Life of S ~ The Russian Roulette ... Vol. III

continued from here...

By the time S managed to get some sleep, a good 10 hours had passed by on the airport. His watch was ticking, but every minute seemed like an hour. His laptop batery was dead, and his IPod battery had one leg in the grave.

It was only a matter of time that S realized that every person in the room was a respectable person. Contrary to his initial thoughts, they all turned out to be really nice people, and time started flying by as we tried to make conversation in the most traditional sign language that existed way back in time. It was funny, and yet amazing, that in-spite of all the odds, we managed to express ourselves. During one such conversation, one of the English speaking guys from Kazakasthan came up to me and asked from which country I was. The moment I proudly said India, he and the Uzbek guy standing next to him entered a level of excitement. The first words that came from their mouth were…”AMITABH BACHCHAN”. Kewl…so here we had a personality more widely known than the President of US. “Shahrukh Khan, Hritik Roshan, Salman Khan” were the next few things about India that they knew. And then he said, “the father of Indian cinema Raj Kapoor” and started singing, “Awaara hoon, Awaara hoon..”. His knowledge of India amused me. Interestingly, a little while earlier, one of the Ethiopian gals was singing “Kuch Kuch Hota hai…”. I never had an idea that Indian cinema was so popular across the globe. Infact, she even looked at my hair in the most fascinating and amusing way. She later offered me a deal in which she would take my hair and in exchange would give me her curly brown hair which I could never imagine on my head. I guess she had never seen such hair back home, where guys are either bald or have really small hair or funny looking curly hair and gals are not much better off. It was funny how people could think of such things at such critical moments.

Another interesting moment was when our own version of Bill Gates was trying to tell her not to talk any longer or all the credit in his phone would run into negative, and she reacted by punching him in the tummy in a manner similar to Laila Ali. My goodness, I would never dare to mess with an African gal in life, they could be dangerous. Two Egyptian guys were asking me to tell them about elephants, as they had never seen one in their life. India had always managed to amuse people in history. Here it was nothing new. People were all over the place and the chaos never died down till fatigue started getting the better of us one-by-one and each was falling prey to it and dozed off in the little place we had in that room. The public phone was also soon switched off and there was pin-drop silence, as would be expected in a court room during the hearings. Our contacts to the outside world were limited as it is, and now we were totally cut-off. This we were unaware of, and only realized it in the morning when we woke up expecting calls from all corners of the world, only to our disappointment.

During these light moments, there were other tense moments when we saw new people coming in and they seemed as upset as we were, when we had entered the SPECIAL ROOM. One gal from some African country even broke down to tears. We all did our little share of trying to cheer her up by talking to her. Some guys would start kicking chairs when they entered the room. I could understand their frustration but preferred to stay away from such people. Each time the door opened, all of us would run to the officer and try to explain our problems. My questions had the same old standard answer, “No speak English.” Damn…could you not get a peson who could speak English!!! I finally found a way out…a translator. The Kazak guy could speak both English (not the best person who could, nevertheless he could in bits and pieces) and Russian (although a different dialect which was spoken in his country back home with basic Russian words). He was my savior; he explained the whole situation to them and me. But it was all in vain as they would not bother to answer any of my questions that night and only said that we would talk again in the morning at 9AM, when the offices in the city opened. Sleep was the best, or rather the only, thing I could do and soon the night passed by, with me hoping for a better day ahead. I was still optimistic thinking to myself that in the worst case, I would have to stay there for 3 days and take the flight back home as per schedule. So I slept with some peace of mind thinking things would be solved in the morning. I had no choice left but to wait till 9AM.

to be continued...