Modern suspicion-2

    The look she gives you makes you think of a furious school teacher who is accustomed to dealing with unruly kids. Her eyes are on you and then she literally turns her head and stays where she has been standing for hours without giving you a word. This makes you thinks she is trying to say “I don’t give a damn. You wait till I’m done, boy.”

   With “excuse me” you try to excuse yourself through the trolley and the armrest brushing against one passenger. The passenger moves side way thinking you should pass, the   attendant remains unmoved. Of what use  you have braved the blockade to get into one of two toilets? To stand in a line with my back leaning against the armrest of one passenger, disturbing another passenger with you being pushed each time more and more attendants stroll down the aisle with broad trays on their palms over the glistening oiled heads.

   After several hours you are in this recently-transformed airport where the floors are carpeted, the electronic walkways are newly installed, the staff members are made to wear clean-looking uniform, and on the walls after every few metres you can see the ceiling to floor portraits of happy turbaned-man and content-looking veiled ladies.  It must have been only one escalator some years back now there are four of them going downwards and at the feet of them there are potted palms and you can see some young lean uniformed security guards with Israeli sub-machine guns standing by and examining the leaves of the potted plants. There are tens of immigration counters manned by well-trimmed mustachioed men in suits, but there are long zigzags created by stanchions with the straps stretched out to the very ends.

     You still don’t know where you will be staying, all that you have is a guide book in my hand and in it there are few cheap, probably cavernous hotels which you want to check soon you get to some encircled areas in the map. So you have written only the area where you will be headed off to in the arrival card, but the immigration officer wants you to write a detailed address with the number of someone whom you know in the city. You couldn’t lie and couldn’t give him a number which doesn’t exist. He doesn’t listen because he is used to insisting people who someone like him can conveniently trouble. Lie is what he wants so you place the guide book on the counter and flip few pages, and tick an address and the telephone number of the ticked place and just scribble them down, then you hand him back the form which has been passed back and forth between few times. This time it returns to you one more time. You haven’t put down your signature. It doesn't matter, you just put a signature, not your original signature, just to test the man. He doesn’t say a word because his supposedly pedantic eyes haven’t compared the real signature in your passport with the one you have just scribbled in the card.

   So much power has been bestowed upon them to probe the suspicion they see in every individual, but this bestowed-power has come upon them when they themselves haven’t been reformed; their lethargy. At the arrival gate there are five of them standing with larger Israeli sub-machine guns and their bodies armored and heads helmeted. You have a life-size rucksack in the trolley and a laptop knapsack besides and the camera which is dangling on one side of your empty belly. One among the many sub-machine guns wielding men wants to see your baggage card but it’s you who has to go up to him to present the baggage cart, a tiny strip of paper which bears the powerful stamp of the man who failed to see the difference between your real and faked signatures.  Atop the buildings nearby are the people behind sandbags their helmeted heads and the long and prominent barrels visible. They are planted to thwart off any suspicions or any mischief of some sycophants. Would you have to be grateful for being born in such a deeply suspicious modern-looking world? The mind wanders off to fetch “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.”