Moving to an Alien Land

Toowoomba sounded more like Timbuktoo the closer I got to it. Most people didn’t even know that it existed in Australia leave alone be aware of the state it was in. All I knew of it was that it was in Queensland and near the Gold coast. That sounded exotic enough to me to decide a year in the land of Oz might do me some good.

The Australian lifestyle I had heard of included plenty of sunshine, beaches, a laid back atmosphere and a daily glass of wine or one beer. That sounded good for one’s health. So I set off to the Gold coast and the Sunshine coast leaving the blistering heat of Punjab behind. Little did I realize that I had set myself up for a year of incessant summer reaching Australia in September with my return scheduled for June 2005 when I would land back in the lap of peak summer! Queensland was known for it’s hot weather, I was warned.

The flight was pretty uneventful. The stopover in Singapore was too short for me to explore anything apart from the airport. I landed in Sydney at 7:30 pm. Like most middle class Indians, I had relatives there as in other parts of the world and they were there to pick me up. I spent the next three days cruising the malls and saw a little of Sydney besides that as well. The place where we were staying had Indian neighbours on one side, a couple with two young daughters and Chinese neighbours on the other. Besides the ubiquitous Chinese and Indians, you saw other nationalities specially Indonesians, Fijian Indians, Pakistanis, Lebanese and Turks and Greeks, the latter called wogs, ie Sydney was a virtual conglomeration of the nations of the world!

I soon learnt that gambling was a national pastime with shopping incomplete for many unless you bought your Lotto ticket in the wild hope that you might finally hit the jackpot one day. After all, even more than Christmas the major heart stopping event which brought the country to a virtual standstill while everyone laid bets with bookies and each other was the Melbourne cup. Work would cease, everyone congregating around the television as everyone’s hearts thumped as they watched some of the fastest horses in the world and some of the best fashion too what with women in their most outrageous dresses and even more outlandish hats made a fashion statement at the event of the year.

I took a cab to the Sydney airport the next day to catch the flight to Brisbane. The taxi driver was playing Hindi songs and I spoke in Hindi to him as I got in. “Mashaallah,” he muttered, “ Mazaa hi aagaya! Apni zubaan bolke.” and the rest of the conversation continued in Urdu and when he learnt that I was a Punjabi we shifted to that. It took me a while to figure out that he was Pakistani and that was something that I would do often here with people who looked like they were from the subcontinent but where exactly from was anybody’s guess.

My Pakistani taxi driver friend, an MBA, awaiting his Permanent residency was miserable here, he averred. “ Yeh bhi koi country hai, Simmijiji.” Then started a monologue on the western women and their shamelessness. “They keep their dogs and cats, yet wont keep their men”, obviously not understanding the convoluted minds of these women. He was extremely worried about the Indian and Pakistani women who came to this country and degenerated to acquire Australian values. When I said I didn’t have a problem with the women and their values or the clothes or their drinking and how he sounded just like most Punjabi men, he beamed happily at the unintended compliment. “I am Punjabi, yes proud to be.”

He discussed his trips to Delhi and how he hoped to go and lie in Ammi’s lap for 6 months next year and then get married and return. He also went on to tell me that he hoped I would stay as I was and not get influenced by this culture! I reassured him that there were few chances of that - I was already too much of a decadent despite living in India all my life and the Australian culture couldn’t possibly make me worse. He went on, “ Now men will be men, a date here and there hardly matters, they look after their families, they do.” I agreed with him, not wishing to launch into a why men and why not women tirade. He commiserated with me when I told him my father along with other army men were still believed to be in Pakistan and said he had loved “Deewaar”, the recent movie on Indian Prisoners of Wars (POWs).

By the end of the trip we were friends, almost long lost ones and parted with the exchange of phone numbers. That often happened, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis all met with a sense of relief at having found another one of their ilk here in this alien land. I don’t want to start off on a diatribe about the so called similarities that we all shared and how we were one. Besides our brown skin and common Bollywood background, there were many differences just as there are differences with most people, for example with the next door neighbours back home in Punjab who were often abominable to say the least. Yet one couldn’t deny it that you did feel at home with other brown skins around.

SO it was a pleasant surprise when I found that among the doctors in the Toowoomba hospital, there were two Indian girls, one Indian born in Malaysia and brought up in UK, a Sri Lankan, a Bangladeshi, a Pakistani and an African. The Indian girls took me under their wing. Yet the initial feeling of emptiness persisted. As a colleague who had just moved to the UK said to me, despite our schizoid credentials, we missed the smell and feel of home.

Despite the infuriating madness, the incessant queues, the mayhem, the intrusiveness of small town India and complete lack of logic even at times, I wondered if even coming for a year had been a good idea? I pulled myself together. I had come here to get the real taste of Australia and to try and travel a bit so that is what I would do. Hello Australia, here I was. Let’s see how it goes.