Dylan Stafford

Last month I went to India for the first time, sixteen days from start to finish—the longest I’ve ever been away from my wife Marisa—the longest time apart from our three year old son Jackson. My gut literally hurt when I waved good-bye to him through the daycare window the morning of my departure, knowing I wouldn’t hug him for over two weeks.

He was fine. “Bye-Daddy-Going-To-India,” rolled off his tongue in one long word. I blew him kisses and left with wet eyes.

India was a business trip for my job at UCLA. As admissions director for the part-time MBA program, I accompanied one professor, 24 MBA students, two spouses and one alumnus for a week-long, study-abroad experience—Doing Business in India. I stayed a second week and visited an ashram in southern India—my very own Eat, Pray, Love experience.

I wasn’t ready for India, wasn’t braced for the enormity of it. I’d gotten plane tickets and a visa, Typhoid and Hepatitis vaccinations, but all the intercultural preparation I’d imagined hadn’t happened. The only preparation turned out to be living in Mexico City back in 1992, after college when I went to live with a Mexican family to learn Spanish.

Back when I had landed in Mexico City, my former Texas A&M roommate Humberto had greeted me at the airport. He was working for Merck and he tossed my suitcase into the back of his company pickup truck. We climbed inside and he fired up a Marlboro red—Mexicans at that time never smoking Marlboro lights—and handed me one too. My rule of thumb was only to smoke when I drank, or when offered.

“Are you ready,” Humberto asked me with his accent and five o’clock shadow, exhaling a huge plume of smoke and looking very gangster in his black leather jacket, “for driving in Mexico?”

“What choice do I have?” I replied.

“That’s right! No choice gringo. Your life is in my hands.” He laughed.

“There are only two rules for driving in Mexico City. The first rule is that there are no rules.” He smiled. “The second rule is that the right of way goes to the bravest.” With that introduction to driving etiquette in the world’s biggest city, Humberto proceeded to make an illegal u-turn, jump a curb and exit the airport.

India would feel a lot like Mexico: incredible poverty and extreme wealth, street life and open-air shops, spicy food and smiling people. And at the same time, India would prove to be very different.

Los Angeles to India took two flights: sixteen hours, LAX to Dubai, and then four hours, Dubai to Mumbai. I left Thursday afternoon at 4:00pm, and arrived 23 hours later, Saturday morning about 3:30am local time.

My seatback television showed me our flight path and the history of US foreign policy in my lifetime. We flew over our Cold War nemesis Russia, and continued to our current war on terrorism and other fears as Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq could be seen on my monitor. I also watched The Men Who Stare at Goats, Invictus, and most of a season of Dexter.

We landed in Dubai International Airport and I had three hours between flights to experience the Mall of the Middle East. The hyper-clean, shiny glass and steel world of the airport made me think of Logan’s Run, that movie from the 1970s about a futuristic world where no one lives beyond the age of 30. Pilgrims were directed with signage for Prayer Rooms, while the Starbucks marquee announced caffeine in English and Arabic. I ordered my first-ever Pinkberry, an over-sweet frozen yogurt, but still a taste of home.

I made a brief phone call to my wife Marisa and boarded my second plane. It was the Friday night commuter flight, 10:30pm Dubai-time, full of Indian guest-workers going home. The meal was 100% Indian, the first masala moment of many coming my way.

Four hours later the plane flew low on a rainy night in Mumbai. Out my window, I saw random streets ablaze with what appeared to be Christmas lights. There were people in those streets, not a lot, but certainly more than I would expect in the middle of the night. I learned the next day that we arrived during the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi, the four-armed god with the head of an elephant and body of a person.

Instead of Humberto greeting me in the airport, there was a man with a small sign with my name on it, the first time I’d ever been greeted at an airport by someone with my name on a sign. I was happy to see him, tired as I was at 3:30am local time. We crawled into our taxi and drove an hour south to our hotel.

All along the route I saw pickup trucks carrying statues of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god. In some of the side streets I could see the Christmas-light adorned ally-ways, all in honor of this festival of Ganesha. Our driver told us how the ceremony differed by household, but that it was usually from 3 to 10 days, and the culmination was placing the statues in water.

At the hotel, already in my room was Paraag Lal, the UCLA alumnus on the trip, and my friend for eight years from when I started this job in 2002. Paraag’s flight arrived only a few hours earlier than mine and he was still awake. We talked and caught up and he loaned me an electricity adaptor to charge my cell phone.

My first skype video call to my wife and son was from a hotel room in Mumbai back to our home in Los Angeles. My laptop video camera sent my image to my wife and son, while Mommy’s laptop did the same and showed them to me.

This was also my son’s first video call and it was more exciting to him than we’d anticipated. Seeing his own face reflecting back to him on the laptop screen, he started to move back and forth, like a monkey at a mirror. Pretty quickly he started sounding like a monkey too, his three year old speech devolving into hoots and shrieks and giggles.

The internet signal on my end wasn’t too strong so after about 30 seconds the video image froze, leaving me to look at a still snap-shot of my red-headed monkey child, tilting to the right, mid-monkey-move as he contorted on my wife’s lap.

We finished the laptop phone call and I reflected on the world we live in. Instead of waiting a week for a postcard from India, my wife and son had already received a cell phone call from the Dubai airport/mega-mall and now my son had seen my face live on a laptop video call. He’s only three and a half years old, and this is the world he’s inheriting. I wonder what technology will be like when he is a father some day.

The excitement of arriving finally wore off and I could go to sleep about 7:00 am local time, 36 hours with only a few cat naps. Paraag had told me my typing and phone-calling wouldn’t bother him and he had slept though my emailing/facebooking/skyping.

There was a knock on the door about 10:00 am that I barely noticed. Paraag had gotten out of his bed at the knocking, to find someone offering apples. Our actual wake-up was a 4:00 pm phone call from a work colleague, asking if we’d like to join the planning team for dinner that evening. I don’t know how much longer I would have slept, but this was long enough to ensure that

<to be continued. last writing 10-28>