of the other passengers on our flight was a middle-aged businessman who had been at some kind of conference in St. Louis with a bunch of amateur musicians. He greeted half the people walking by our gate, saying all kinds of wildly enthusiastic things ("Have fun!" and "You were amazing yesterday!" and "Hope your wife doesn't find out!") and playing his guitar. It was at once obnoxious and hilarious.

The flight to Detroit was quick and uneventful. As soon as we got off the plane, we made our way to our next departure gate, where a crowd was already waiting. We met up with Rob here. Looking around the gate area, I noticed that there would be a few babies on our flight, which made me nervous. I've been on a flight with screaming babies before, and it wasn't something I was hoping to repeat.

But that's exactly what happened: a family of four, with a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old, settled into the row of seats in front of ours on the plane. I hoped that the youngest child would sleep at least part of the flight so that we could also rest. If it got really bad, I thought my earplugs would be enough to block the noise.

Unfortunately, the baby hated flying and erupted in wailing, shrieking fits that lasted upwards of 45 minutes and were spaced throughout the duration of the flight. I felt (a little) sorry for her parents, who kept shoving her back and forth across the aisle to each other, but they seemed more bored than concerned. We ended up dozing between the blood-curdling wails, watching movies on the in-flight screens (although they didn't work consistently) and playing games on the iPad, getting only a few hours of sleep total.

When we landed in Amsterdam (around 8:30 am local time), we had about 2 1/2 hours before our next flight left. Rob had warned us to get to the gate early, however, because there would be another security screening. We took turns visiting the restrooms (one of my top ten most enjoyable experiences brushing my teeth and washing my face) and then wandered a little. It was disorienting to have people moving so fast around us when we were so exhausted. There's a deli/cheese shop there, so we drooled over huge hunks of Dutch cheese (and they had samples!).

But soon enough we were back in line, waiting to be gently interrogated by Dutch security. Not only did we have a bit of trouble understanding the questions through thickly accented English, the guards also failed to give clear instructions. It's unnerving to be expected to behave a certain way, and not look suspicious, when a stranger in uniform is staring at you expectantly, or not paying any attention to you and speaking rapid-fire Dutch to a coworker. Maybe it was just exhaustion, but I couldn't really appreciate the screeners' sense of humor when he smashed my bag against the conveyor belt with a meaty palm and said "Hold it right there!" when I tried to take it. I immediately took my hands off my bag and apologized profusely, and he said something to the effect of just kidding. Yeah, thanks for making me feel like a criminal. A man in front of us had been interrogated about his cuckoo clock, and he told us the guard kept saying "You have a glock? A GLOCK?" Not funny.

Since the flight to Mumbai was going to be over nine hours long, we were hoping to make up for some lost sleep. But guess who was in the row directly behind us? The father gave me a wimpy smile and said "Hello, again!" and I immediately offered him some gum for his child. It turned out that the little one was less of a problem than her older brother, who kicked my seat (approximately) every six seconds. I'd get comfortable, adjusting the flat pillow and thin blanket the airline provides, when I'd feel a jab in my kidneys, a poke to my spine, or a thump under my butt. He was quiet, but he was an omnipresent irritation nonetheless. The baby limited her screaming to take-off, landing, and a few select moments of especially bad turbulence.

Because it was a daytime flight, it was too bright to look out the window--and it was cloudy most of the way, anyway. Things cleared up a little over Turkey, and we watched the sun set over Iran and Pakistan:

As we started our descent, we were absolutely floored by the expanse of lights below us. This wasn't just a big city--this was a huge, gigantic, monstrous city with 20.5 million people. Neither of us has been to NYC (8.1 million in the city, 18.9 in the metropolitan area); I visited LA when I was a kid (a measly 3.8 million in the city, 12.8 million in the metropolitan area); I lived in Rome for 4 1/2 months (2.7 million) and visited London (between 7.8 and 8.2 million). Meanwhile, our current city of residence has 17,460 people. Our hometown has 1,314 people (most of whom know my parents) and two traffic lights. This was beyond anything we had ever experienced.

