You can't judge a country by an airport at midnight, but I learned one thing: Chinese security screeners are more assiduous than their American counterparts. Clearing security after a brief and efficient trip through immigration, the Chinese TSA dude insisted that I had a lighter in my backpack. This was the same bag, with no additions or subtractions, that had passed muster at SFO. I assured the guy that I had no lighter. "Maybe it's my USB key," I suggested. The guard looked me square in the eyes. "No," he said emphatically, "it is a lighter." (ie, I know what I saw, jackass.) So I dug around in the backpack, under the watchful eye of his colleague, and pulled out...(see where this is going?)...a lighter!
Soon we will all be Chinese.
In Delhi we were driven to our guesthouse by a friendly young man from Uttarkhand, a state in the north of the country. He had never been to this particular subdivision, he informed me as we left the airport. He called me sir and spoke in a high, squeaky whisper. When we reached the "enclave" (as residential neighborhoods are called here), we did a lap around the main road but failed to locate the house number. The driver pulled over and asked directions from a couple of men--were they homeless?--preparing tea over an open fire. Bear in mind it was 4:30am. Turns out these guys were the gatekeepers for the enclave block we wanted. They swung open the gate and gave our driver directions in Hindi. We found the number--B4/125--but the house was completely dark. The driver rattled the gate and hollered something. Almost immediately, a man appeared from inside the carport.
Let me stop and emphasize something. This was the middle of a cold December night--you could see your breath, which is a real rarity in Delhi--and there was a man to answer a rattle, any old rattle, at his carport gate. Plus, this was not even the house we wanted--while the driver negotiated with the carport guy, I checked the address in my cellphone and saw that I had a different house number. I had B4/124, one house down. So the man disappeared back into the shadows, we drove a few yards down the block, and before we were out of the van another guard (or genius locii) stepped out of a tiny wooden box the size of an upright coffin. This one wore a ski mask. We asked if this was the guesthouse, and he confirmed it was. He moved slowly, like a frozen reptile, to unlock the gate, and then the front door, and then for a minute nobody moved or spoke--not the driver, not the guard, not me. There are a lot of moments like this in India, where something needs to be negotiated but no one will step forward to begin the proceedings. I think it has to do with a set of social rules which are obscure to me at this point. At any rate, I finally asked if I should go upstairs or down from the foyer. The guard exhaled, a plume of steam rising from his ski mask. "The boys will come," he said. And a minute later, they did: three bleary-eyed teenagers dispatched by the landlady.
My advice for the luckless, the confused, the disoriented, in India? Just wait. Someone will come along. He might even be the man you need.
