Off The cuff: A wry look at life

"Where you comin' from Mohammed?" asked the customs officer at the huge, cavernous and surprisingly empty Newark Airport at 8.15 in the night.

"Dubai," I said smiling.

My flight to Toronto via Newark was delayed by three hours at Milan and I was now forced to spend the night in the United States. But first I had to get past this.

"U. A. E?" he asks, with a long emphasis on each letter, as he wrote it down on my customs form. Then, "Take this and step towards counter four," he said, returning me the form.

New York city is about 45 minutes away from here by bus. There are huge dedications on the walls of the airport building to the people who died in September 11, but I don't have time to register what it says, because from the corner of my eye I see that at counter four is a young policewoman.

At the other aisle I see the friendly Syrian, with whom I chatted with during the flight, being taken away by a security officer to a room. He had said he was a businessman and travelled frequently to America.

He said his line of business is oil additives, the thing that turns your gas to "premium" and which makes lubricating oils more viscose. He also exports medical equipment, manufactured in China, he said. Many labs in the U.S. use the stuff he exports.

I pick up courage and ask him straight out, "No trouble getting in and out of America"?

"No, not at all", he replies. But he looks down when he says that as if remembering something. I leave it at that and go and lie down in the middle aisle seats in the near-empty aircraft to catch up on my sleep.

"What's your line of work, sir?" the policewoman asks.

"Journalist", I say. That apparently throws her just a little, because the next line even as she is busily tapping the underside of the suitcase was, "I was ready to listen to 'engineer' or a 'doctor'. So, what do you write?"

No way I was going to tell her I have this column where I sometimes poke fun at the fads and foibles of Americans.

On the flight from Milan, I picked up the Wall Street Journal from the Syrian's seat pocket, and right on the front page Ottawa was warning Canadians of Arab origin not to travel through the United States if possible.

I was not aware of this but the next day Washington announced that Canadian landed immigrants from the Commonwealth countries will also be fingerprinted and photographed.

Earlier, my wife had called and said that Rohinton Mistry, the award-winning Indo-Canadian writer, had cancelled his book promo tour of the United States as he was meticulously targeted at each airport.

No one was safe from America's security dragnet but I just had to be in Toronto at 1.45pm on Tuesday to appear for the test which Citizenship Canada had called me for. "What are you doing there"? asked my wife with a slight hint of tension in her voice, when I finally called from my room at Howard Johnson's.

Trying to board the aircraft the next morning was like walking through quicksand and in slow motion. "Hey, how you doing?" asked the young Black-American cheerfully and advised me to take off my shoes. I had to pass through two checkpoints before I could heave a sigh and board the aircraft.

The next day I read in the papers that while Ottawa was fuming at America's border policy, it had quietly backed down and while Prime Minister Jean Chretien defended the right of Canadian citizens to enter the U.S. without being fingerprinted and photographed, he openly ignored the plight of the 1.4 million permanent residents who do not have Canadian passports.