When we disembarked around 10:30 pm local time (January 15) and made our way down the escalators so we could go through Immigration, my senses seized on the smell of the building: it was almost exactly like Faner Hall in the summertime. A combination of damp concrete, mold, dust, old books, and some faint food smells. The Mumbai airport was slightly more pleasant to look at, though.

We were herded into a winding line that fanned out to about 50 booths, each with a number on the floor in front of it. A guard told us what number to stand on and when to do it. Guards took each person's passport, looked at the VISA, and took a picture of the passenger, all without saying a word. It was hard to know if it was okay to leave, especially since there was no eye contact. I asked the guard when I could leave, and he didn't answer me; he moved his head a tiny bit, though, which I interpreted as permission.

We had already learned that lines, order, and following instructions were not of the highest priority to Indians while still on the plane, especially at that moment when you think it's okay to unbuckle your seatbelt, but the flight attendants tell you differently. Indian passengers, however, not only unbuckled their seatbelts but also stood up, reaching for overhead bins, before flight attendants tried to bark them back into their seats (and to little effect). Claiming our baggage marked our real entrance into India, though, as we intimately experienced some of the cultural differences between Americans and Indians.

I tend to think of Americans in a crowd as loud, obnoxious, self-entitled jerks with no regard to their surroundings. They push, shove, elbow, and stomp on anything in their way. They talk on cell phones at top volume. They feel they should never have to wait for anything, and that waiting even one second longer than the guy/gal next to them is a personal affront worthy of a tantrum. Obviously, I'm conflating the worst possible traits into a horrible stereotype of how a typical American acts, but you can also probably think of multiple instances of such behaviors en masse. We usually adhere to lines, though.

Indians, while not overtly rude, pushy, or obnoxious, exert an undeniable force. They go for it--whatever it is--but do so in such a way that they weave amongst large crowds the way water flows around pillars. There was a wall of people standing four-deep around every inch of the baggage carousel, but it wasn't about throwing elbows. People just got into position, got their bags, and got out.

I let Aaron take the lead on this, since our bags were a bit too heavy for me to easily lift off the belt, and I waited about 15 feet back, just outside of the crowd. I smiled a lot. I moved out of the way for people with baggage carts, some stacked with six or eight huge suitcases. I moved for wheelchairs. I moved for the elderly. At one point, the loudspeaker announced that our bags would be unloaded onto a different belt, so Aaron waited at one while I watched the other. And we waited.

We don't know at what point Rob collected his baggage, but enough time had passed for him to believe that we had already left the airport, so he rented a cab and went to the hotel without us. Meanwhile, we were still waiting, and the number of people (and the quantity of luggage) decreased. Our flight was taken off the display screen. A new arrival was added, and its bags were unloaded. And then a second flight was listed on the board. And still we waited. My bag came, but not Aaron's. We weren't the only ones still waiting, and suddenly there was a commotion near an office along the back wall where bags were apparently inspected before being loaded onto the conveyor. After several other people from our flight collected their bags, Aaron's bag finally showed up--literally the last bag from our flight.

We had no idea what time it was, and we didn't see Rob anywhere, so we proceeded through another security checkpoint and started walking down a hallway that would take us outside. There was a currency exchange, a set of double doors with another security checkpoint, two prepaid taxi booking counters, and one final doorway before the outside world. Aaron took a little over half of our cash and exchanged it for rupees, coming back with a wad of different sized bills. We had 5,700 rupees but Aaron hadn't paid attention to the exchange rate and I was in no state to perform mental math.

We debated getting a prepaid taxi, but then we thought maybe Rob would be waiting outside for us (or that maybe a ride had been arranged for us). The last doorway, leading to a covered courtyard, was guarded by men in military uniforms, armed with large rifles. It was the point of no return. I was trying desperately to hold it together, but my exhaustion and fear were catching up with me, as well as some animal-emotion at the idea of being alone in a gigantic city with no way to contact the only person we knew. It felt like anger, panic, frustration, but it was also colored by something else I had only felt one other time in my life, when I wrecked my parents' car. It felt like the full weight of that SUV hitting me, but played inside my body as an endless tape loop.

