His bleary red eyes still haunt me. It has been 16 years to the day now, but those eyes won’t let me sleep.
I was on a holiday that summer with my family. We had spent a month at Bergen and were visiting Paris for a short break before returning home to Delhi. This trip had been long in the planning. Paris, the city of lights, was also the city of our dreams. It was an expensive city, and we had only managed a small bread-and-breakfast room in the poorer part of the city. It was only for a few nights, I told my young son reassuringly. The rooms were clean and didn’t smell musty, the sheets were fresh out of the laundry. The breakfast menu was limited but the food was healthy and filling. On the second day, we did discover why our floor carpets were damp; the shower leaked andthe bathroom door didn’t shut too well. But it wasn’t a bad leak, and anyway this was just a short trip, I said, a little ventilation would let it dry out. Meanwhile, let’s enjoy Paris.
On the very first day, we bought a day-pass for the hop-on hop-off buses through the city and the boat rides on the Seine and Paris became more accessible. Cruising down the river, made more magical by the magnificent monuments along its banks, made us concur with every romantic ode ever written to the city. Paris was the city of love, built by loving hands. Its every sidewalk, every street lamp, every boulevard, and building facade, seemed to have been designed to fit a broader vision of aesthetics, the best and the finest. This is what we had come for. To experience the romance of the city and to be romanced by it. History and culture walked hand in hand here. The present blended in without any conspicuous reminders of the violent break that it had made with its past. The grandeur of Avenue des Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe mirrored the grand victories of Napoleon’s armies. The architectural splendour of the Cathedral of Notre Dame justified its choice as the backdrop of Victor Hugo’s famous novel. That the Hunchback of Notre Dame actually helped restore the Catholic cathedral, with its majestic Gothic architecture, was somehow very satisfying, as though it had somewhat mitigated the effect that the tragic end of the novel had had on me for many weeks after I had first read it in high school.
Paris was a tourist’s ultimate delight. Everything was designed to enable and enhance one’s sight-seeing experience. Especially if you could forget the damp room that we stayed in. Third-worlders like us have long learnt to make these ‘adjustments’ in order to see the world. The skewed nature of the currency exchange rates is something that everyone on the receiving end of the deal perfectlyunderstood. So, we had put those images behind us. We had ignored the fact that, from the moment that we stepped into the hypermarket until the time that we paid the bill and left, we were followed around and kept under constant surveillance by the staff. We had even shut out of our minds that incident at the Sacré-Cœur Basilica where an elderly gentleman went apoplectic with rage and swore at us mightily. I had felt faint for a moment and sat down suddenly at the other end of a bench that he was sitting on, and he hadn’t taken too kindly to it. His reaction had been instantaneous and explosive. But luckily for us, we understood no French then, and his words didn’t stick. Without the words to go with them, it was easier to dismiss the disconcerting images of an old man hopping up and down in anger and stomping off, and we actively decided against lugging him around in our heads for the rest of the day.
Thus, we collected ourselves, and went to the Louvre Museum, where we had hoped to spend the remainder of our day, and large parts of the subsequent days, lost to everything else around us. This is what I had most looked forward to on the trip. Museums have always fascinated me, as much for what they exhibit as for what they value. The French clearly valued history and revered the arts in their multiple forms. The Louvre was imbued with this reverence, both in the exhibits and in their presentation. There they were, heavily guarded, precious pieces of art and artefacts collected from many parts of the world, standing cheek by jowl, so to speak, in real time. French and Italian, European and Asian, African and Arabian, Byzantine and Egyptian, conqueror and vanquished, colonizer and colonized, all brought pleasingly together, in a manner that defied past animosities and their present politics. Standing, however bizarrely, you might say, as testaments of the passage of time and the compression of space.
At closing time, we hopped on to the boat once again to go and watch the light show at the Eiffel Tower, that engineering marvel which is the ultimate symbol of Paris. We couldn’t have visited Paris and not seen the Eiffel Tower, that would have been like going to Agra as a tourist and not visiting the Taj Mahal! We were greeted by long queues of people, waiting to ascend the tower. The waiting time was anywhere between 2-3 hours, we were told, and we decided that it would have to wait for another day. This evening was reserved for the lights. Tourists of many different colours and nationalities were present to witness the light show, unlike at the Louvre which had a far more exclusive crowd. Flitting in and out through this crowd were the immigrants, many of them illegal or without adequate paperwork, selling Chinese-made metal and glass replicas of the Eiffel Tower. They stood out from the touristy crowd for their worn-down shoes, their shabbier clothes and their cheap shoulder bags. To us, they also stood out by the facial features and the colour of their skin.
