As Time Goes By

One of the many things that I find charming about Latin American social life is how people remember little details about you even when you have forgotten them. It never ceases to surprise me.

I often enjoy the company of kids far more than that of adults. So when this extremely sweet girl - with cheeks so red you would think they have been painted – slowed down her bicycle and started talking as I was walking from one building to another, I couldn’t help extending the casual conversation. What I didn’t know was that she would touch me in a special way!

Her name is Estafani (Latin version of the Anglican Stephanie), six years old. She told me about her mother who is in Mexico City and her dad who is in Italy and she lives with her grandma on the film school campus. She must be feeling terribly lonely here and I start feeling sad for her but she wasn’t sad at all. She strikes up conversations with students and teachers everywhere and all of them seem to love her. I was missing my own son very much and so spending time with her was a kind of emotional substitute as well as a way of refreshing myself with her beautiful innocence.

In the evening, I found her playing with her grandma close to my apartment and I realized that she is the granddaughter of someone I know for many years. The kid’s grandma, who is now in her late 70s, remembers clearly till this date that I had taken a photo of her ballerina daughter (Estafani’s mom) twenty years ago in the swimming pool and had sent it back to my family in Calcutta as a (biased) sample of how Cuban girls look like and everybody had gone gaga over it. So it was a pleasant surprise that this little girl is the daughter of someone I know. What does her mom do now?

The ballerina mother continues with her career in dance but as the trapeze dancer in a circus in Mexico. How time passes! The grandma is visibly proud of her daughter and granddaughter.
“Her mom is as beautiful as she was 20 years ago and this kid is an image of her mom, isn’t she? She is so friendly that she can strike a conversation with anyone and so intelligent that she asked me, ‘Can you imagine what it feels like when the president of a nation is thrown out of his own country?’ ”

She was referring to the incidents following the military coup in Honduras which has shaken the whole of Latin America for the sheer barbarity of the act. The Miami news channels are playing hourly updates on it. But I am more interested in the story of the mother. How does a beautiful ballerina dancing to Bizet’s Carmen become a trapeze dancer in a circus? It confuses me because in my mind, ballet belongs to high culture and circus belongs to the other extreme in the hierarchy of cultural forms of entertainment. This can only happen in Latin America!

I also suddenly remember something and that fascinates me further. I had indeed seen a circus playing while in Monterrey in Mexico two years ago and someone said that the circus is of a very high standard, specially the dancers. I wanted to visit it though it was very expensive but my friends discouraged me firstly because there was no time that I could take out of the conference to go to a circus and more importantly, they all thought I must grow out of my childhood fantasies.

Estefani’s mom had married an Italian and migrated to some Italian city and the child was born out of that marriage. She subsequently divorced the guy and married a Mexican businessman and migrated to Mexico, travelling with the circus while leaving the daughter back in Havana with the grandma. The mom calls the kid every few days just as much as the dad calls from Italy.


Catching up with people after so many years is like following the characters of a novel and seeing in a few moments of storytelling, what Time does to people. Divorces and separations are rarely seen as tragedies in this part of the world. When women tell these stories, they sound more like stories of liberation and triumph. Many years ago I had seen this septagenerian grandma getting married on the campus for the fourth time in her life at the age of 50 or so. It was a hugely memorable event with Gabo (ie, Gabriel García Marquez) playing her godfather and Fernando Birri (the ‘pope’ of Latin American cinema) as the priest substitute. I overheard her boss, a woman, saying, ‘At last she has found the great love of her life’. As I followed the atheist rituals of the event with wide-eyed wonderment, it felt like a thrilling tragi-comic idea to find the great love of your life at the age of fifty.

So now I ask her what happened to that man.
‘I got rid of him’, she said. ‘He migrated’.
No more men in your life after that?
‘No. Enough with men. Now I have my granddaughter. I live for her’.

I didn’t realise that the kid thought I was a native Indian from some part of Latin America.
‘But you don’t look like that. You dress differently.’