Stepping out into the courtyard, I felt Mumbai hit me for real: a solid wall of sounds and smells. My senses tried sorting and classifying them, but it was like my brain and body weren't fast enough. In the center of the noise was a babble of hundreds of voices, coming from the people assembled around the fence enclosing the courtyard. We scanned the crowd for Rob, or for our names on one of the hundreds of signs held by the assembled drivers, but there was nothing for us. There was also a steady cacophony of car horns. It wasn't just an intermittent beep here and there; it was a non-stop succession of jabs and shrieks. At the same time I heard all of the cars, I also smelled their exhaust--as if I couldn't smell it until I acknowledged the sound. There were overtones of smoke and garbage, raw sewage, strong cologne. By then, I also realized I was the only person standing still: everything else around me was moving, and had a sense of purpose.

We decided that we might as well take our chances and book a prepaid taxi to the hotel, since it seemed that we had been left behind. I stood by our bags while Aaron waited in line. I only realized I was crying when I started sniffling. I tried to do it silently, so as not to draw more attention to myself, but the more I tried to control it, the harder it became. I was not up to this. I could not handle this. I was going to break into pieces and get swept into the street, where I would be promptly ground into the pavement. And it wouldn't matter, because I didn't even exist anymore.

Aaron came back with a receipt with a number on it, and we made our way out of the courtyard to the waiting taxis, where four men ran up to us and took our luggage out of our hands. We didn't need help, but we were too tired and numb and overwhelmed to think about refusing, so we followed them. We assumed one of them was the driver. We passed several regular cars, a few older black-and-yellow cars, and stopped at what can only be described as the tiniest van in the world. It had driver and passenger doors, as well as sliding doors on each side, but it was shrunken down. It was also heavily dented, very dirty, and of questionable road-worthiness.

The men loaded our bags into the back of the van (it didn't all fit, so one of the bags had to ride in the front passenger seat) and the men asked Aaron for tips. Not thinking, he pulled out the entire wad of cash, and they proceeded to try to strip the largest bills from his hands. "Give me this one, this is the right one!" a man said, pointing at a thousand rupee note (which is about $20). I tried to tell Aaron "small bills," but part of it came out in a sob, so I gave up on talking. I don't know what he ended up giving them, but I'm sure it was too much for the 20 feet they rolled our bags, which we had been doing with two fingers.

Our driver got in the car (on the right side, not the left) and started the motor, which sounded more like a blender or weed-whacker than a vehicle. I kept expecting it to either stall or shoot out a smoothie. He drove about 500 feet, pulled over next to an overpass, turned off the car, got out and walked away. Aaron and I looked at each other, and I saw a tiny measure of the panic I felt reflected in his face. I immediately imagined how we were going to be yanked out of the van. Kidnapped. Robbed. Some kind of horrible dismemberment and/or death. And then the driver got back in, started the cab, and asked us where we wanted to go.

It was also at this point that we learned that our driver spoke and understood very little English, which was not comforting. Aaron told him the name of the hotel, and we had to hope that he knew where to go. I'm not proud of it, but I was completely useless by this point, lost in my own panic and unable to control my sobbing. Aaron kept asking me to keep it together, just in case my fear put us in some kind of danger.

Soon we were riding through the darkened streets of Mumbai at a speed incompatible with feeling safe in a vehicle that offered little to hold on to, save for a grubby rail near the ceiling. There wasn't much traffic, but it didn't seem to matter to our driver, who ignored lane distinctions where they did exist. He did not obey traffic signals to stop or slow. He did not use his blinkers to turn or change lanes. He swerved and honked and swerved, weaving between motorcycles, cars, and trucks with no concern for their size, speed, or proximity. No wonder all of the cabs were dented.

