“Do you know where my passport is?” I asked my wife in a voice that was trying not to sound squeaky with blind panic.
My wife keeps all our travel documents safely in an old biscuit tin that also contains all our old passports with their front covers clipped, and that over the decades, have expired.
Whenever we travel, my wife insists that she carry all our passports with her in this huge and heavy bag that most security guys at airports eye with suspicion. Then, she carefully hands each one of us our passports as we approach the check-in gate.
(She now also keeps my ticket and boarding pass with herself, saying she does not trust me and that I may lose them. Many a time she has disappeared in a ‘ladies queue’, leaving me looking like Tom Hanks in the movie, Terminal).
All our new passports are kept ready for departure in leather travel wallets along with naphthalene balls (because of Bengaluru’s horrendous humidity), and the passports smell like they had been disinfected.
The travel wallets were gifted to me by various corporates in an Arab Gulf country. Whenever I attended a press conference the PR guys would step up and remark, “Thank you so much for coming. Here’s a little something for your trouble.”
Then one day my wife warned me,” Stop going to these silly press conferences.” she said.
I could understand her frustration over trying to find space for useless stuff in our home because the new trend now is minimalism and there are experts that advise you to throw away everything you own, because junk is not good Feng Shui.
“It’s in the house, somewhere, I am sure,” she said. “Why do you want your passport, anyway?”
“International flights will start next month and I am just trying to organise things,” I said.
My wife had booked our flight and also paid extra for seats in the front of the plane. “The air is much fresher in front.” she said.
I did not dare ask her where she gets her crazy theories from and she is like a certain health minister which we shall not name, and who has some really outlandish ideas about how to avoid getting infected by the Coronavirus.
“I read in a scientific journal that the virus is super infectious indoors and the only way to control it is to open the windows and let in fresh air,” I said, and immediately regretted saying that because there was a certain look on my wife’s face and I had images of her trying to open the plane door to get in some fresh air.
Will Canada let us in?
“What makes you think Canada will let us in?” I said. “Everyone is scared of the new virus variant. Australia is telling its citizens that they would be jailed and fined if they go back home from here,” I said.
“Canada would not do that to us,” said my wife. “We will just be told to quarantine ourselves in a hotel room for a couple of days when we land, and then to sequester ourselves at the Airbnb, for two weeks.”
“We can do that to ourselves right here, why travel thousands of miles for that?” I said.
“We are taking a break to see our kids,” said my wife.
“I know where my passport is, it is in the car’s glove compartment,” I said finally remembering where I had put it.
I had taken it to the bank to prove that it was me and not somebody else who was keeping money in the account.
“When I took out the passport the manager’s office started smelling like old sweaters,” I said.
Mahmood Saberi is a storyteller and blogger based in Bengaluru, India. Twitter: @mahmood_saberi
