(no quotes please) “Pourquoi êtes-vous ici si tard?” said the stern security officer as I woke up in utter confusion, barely aware of where I was. A janitor swept the floor quietly in the corner of the vast terminal while a fellow traveller snored away at a distance. It took me a few seconds to get my mind in order before I informed the officer that my flight was the next morning and that I had to sleep on the terminal chairs for the rest of the night. He nodded understandingly and walked away.
It was, by my count, the seventeenth hour of my transit stop at Zurich International Airport. With six more hours left until the next affordable flight to Mumbai, my patience grew thin. Mustering what seemed like the last of my energy, I told myself that I had no option but to get used to long journeys like these and focused again on why I was there in the first place. I had managed to save up enough money from my budget to afford a flight back home to Mumbai for summer break to meet my family and had planned the trip perfectly so that it coincided with my parents’ anniversary. I would be their surprise. Speculating on how they would react was enough to get me through the rest of the journey.
The last time I saw my family, nearly a year ago, I was seventeen and at the airport about to get on a one-way flight to the United States. My mother was crying despondently and instructed me through the visitor’s window at the airport to put away my passport safely. My father and sister both smiled encouragingly as I said goodbye and set off toward the check-in counter. It was a difficult & emotional moment for all of us. Mother was concerned I won’t adapt well to the snow, while my father and sister were worried I’d feel isolated and alone.
None of all that mattered to me at that time, of course, as I was set to embark on a life-changing endeavour to study and live abroad for the next four years. It took many months of persuasion and deliberation to convince my parents that studying abroad, even at that young age, would be a prudent move. The food and the weather were irrelevant, I argued, because what truly mattered was the experience. My parents, having never graduated college nor moved out of the family home, took a while to agree. The prospect of making my way through in a foreign land gave me a sense empowerment and control over my destiny. I would get out of the experience what I put in. It was this realization that gave me fortitude to tide over whatever I felt at the airport and allowed me to focus on what lied ahead.
With not much else productive to do, I decided to spend the next few hours at the airport researching the infamous H1-B worker visa and understanding the process of how I could possibly obtain work authorization after graduation. Being only a freshman at the time, I was years away from a full-time job. Yet it was important for me to look into this issue since I had to declare my major in a few weeks and, thus, had to foresee as many repercussions as I possibly could especially considering I would then be considered an immigrant. In less than an hour, a headache and a sense of anxiety forced me to put my laptop away. The rules and processes were far too complicated for me to worry about at that moment. My first year as an international student was wrought with instability and risk anyway and there was no point stacking on more anxiety. I decided to deal with the obstacles as and when they appear and immersed myself a novel for the remaining few hours.
As the lady on the intercom announced the boarding of my flight, I arranged all my travel documents once again – a process which was almost instinctive to me by then. I took a deep breath, stopped worrying about visas or passports or airport security officers, and marched on to the gate. I was about to go home and meet my family whom I had for far too long only seen through a laptop screen.