Even without speaking to them we knew that they were either Indian or Pakistani Punjabis. Which side are you from, our side or the other, my husband called out. Your side, came the reply, an acknowledgment that my husband’s Sikh turban had been correctly identified. And almost immediately we were surrounded by a group of salesmen, all eager to meet us. As with most South Asians abroad, within minutes of the meeting, we were being introduced to more acquaintances, exchanging detailed notes and chatting like long lost friends. We pulled out the packets of chips and cookies that we had purchased at the hypermarket and sat down to talk. They were told about our cross-country marriage and we were told about their life histories. Soon we were listening to their similar yet disparate stories of hope, of despair, of desperation and longing. They were indeed Punjabis from both sides on the border, united in their struggles, in their experience of othering. They were all “Paki bastards”, or its equivalent in French, when being abused by the police. They had each left home to go abroad in the quest of a better life. Most had paid large lump sums of money to fake dealers, after selling off their highly productive lands or using them as collateral in usurious loan agreements. They had hoped to make their fortunes in the prosperous West and send money back home. The unscrupulous agents had smuggled them into different countries of Europe without proper documentation and left them in the lurch, sometimes without even sparing them their passports.
Each had a different story of how they finally ended up in Paris. But each had the same story of living at the margins of society. Of being treated as invisible at times, as fugitives at others, vulnerable to exploitation and blackmail. They were the cheap labour that made the big city tick. With neither valid visas nor the resources to buy themselves a passage back home, many were merely living fake replicas of the life that they had hoped to find, while their families back home toiled doubly hard and waited infinitely. Their excitement at meeting compatriots and sympathetic listeners made them open up to us, and we returned the next evening to listen to more biographies in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
The three days of our holiday went by in a blur. Yet, after that first evening at the Eiffel Tower, time had been at a standstill for us. Overwhelmed by all that we had seen and heard, we reached the Metro station on the last day of our trip, each lost in our own thoughts. I absent-mindedly slipped the ticket into the scanner at the gates, and before I knew it, someone had pushed past me through the turnstile gates to enter the platform ticketless. I got pushed in too, with my luggage, but for a moment I stood nonplussed and unsure of what had occurred. The stranger ran on, and I had no intention of chasing him. He did look back momentarily, and I caught a glimpse of a bleary-eyed Punjabi face.
That face appeared again in the crowded metro train fifteen minutes later, standing opposite us. Together we occupied freshly vacated seats and eyed each other awkwardly. Did he remember the incident at the gates? Would he apologise? He smelt like a combination of fermented sweat and …alcohol perhaps? Before I could speculate anymore on this… Sat Sri Akal, Iqbal Singh from Hoshiarpur, he rasped. His speech did seem a little slurred, his cheeks slightly flushed, his eyes red-shot and a bit watery. He certainly has had one drink too many I decided, as I steeled myself against his fellow countryman appeal and turned away with a mumbled response. Not drunk enough to miss the turban. I mentally frowned, and recalled once again the nimble cheat at the turnstile gates. These characters are responsible for the stereotypes that the Europeans have about us. Shameless. Because of them we suffer.
He didn’t wait for my response. Perhaps he hadn’t expected any. Perhaps he was even used to such slights. He spoke, nonetheless, hardly waiting to catch a breath, as though in the short time that we were together he had much to tell. He lived in Paris with his French wife, he explained. We realized that he lived in the same neighbourhood that we had stayed in during the last few days. He was going back home today when he spotted us waiting for the train at the metro station. Just as he had begun walking towards us, with the hope of introducing himself, we had got into the train. He had followed us in, on an impulse, just as the doors shut. He smiled nervously and then, suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, became emotional. The alcohol had dulled his inhibitions, no doubt, I thought. What would make an adult man tear up in a public place otherwise.
Words came tumbling out in incoherent torrents as he spoke. He gasped for air occasionally in between, making up for the breaths that he had missed. He was a drowning man and a fish out of water, simultaneously. His stress was obvious to everyone around. My husband reached out a hand to him, trying to make up for my rudeness earlier. Other co-travellers turned away to give him his space and he continued unabashed.
I had no difficulty in piecing together his life story though, I had heard it over and over again so recently. At twenty one, as a farmer’s son and an indifferent student, he had left home in search of a brighter future. He didn’t have any valid documents. He had worked hard, washed dishes at Indian restaurants, cleaned their toilets, carried out the garbage, run errands, sold trinkets at the tourist attractions and even done shady deals, when needed. But the money never amounted to much and he barely sustained himself. He owed large sums of money to multiple people back home from whom he had borrowed for the trip. For twenty years, he had never been able to even buy a decent pair of shoes, leave alone save up enough to repay his loans and buy that single one-way ticket home. At home, his father had always bought him the latest shoes in fashion for one function or another, he added wistfully. And he had dignity there. Here, even his wife didn’t think much of him. But still, she had given him legal status and a room to stay. It was better that they thought him dead than that he returned home in dishonour. Twenty years, he said, coming up for air noisily, twenty years…. I beg you, please come and visit me, just for a few minutes. By now, my husband had his arms wrapped around the other man’s shoulders.
It was time for us to get off. We had a flight to catch to get back home. We need to get off now, my husband said, heavy-heartedly, apologetically, as we stood up… but please, you too must go home. Clutching at straws the drowning man followed us to the door, pleading with folded hands, I wanted to be home, just once more, just …for a moment ….Virji… Bhabhiji…
The doors shut on a sobbing man, down on his knees. His orphaned words hung uncertainly outside the closed doors, and then followed us quietly to the airport.
