I have been thinking a lot about airports lately. This is partly because one of my final papers this semester was about airport bathrooms, partly because I’ve recently spent 36 hours in and between international airports, and partly because nearly every night I dream about what it will be like when I see Sumit walking through customs at an airport in the United States.
Airports — particularly big international airports — are emotionally-charged spaces for me because I have several times been confronted with the harsh reality of the boundaries they represent. For example, at the international airport in Chennai, you cannot enter the check-in area of the airport without a ticket. I have departed India through this airport 4 or 5 times after visiting Sumit, and when he drops me off, we always wait outside the check-in area (sometimes in 104-degree South Indian heat) as long as possible. About one hour before my flight, we say our goodbyes, and I enter the airport through a doorway manned by Indian military personnel in sharp uniforms with big rifles slung across their backs. I always look back several times while these guards check my documents, imploring Sumit to charge the entrance, to find a way to come with me.
Anyway, right before the guards hustle me inside, I always think, I could still touch him. It seems rather remarkable to me, that there is this moment when all it would take is a few seconds’ stride and suddenly we would be able to touch each other again. I’ve spent so much of my relationship with Sumit pondering the magnitude of the physical distance that separates us — 7,500 miles, actually — and in the moment when we begin to create that distance again — the moment when I am just the first few meters of what will soon be many thousands of miles away from him — I am struck by how easy it would be to turn around and erase the distance. But I never do, and I always wonder why I never do. I suppose it’s because that’s the kind of thing people in movies do, but in real life, you can’t throw away an $1800 plane ticket just because you’re in love.
So I leave Sumit outside the airport and I enter it. He doesn’t have a ticket or a visa, and these are two of the three documents necessary to gain entrance to the airport.
Airports are unusual spaces. They are points of arrival and departure, and the time spent flying between them is time spent between two places. I once had a friend tell me about something she read on an international flight while “over Afghanistan,” and I marveled at the strangeness of the way she demarcated her time in the flight. To be in a flying airplane is to be in a liminal space — to fly from Chicago to Delhi is to be in an airplane for 14 hours, not to be in Quebec, and then in the Atlantic ocean, and then in Norway, etc. You do not need visas for the places you fly over; you do not enter them. Rather, in air travel, you leave one place and arrive in another. In comparison to any other form of travel — train, car, ship — air travel is strange in that it allows passengers to imagine they are not passing through other places, but rather to and from one place and another.
It is not a far stretch, then, to think of airports as a kind of no-man’s land. They are unmarked spaces, territory where standard geographic boundaries melt away. And in order to gain access to these spaces, you must have documentation that declares the exact nature of your identity outside the airport (passport, visa, ticket). It is not even the actual content of these documents that matters (your nationality, type of visa, destination, etc.), but the sheer fact that you possess the documents in the first place. In other words, before entering the liminal zone, you must be formally categorized, such that, while you are in the liminal zone, you can verify the exact status of your membership in those same geographic zones that have otherwise melted away.
So in applying for a US visa, Sumit is attempting to officially document his status as an immigrant to the US, so that when he crosses the boundary, he can verify that his status in various geographic zones (India and the US) is exactly as he claims (citizen of India, immigrant to the US) while he is in the liminal space between the zones. Of course, you could argue that applying for a visa is about more than getting through the airport — perhaps it’s about moving to and living in a new place — but its seems to me that the boundary is in the airport, and Sumit needs the visa to cross the boundary.
Anyway, Sumit’s interview in Delhi should be sometime in the next few months, so hopefully he’ll be able to secure the appropriate documentation so that, for the first time, he can enter the airport with me when I leave India in August. The idea is somewhat surreal to me at this point — to think I could actually travel with my fiancé instead of away from him!
