I enter the tarmac, and the smell of must hits me. You know the smell...it’s towels that were left on the couch too long after a shower, or your house with the water cooler only after it’s been closed up like a drum for a week at the peak of summer. It’s not bad; far from it, it makes my amygdala light up like a nostalgic summer camper (which I never was) and bring back warm fuzzies of my aunt’s house and beach trips. We arrived at the airport at 12:30am and it took about an hour to go through immigration, customs, and grab the luggage. As soon as we walked outside there were hundreds AND I MEAN HUNDREDS of men lined up to try and get our fare as taxi drivers. Holy crap. Right away some dude tried to grab my luggage to my “waiting car”, and luckily I’m paranoid and also knew that we had a car from the hotel waiting, so I was able to find him and make that grabby sumbitch carry my luggage to the car. Because I’m not a douche, I tipped him $2USD, which converts to roughly $160 rupees, and that’s a high reward from grabassery behavior but such is life. I tipped the actual driver only $100 rupees, and considering a standard tip is 10-20 rupees (approx. 15-20 cents USD) I’m just handin’ out hundreds like a baller. I’ll only ever be rich enough to sprawl out on a 5-star-hotel comforter surrounded by imposing-looking currency, and that’s in India, and Imma take advantage.
We get to the hotel, check in, room is EPIC (and also musty). I shower under a waterfall showerhead, slip on my terrycloth robe and try to defrag after 22 hours en route from LAX to Chennai. I succeed and sleep for a momentous three hours, at which point I spring up like a Hun daisy (thanks Mushu, you have a quote for every occasion). I go down to breakfast, which is also amazing. This hotel officially makes the most magical cheesy eggs I’ve ever had in my life and YOU BETCHA I’m going down an hour early so my food can settle and I can get seconds tomorrow.
People are constantly looking at me. I worried it was because I was dressed improperly (my calves are showing), but I realize it’s because I’m white. And how many times have I noticed with disdain that people in any given place are staring at a Punjabi in a turban, or a Muslim woman wearing a burqa? And here I am on the receiving end, the end clearly demarked “other”, and I am self-conscious and paranoid and fidgety and GRATEFUL. Grateful that I can take this trip at a point in my life when I am acutely aware of my priviledge as a white American and am shoved against the glass; not only do I see an entire society of those who are unable to rise above their station, which I have already done at 30, but I am found wanting by many onlookers. I am grateful to be lacking, know that I am lacking, understand why I am lacking, and try anyway. Because that’s the immigrant’s tale in America, and even after one day, I think it’s really important that most Americans experience this feeling. We’d be a lot nicer of a country if we did.
After breakfast we went to the hospital and met with the surgeon, at which point I had x-rays done and went to another place to have a 3T MRI. That’s right, 3T stands for 3 Tesla, and shows cartilidge damage severity by accumulations of water (which indicates swelling in le cartilidge which is 80% water) - something never made possible to me in the US. I waited a total of 30 minutes, had the MRI for 20 minutes, and picked up my results (including color-mapped readouts, scans, and report) within two hours. While we waited, Sam and I picked up some adroid phones for $90 and Sim cards at ANOTHER location (because they can’t be sold at the same place) which required legit passport photos that we had to walk around the corner to get and were done way more professionally than ours in the states, haha. Got said Sim card and purchased 10 gigs of prepaid data for $20 (HOLLA), then picked up the results and went back to the doc. I’ll talk more about that second fateful visit when I’m stuck in bed post-op, but I’ll tell you a few things right now that I saw driving around the city.
A ganesh painted onto a tree, his trunk melding into the roots. Colorful shrines on every corner (literally), including in the parking lot of the hospital. The tiniest horse I’ve seen that wasn’t a donkey or pony hauling a two wheeled carriage/rickshaw piled high with hay. So many colors. Vendors in every nook and cranny of each street. SO MANY TREES. Almost the entire city is shaded by their leaves. Not as much poverty as I expected. Massive demolition with new construction going up in its place for the poor. Didn’t smell as bad as I’d been warned to expect. So much beauty.
Basically, I feel like the first few days are a page right out of the Darjeeling Limited and I’m not about about it.
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