I explain to her about the silly mistake that Christopher Columbus made five hundred years ago, leaving all of us confused about ‘Indians’. He wanted to find us (India) but instead took the opposite direction and ended up finding you’ll (Latin America) and the guy didn’t even realise his mistake. He started calling them ‘Indians’ and that continues to this day!

‘Five hundred years ago?’, the girl murmured to herself in amazement.

Actually, more than that.

‘My friends also create so many confusions in class.’

She takes me to show something in the garden – the design of the shrubs. I am enjoying being with her but some people call me to a van which is waiting for me to get in. I have to tear myself away from her.

The next day, I go to the office of the director in search of some documents I need to sign and there was the grandma there who works as the director’s secretary even at her age. Suddenly the sweet little girl comes out of the door and hugs me intensely as if I am her father. I almost reciprocate the emotion but I have to hold myself back with a sense of adult guilt. It is not a good idea to develop emotional bonds with kids when you know you are going to leave within a few days/weeks. For me she is just a substitute for my own kid and for her, I am just a substitute for her father whom she must be missing deeply.

Adulthood has also taught me that loving anyone involves certain consequences, certain responsibilities that we must be ready to embrace, and embrace them with joy but what do we do when what we stand to lose is far more than what we gain?

On the final day of my stay in Cuba, I ask Estefani to speak to the camera while I record her standing at the landing of the staircase. She tells me, ‘Mom said yesterday she is coming to Havana in December and will stay here for the next two years. Why don’t you stay back till December? Then, you will get to see her’.

Coming Home: A Rebel Without a Cause

‘This guy is a rebel without a cause’, I overheard someone commenting about me to the chauffeur who had come to pick me up from the Havana airport. What did I do to provoke such a response? And yet I am fascinated by the cinematic allusion. I have been analysing Nicholas Ray’s film in class for many years now.

As the wheels of the aircraft touched Cuban soil, all the passengers burst into applause. This does not happen anywhere else! I wonder why. Is this a celebration of the relief of having survived another flight across the oceans – of the triumph of life over death - or is it the joy of arrival specifically to one place, ‘coming home’?

As I come out of the aircraft, I hardly have time to wonder if anyone had come to pick me up. Immediately after emerging out of the tunnel, I see a placard almost stuck in front of my nose that declares my name. I follow the woman as she insists that I must go straight to the VIP lounge. First I have to clear immigration. I see a long line of people and stand behind them but the lady in uniform who has been sent to escort me insists that I take the ‘VIP channel’ where there is no one. I feel utterly embarrassed, full of self-contempt as I wonder what have I done in life to merit such a treatment of jumping the queue in Cuba. Soon after, I insist that I pick up my luggage. She doesn’t give me an option but ushers me into a silly VIP lounge that I hate with a passion, the ultimate horrifying expression of which is the Bollywood salon I had seen at Bombay international airport: utterly ultra-kitsch. My usher’s duty involves offering me a drink which I decline as I am more concerned about my luggage going round and round in the conveyor belt without being picked up or worse, it may not have arrived from Madrid. She finds me strange and unfriendly since I have travelled all the way from India and must be tired. In fact I am not. I am coming merely from Madrid and slept well in the plane because there was no LCD screen behind the seats in the aircraft and Air Europa has some kind of a ridiculous rule that you have to buy the headphones from them. I totally refuse to give in to their pettiness even if it is in the name of recession. I have also learnt that the smartest way to avoid jetlag on long flights is to cheat your body into thinking that your sleeping time actually coincides with the sleeping time of the country of arrival.
Anything to eat?, she asks me.
No, thank you. I want to go and find my luggage.
‘This guy is really a rebel without a cause’, she tells Capote, the chauffeur.

As I get into the car, there is a student of the film school who wants a free ride. I am glad to oblige him but another girl follows and then there is a complicated situation. The car has the luggage of someone who cannot be found and that happens to be the girl’s boyfriend. She is a documentary filmmaker from Peru and when she learns that I am an Indian, she tells me that she was in Bangladesh over the past month making a film about the success of the micro-credit system and the Grameen Bank.

