The Water is Always Bluer on the Other Side

It was nearly eleven am. The streets were jammed with fat yellow taxis, rickshaws, pedestrians, and cows. Car horns blared. Bicycle bells rang. And above their cacophony resounded the cries of itinerant—and ubiquitous—street-vendors.

The smoke and aroma of cheap incense filled the cabin of a taxi. I slouched in the back, infrequently glancing down at my watch. Not yet gnawed at by the moths of despair, I lay adrift in a haze of anticipation, buoyed by apparitions of nameless beaches.

A pot-bellied man approached the half-open car window and thrust a strikingly red dustpan to within an inch of my face. I sleepily shrugged him off: "Nahee, boss."

He retracted the dustpan and replaced it with a mildly offensive yellow one. “Twenty rupees.”

I mustered a feeble grin. He again withdrew his offering, and reached for a toilet brush. The driver glanced back at us over his shoulder and the car lurched forward.

A minute or two or thirty later, I was roused in Bengali. The only word I caught was "airport."

"International terminal." I rubbed my eyes with the sides of my index fingers, a bit disoriented. "You don’t know?" I continued in Hindi.

The car slowed. The driver’s voice picked up speed. "Yes, this is the airport."

I peered out the window, the bright sunlight warming my face and burning my unprotected eyes. "There."

The entrance to the terminal was flanked by two soldiers in tight olive-green sweaters. They were both cleanly shaven, their mustaches fastidiously trimmed. From what I gleaned of their attention to duty, they may as well have still been in the barber chairs. A line formed in front of them—a tenpin bowling triangle—filled with passengers, documents in hand. As I joined in, someone tread on the side of my shoe. Another pushed from behind. The three of us stared blankly ahead.

I handed my passport and internet printout to one of the soldiers. With his head tipped in contemplation, he gently stroked his mustache, and uttered something in Bengali. I nodded slightly and he waved me through.

Five days before, a local friend and I boarded a bus headed for Nepal. There were goats chickens boxes bags their owners, and rumors that the India-Nepal border was closed by Maoists. There were two people getting off the bus, one of them several shades lighter than the other.

Four days before, I bought a train ticket to Kolkata and a plane ticket to Bangkok.

Three days before, my visa expired.

On the overnight journey to Kolkata, I armed myself with a litany of excuses—some true, some not, some flimsy, others flimsier—for overstaying my visa. Checking in at the airport, I tried my best to recall them, burbling softly through my options to select the most believable one.

I approached the immigration section, steeled against the prospect of paying the penalty fee: the equivalent of 700 cups of chai, 500 samosas, or 3 goats—hardly a minor sacrifice.

My passport and immigration card dutifully placed on the counter, I peered, squinting, over the shoulder of a stony faced immigration officer. His black, interrogating eyes swiveled at me as he held aloft my passport. He stared until I was off balance, and opened his mouth to speak. In an instant’s silence of indrawn breath I gathered my response. Then, as spurious and cliché as it may sound, his cell phone rang.

He looked at the mini-screen in his hand and a ripple of disgust spread over his face. Folded peaks of exasperation formed on his forehead as he hunched over his desk and dispassionately stamped my passport. Laconically, and without raising his eyes, he handed it back to me. His mustache now sprung and wild, he lifted the mobile to his ear as I turned and walked away.

The plane was large and the cabin quiet. There was no one seated next to me and the rows behind and in front were empty. I turned to my left and accidentally caught a glimpse of myself in the window. Noted to self: shave.

We touched down into a warm and humid afternoon, a light grey sky sporadically interrupted by dark grey-cemented progress.

Someone asked me where I was going and I told them. We got into a taxi and headed to the center of Bangkok.

It eventually got dark but didn't cool off. I ate three dinners. The fan in my small room lulled me to sleep.

I awoke to an iron-grey morning with a low sky. I combed the streets for coffee and clutched my plastic cup tightly as I boarded my bus. I propped my head against the window, laced my fingers over my chest and closed my eyes.

We again passed grey buildings hedged in by grey sky and arrived at the airport. I sat in the terminal waiting to board. Before I stood up, the sun tore through the clouds.

A day-and-a-half and six curries later, it was a bright morning. Warm. I don't know exactly where I was. A white sand beach. All around me were huge limestone cliffs, and blue-green water licked my feet. I lay immobile, interrupted only by moments of lush stretching. A book at my side remained unopened.

That evening I sat twenty feet from James Bond, and fervently presided over my seventh curry. A light breeze stroked my neck and a Chang beer my throat. I danced until 3am with two Dutch girls whose names I couldn't pronounce.

The following morning I paid someone to take me underwater. On the first trip down the 'master' lost us. We resurfaced, giggling uncomfortably. The second time he again lost us. Claire and I did flips, inches above the coral, and flipped off the general direction of where we imagined the 'master' to be. We were off by a good 100 degrees.

Mom's Kitchen was crowded when I entered to have my last two curries. It was crowded when I left.

I stirred to a mosquito bite a freckle or two south of my hairline. It was 6am. I took a boat to a sǎwngthǎew to a scooter to a plane. The massive grey buildings of Bangkok again filled my eyes; this time they were ringed with blue.

I visited Chinatown with Ed and he told me stories. We ate shark fin soup, but not sea slugs; he doesn't like those.

Noon. A market of 10,000 stalls, 100,000 people, and 100 percent humidity. There was a dull knocking in my head that only seemed to shut up with guava and chrysanthemum juices. I repeatedly humored it.

That evening, Ed's son, Ben, and I sampled a bit of Bangkok's nightlife. We tried to tackle a bottle of scotch while watching a Thai rock band, but the cigarette smoke didn't agree with Ben's recent Lasik surgery.

I nodded off on the plane back to India and woke with a cramped neck and a paean to Thailand on the tip of my tongue. There was white sand in my hair ears eyes nose, but no beach. Eleven nine one—twenty-one hours and I would be back at work, dust in my hair ears eyes nose, but again no beach.

In front of the terminal, a lime-colored mob encircled a young Korean boy. His shoulders hung in dejection and exasperation, hardly belying his discomfort at being the cynosure of all eyes. A guidebook lay clutched in his tightly folded arms, scarcely protecting him from a brazen sea of taxi drivers. I couldn’t make out what they were saying to him, but I could see the specious twinkles in their saffron-tinged eyes.

I paused as I slipped into a taxi, my index and middle fingers trying to rub the sun out of my eyes. It was a warm and humid afternoon and a strong whiff of urine drifted in through the half-closed window. I eased back into the seat as the driver started the car. He began to hum a song I thought I recognized.