Dallas via Las Vegas

We are off to Dallas, my first flight within the country. At San Jose airport, we are assisted by a short, tubby, dark, woman in the airline uniform who looks like she may be Indian. She wants to help us with our check-in but we want to do it ourselves because we would have to tip her precious dollars. She senses our reluctance, switches to Hindi and tell us to just come along with her. Boarding passes in hand, we feel more relaxed about talking to her and it looked like she wanted to talk too. “You are from India, aren’t you, from where”. We tell her and ask where she is from. Her accent sounds Bihari. “I am from Fiji”, she says “But my grandfather was from India. From Bihar, I think.” Would she like to see the place where her family came from? “Yes, I want to. There is a wedding in the family this year (which will consume her savings); maybe next year I will have the money. Make sure you reach Gate 13 in 45 minutes”.

The plane takes off; there is a lot of laughter and conversation. The cabin crew is informal and I thought it was a group that knew each other from before. Its only after eavesdropping for a while that I realized they had just met. This is the leitmotif of flights within the country, No “kripaya dhyaan dijeye” scene; just chatter and jokes.

We have to change at Las Vegas. We get off the flight and I was completely unprepared for the scene that awaited. Slot machines everywhere. Disc shaped neon signs with lights in concentric circles, spinning with music. People sitting in front of screens, feeding money to the machines. I have to play, I decided. So I went up to one woman - 50-ish, platinum blonde curls ' and asked if I could watch her. “Sure, dear”, she says. I asks her what she is playing. “It’s my favourite. It’s called “Nurses’ Station.” I can’t remember the name of the game exactly but it was about different kinds of surgery you can opt for and as you press the buttons, the nurses tell you if you have insurance cover to have the surgery. If you do, you win money. I feel like laughing but you need someone with you who also finds this funny. I ask an attendant for an easy slot machine game and give myself a limit of five dollars. Within four minutes the machine has eaten up four dollars. Dr Pattnaik plucks at my sleeve. “Enough, Suchitra, five dollars are over”. He sounds really worried at my rapid slide into sin.

Dallas is easily the ugliest place in the world. There is concrete everywhere, everything is giant-sized, even roads inside the city have ten lanes. Actually everything in the US is giant-sized ' the cars look like trucks; my colleague from Orissa and I ordered a single breakfast (they kindly let us share) and we could not finish our halves (the omlette looked like it was made from about 12 eggs). We left the restaurant filled with guilt at the wasted food and passed by other tables with plates heaped with uneaten food. The supermarkets are HUGE and a banana goes from fingertip to elbow. If the word humongous did not exist it would have to be invented to describe this landscape ' huge, monstrous does not effectively capture it. (The word was coined, in America of course, sometime in the late 1960s).

We have a lunch meeting with the local desis ' discuss debt bondage over dal makhani. I am already getting tired of this. After the meal we insist on being shown the city; there is no public transport here ' the car companies have made sure such systems are never put in place ' and we cannot manage on our own. We would like to see the memorial to John Kennedy who was shot here in 1963. Our host cannot find the place and when we do it is deserted. The plaque says the memorial was designed by Philip Johnson ' an ugly, soulless, box which looks like a stall in restroom.

The next morning a limousine taxi comes to take us to the airport. The driver looks Indian but you can’t say for sure. When we are on our way, it turns out that he is from India, from Gujarat and from the Rajkot area. This is interesting and of course I begin probing, “Do you know where your family is from?” “My mother is from Dhoraji”. “Oh! That’s the place Jinnah was from”. “Really! You mean Jinnah was Gujarati!” “Yes, Si-ir.” It turns out he is a Memon, grew up in Mumbai and his father tried to look for work in Pakistan but nothing seemed to work out. We are talking Hindi-Urdu by now. “I have been driving a taxi here for 11 years. The mistake I made was that I did not get an education here. If I had done that I could have had a better job. You know, this car looks fancy but I work like a donkey.” “But the university system is good here; you can get qualifications even now.” “Yes, but I will have to study part-time and by the time I get my Master’s I will be about 45 years old and then every employer will say I am too old to hire now.” We are at the airport; he shows us where to go and how we can save money while check-in our suitcases. We part with wishes of good luck to each other.