Becoming British - 2

I must have been six or seven when I became aware that people travelled between countries fairly regularly. The realisation must have been triggered by an uncle’s return after a trip abroad and much fuss being made of his jaunt. No one ever called it abroad back then. It was always ‘Foreign’. Someone who had crossed the national border was ‘Foreign-returned’ and this was not an accolade easily earned. Foreign was this mysterious land that would only allow access to the special ones among us. It was a land populated by chosen people and to have been amongst them and breathed in the same air as them was a rare privilege only a few ever managed.

I can still recall the smell of the luggage that accompanied an uncle’s family after they returned from Foreign. It was smooth, fresh and nothing like the pungent odours of our crowded household. It smelt of clean, white people. A race far removed from the plagues of us dark-skinned beings. Foreign back then was synonymous with any place where white people lived - a cousin’s wife who lived in Kenya once complained to me that despite living abroad she didn’t feel as if she lived in Foreign as there were not enough Caucasian faces around.

I fully expected the Foreign-returned to possess special powers. May be they could levitate. Or turn water to oil. They had to have something extra about them. And yet to me they looked remarkably normal, almost predictably familiar. How could that be? How did they negotiate their way around Foreign land looking and talking the way they did? How did they communicate to the Foreigners if they needed water, shelter or clothing (never mind the fact that being in their land would make our people foreigners)? How did they manage this magnificent feat by appearing so utterly human?

My confusion was further confounded when at the age of 10 or so an aunt read my palm and proclaimed that I had Foreign raasi. It was predestined that I was to go abroad. I wondered if it was the curved line on my palm that resembled an airplane’s tail that gave her the idea and thought it best not to ask in case she changed her mind. And sure enough, some years later I had such an opportunity – and it was to a country with a majority Caucasian population to merit the Foreign status. My return some months later was greeted with great enthusiasm. I was asked how I felt now that I’d seen Foreign. It was my Neil Armstrong moment. And I milked it. I carried my jet lag around with pride and felt a sense of loss as my body clock returned to the local time. I would find casual ways of introducing the fact that I’d been to Foreign into conversations. I felt a unique bond with anyone else who’d left the country ever. We were the chosen ones, the Foreign-returned.

These days however, Foreign travel is much more common and does not hold the same kind of mystery like it once did. I have lived in Foreign for nearly a decade now and this fact no longer registers with me. Everything around me is in sharp focus while Foreign is a fuzzy place where everyone moves in slow motion and the air is forever scented with lavender.

Soon I am to become a Foreigner (or should it be that I now give up being a Foreigner and become a local?). I wonder if there's a line on my palm that could have predicted that.

(to be concluded)

Update: Became British.