How was the experience, I ask her.
She garners all her force and says, ‘Bastante brutalista’ (Very brutal). The poverty is pornographic but there is a lot of human warmth.

As I am fascinated and want to know more about her experience, she starts talking enthusiastically about her documentary which gets my chauffeur Capote very annoyed. It is late at night. He just wants to drop me and go home and this girl is making him (and me) wait for an elusive boyfriend to arrive. She senses the irritation and gets out of the car but assures me that she will tell me the whole story.
‘I can go on talking for hours about it’.

I was looking forward to hearing her story but I never saw her over the three weeks that I stayed in Havana. The boyfriend must have finally arrived.

Going Away

The best part of travel is its anticipation.

For me, it has never been like this. I am used to getting phone calls in the middle of the night asking me if I can go over to Rio de Janeiro ‘in the coming week’. The ticket would arrive on the day of travel and I would make an international trip without insurance. That’s one of the scariest aspects considering my conviction that one day, sooner or later, I will die in a plane crash. In situations such as these, there is no room for anticipation because there is no time to nurture that emotion. Instead, there is a high anticipation of the trip being cancelled. And when travelling from India to countries such as Mexico, the visa nightmares leave place for neither romance nor anticipation, far less the anticipation of romance. The Mexican government somehow thinks that there are no honest travellers among Indians; all we want in life is to cross over to the US through the land border. My visa was sorted out at the last moment through some hobnobbing at the highest diplomatic level and once again, the passport had reached on the day of travel.

Not this time. Everything has been sorted out well ahead. The ticket reached two months prior to travel and even the last visa as well as the insurance were all done a fortnight ago. I even completed the purchase of 35 gift items for friends ten days before and even finished cataloging them (ie, which gift is for whom). For the first time in my life, I truly relish the romantic joy of the anticipation of a thrilling five-week travel schedule with all expenses paid except for my personal side-trips in Europe. All meetings, rendezvous, all lecture assignments, dinners, hotel reservations, encounters with old friends at airport lounges in cities-I-barely-know, all are fixed way ahead in time. It is as if I have scripted my own life with me as the protagonist, belligerently defying any potential unsettling uncertainty. I neatly print out the details of my itinerary, make multiple copies of it and distribute them among those who may have to contact me in case of emergency. And yet, two days before my travel, a Spanish friend informs that there is no way she can take the same flight with me from Madrid to Santiago de Compostela where we reserved a cheap ‘no-cancellation-allowed’ SpanAir ticket eight weeks ago. Even before I embark upon my journey, I see my eighty euros floating down the drain along with my misplaced enthusiasm. To what extent can real life be scripted? What’s the point in being so proactive! Isn’t it better to live impulsively and allow life to take you unawares!

Anuradha (my ex-wife) and Shagnik (my 8-year old son) come to drop me at the airport in the middle of the night. She had never seen me off at the airport during all the years we were married and yet she is here tonight. Neither she nor my son are visibly concerned about me going away but far more absorbed by the romantic atmosphere of the departure lounge of the international airport. I almost drift away, unnoticed. They are busy looking up at the itineraries of airlines as much as I am. There are no finer journeys than the ones provoked in the imagination.

When will you take me to Europe? My son asks me, by way of bidding farewell. When will you take me to Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona? - places he has heard being mentioned passionately at home and now sees some of these names in the itinerary chart glaring in front of him. He learns the names of some new destinations - Newark, Amsterdam, Johannesburg – words that evoke a sense of romance about adventures that await him. The travel bug his hit him too.

‘Study well and you will get to travel to these places and many more’, I tell him by way of consolation as well as inspiration like a middle-class educated Bong for whom giving lectures, attending conferences or film festivals, fellowships or scholarships are flimsy justifications for travelling around the world at someone else’s cost. At least, it is the easiest way to trot the globe.