Lynn Aarti Chandhok Arrivals
As if I'd never left, this time alone,
with only three months gone since my last visit,
I seem to bypass culture shock. I'm fine.
The smells don't trigger fears or memoriesand stepping from the jetway, there's no crush
of humid air—there's A/C now, and tiled
white marble corridors. The modern world
arrived here—when? Just as I've reconciledmyself to a nasty throng at Immigration,
I see that even this has changed: we're filed
neatly through switchback rows, processed, and stamped.
Even at baggage claim, cooperation:My bag's there first. The driver's where he said
he'd meet me, and the night, though hot, is hushed.*
Before the airport had a name I knew,
I came at dawn. Inside, a human sea
seemed sure to drown me till Papaji's hand
found mine. Outside, a far-off orange hazepromised a heat I couldn't fathom yet.
This early world had turned to golden sand,
each object painted from a single palette:
the road, mud huts, a distant parapet,tarps sagging on slim posts, the silty air,
the children everywhere, their ragged smocks
that self-same silty brown. Only their skin
a darker shade, and that, too, pressed with dust.My own face pressed against the glass,
our car the blur that plies the scenery
in movies, past a girl my age, like me
and not at all, who stops, returns the stare,then turns her back and lifts her skirt and squats
and does her morning business then and there.*
But now it's midnight. Walking to the car,
through acrid, thick air, ripe for the monsoon,
I break a thin sweat, notice, but then we're there.
He loads my bags and turns the A/C on.Nothing to see. Somehow, the sidewalk's cleared
of cows—mosquitoes have been "disappeared"—
exiled from this new user-friendly state.
He pulls the car out, turns to the exit gate.
In that slow motion moment, not yet blurred
by speed, the window frames what I'd ignored:There on the pavement, glowing like a moon
or moon-lit washed up fish, smooth cream-brown skin
is yellowed by fluorescence pouring down.
The family, draped in clothing dark and thin,flat to the pavement, sleeping, disappears.
Only the naked child is luminous.