Sri Lanka #2

Part One here.

There was a wee bit of confusion over the documentation that was required to enter the country. Calling the Sri Lankan embassy yielded only a sing-song voices that seemed to differ, based on the person spoken to, on everything except that the new Visa regulations, announced two days before we were to depart, would come into effect on the first of January, 2012.

My father told me to carry passport photographs, to be safe, and asked me to remind Ka to do the same. I didn’t want to be a nag, and assumed that Ka would carry them anyway, having travelled to Turkey and Vietnam/Cambodia in the recent past, and so (I assumed) fairly fluent in the language of immigration. Just to check, I asked him after he had landed up in Chennai whether he had any passport photographs.

Uh… Oh. Well, a couple can be produced at a pinch.

Good enough.

He’d told me that he was lurking around the SpiceJet counter, and asked me to meet him there once I entered. I was semi-trotting, trying to be quick about it, hoping I wouldn’t miss the flight due to the serpentine immigration lines that are the bane of international travellers from Chennai.

The first thing I noted was that it had been a really long time since I’d flown international. The last time I had flown international, or so I think, the international check-in counters used to be what are now the domestic counters at the airport. The new space given to the international terminal feels like an installation space – a vast room, with some puny (by comparison) counters scattered over the area.

The second thing was the ubiquity of students from my college. Literally the first person I see as I’m trotting in is a junior. An involuntary (and entirely unfair) curse floats through my thoughts. It gets better – turns out he’s headed to Colombo too, with two others from college. Oh, goody. Not that it affected me at all – I recognised even then that I was being churlish about wanting this to be my holiday, and not having it sullied by them. They probably felt the same way about me. In any event, they were headed to another part of the country. I did, however, extract an affirming second, third and fourth opinion from them about the passport photograph.

I find Ka. He’s wandering around like a lost puppy, dead phone in hand and ukulele in mouth. He comes up to me and paws at my backpack for my charger – I still don’t know what he was up to the night prior, but he’d just barely made it out of Bangalore with his passport and ticket. Like a puppy that’s just dragged a bird into the living room, he’s wagging his proverbial tail and glowingly proud that he foraged out two passport photographs.

Where are they?

In my backpack.

Where’s your backpack?

Um… I checked it in.

Right. That bridge could be crossed at the appropriate time – never, as it transpired; they weren’t required.

I check myself in, and join the immigration queue. We spent our time staring at a couple of men in front of us, one of whom was a dead ringer (and I do mean completely) for Paul McCartney, circa 1966. His companion looked the non-descript slightly scruffy and greasy type who would’ve played bass guitar for second-tier mid-90s BritPop band like Suede. Ka started humming ‘The Drowners’, and was impressed when I correctly identified it.

We’re filling our Departure Cards while standing in line, and come to the box labelled ‘flight number’. We look at our respective boarding passes, and under flight number, standing in proud, bold, black solitude, is ‘1’. That’s it. Just… ‘1’. It was the same for everyone, of course. We weren’t about to write ‘1’ in the six odd boxes provided, so presented the empty spaces and boarding passes to the lady at immigration – turns out it’s SG001. But SpiceJet are kool like dat.

The immigration lady asks the standard questions – what do you do for a living, why are you going to Sri Lanka, when are you coming back etc. She asks for proof of return, and I produce it. Ka had checked his in, and was in a bit of a pickle. I told her that he was with me, and she let him through, at which point I say, ‘wait. No. I don’t know you. Do I? Who are you?’ He grins sheepishly and scurries away, his passport having already been stamped, while she starts to have second thoughts about letting him through. I was informed immediately that this was not appropriate behaviour at an immigration counter. Oops.

Seated next to me on the flight was the sort of world-hopping Frenchman that I long to be. Though, not as smelly. Let’s call him Henri. Henri had his hair slicked back over his balding head, had really bad smoke-tinged breath, wore a ratty tee, shorts and Hawaii chappals, and was fiercely protective of his jolna, in which he was carrying Mysorepau. We were sitting in the emergency exit row, and he was muttering darkly about opening the exit out of spite because he had been forced to stow the bag in the overhead compartment, the air hostess stony to his protests of his ‘soft cakes’ being squished.

Henri was a bum kind of Frenchman, flitting between Pondicherry (but not Auroville) and Sri Lanka over the year, living off undisclosed means (though he did mention something about an Army pension). He was a diminutive man, extremely talkative and effusively theatrical, possessing an entirely misplaced confidence that nevertheless sat well because of his infectious gregariousness, slippery accent and wholeheartedness, whether recommending the sandwiches served on the plane, the king coconuts on the streets of Sri Lanka, or encouraging me to bang someone in Trinco.

What does he do with his time?

Oh, you know. I sit on the beach, I read, I hunt women. I hunt them… never Sinhalese though. Never even look at them, because you will get shot. But, the tourists. Aah, the tourists…

He flips open the in-flight magazine and looks at an ad with Priyanka Chopra.

Oh, who is she? I must have her. She is in Bombay, you say? I will go to Bombay, and I will have her. Just you wait.

An in-flight announcement is made.

This is a page for Mr. Mohammad. Mr. Mohammad?... Uh, Mr. Mohammad sitting in seat number XX.

Ka was sitting behind me. We both burst out laughing at the perfect ambiguity of it, and spent the next few hours being gleefully PI – whether the same page on a flight to Dubai (Mr. Mohammad.. Yes? Yes? Yes? Yes? Yes? Uh.. Mr. Mohammad… Abdul? Yes? Yes? Yes? Yes? Yes?), or a page for Mr. Singh on a flight from Punjab to Canada.

And then we landed, went through baggage, and were out.

Colombo. 

(to be continued)