When I wasn't staring at my knees, trying not to vomit from the physics of the ride, I looked out the window. It was gritty and dilapidated in a way I had never experienced before, but also impressive in an odd way, like it was built on a dare. Lean-to shacks and two-story buildings were nestled between (or sometimes under) high rise buildings, all in various stages of decay, repair, or disrepair. Some windows were screened in, some had metal bars, but others were open to the night, which was about 70 degrees. Laundry hung from balconies and between buildings, and I thought about the smoke and smog, how those clothes would be dirty again before they air dried.

Nothing about the streets or buildings looked intentional. It was more like a once-orderly city was lifted to a great height and then dropped in one motion, left to settle however it happened to fall, suffering significant damage in the process. It took me a minute to realize that the sheeted bundles on the sidewalks were people--the homeless, sleeping beneath overpasses, in doorways, in any open space. A few people were walking, mostly in the street, since there didn't seem to be many actual sidewalks. Some squatted near the median, relieving themselves, oblivious to oncoming traffic. Even though the windows were closed, I could smell piss, smoke, exhaust, and rotting food.

And then I saw something I had been initially been looking forward to: cows. There were cows in the street! But then my brain registered the entire scene. A pack of stray dogs was rooting through piles of garbage one or two feet high, wandering around a group of overflowing trash bins, accompanied by six cows. I was hysterical, both laughing and crying, convinced that we had died and gone to hell, because this could not possibly be happening. Just as we couldn't possibly be strapped into a rickety taxi, shooting through a city on the other side of the world. I kept thinking we weren't taking main roads, that we were cutting though the heart of the city, but it occurred to me that a city this large was all one vigorously beating heart.

We passed a bank with a digital clock and found out that it was almost 2:30 in the morning. We had been in the cab at least 45 minutes, and we had no idea if we were close to the hotel. I kept looking out the window, expecting the scenery to change in some way, but the basic elements remained the same. Broken buildings. Open fires. Stray dogs. And the homeless, everywhere I looked. It was absolutely heartbreaking to know that for every one I saw, there were thousands more. I felt like I needed to be ashamed of my own life, and all its excesses.

But suddenly the driver was talking to us, pointing through the streaked windshield at the Gateway of India, the harbor, and the hotel. He pulled up to a gate with a series of pillars blocking the driveway. Uniformed men walked around the car with mirrors on long poles. There were security cameras everywhere. Before we could even reach for the handles, the doors were opened for us and our luggage was unloaded by white-gloved hands. The guards made eye contact and welcomed us, waving us towards the baggage scanner and metal detector, offering to take our bags (which we held onto, since we didn't want to try figuring out how to tip them).

The moment we walked through the revolving door into the hotel lobby served as the largest imaginable contrast to what we had just experienced in the cab. The lobby was immaculate, hushed, air conditioned. There were marble floors. In the center of the lobby, there was a six-foot tall arrangement of fresh orchids, which was the only smell. It was the embodiment of opulence, and we had little basis of comparison. We found that the difference between the outside world and the interior of the Taj is a workable metaphor for India as a whole.

 Fresh Orchids, Lush Upholstery, and a Gorgeous Area Rug

The front desk employees were almost painfully polite, but also very quiet. We're Super 8 kind of people. We use coupons. We do not stay in fancy-schmanzy hotels. But we were treated like we were the most important human beings in existence, which was extremely uncomfortable. There was a letter from the general manager, welcoming us to the hotel. There was also a note to call Rob in 1602.

By the time we had finished checking in and taken the elevator to our room, it was 3 am. I had stopped crying when we got out of the cab, but only because I was completely used up by that point. Within ten minutes of getting into the room, Rob called us to let us know that we'd be meeting him and our celebrity host for breakfast in one of the restaurants downstairs, after which we would begin our first full day of shooting. We earned every minute of the 3 1/2 hours of sleep we got that night.