A. X. Ahmad is detained by Homeland Security at the airport — and finally gets to really know his fiancée.
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My American fiancée and I had just returned from India, the country of my birth, and stood in the long immigration line at JFK airport.
“We’ll be here for hours,” I said nervously. With my beard and Muslim name, I was sure to face a volley of questions from the officials: What is the nature of your visit? Oh, you live here? What is your profession? Writer? Who do you work for? Yourself? It was always a humiliating experience, and I didn’t want my fiancée to witness it.
“I’m sure you’ll be fine. You have a green card now,” my fiancée said, cheerfully. Seeing the frown on my face, she changed the topic. “Hey, cheer up. It was a great trip, right? And our wedding clothes are beautiful.”
Our summer wedding was in two months, and we’d gone to India to have our clothes tailored: a hot pink ghaghra-choli for my fiancée, embroidered in gold, and a dove gray Nehru jacket for me. We were an unconventional couple—an Indian writer and a feminist scholar with a Harvard PhD—and our wedding would reflect us. We’d be married by candlelight in a small wooden chapel, reciting vows we’d written ourselves, and there would be no wedding rings. After the dinner—a fusion-Indian feast—a salsa-funk band would play our favorite song: It’s an immigrant nation/ With no compensation.
Our shared love of books had brought us together, and we’d romanced each other with poems from Neruda and long, literary emails. We’d been together for five years now, and we wanted to share our love for each other with friends and family. Yet each time I thought about our wedding ceremony, I felt a twinge of uncertainty. I experienced life in America as a battle, a constant struggle to establish myself. My fiancée had a privileged American upbringing—private school, followed by the Ivy league—and assumed the world was a safe, friendly place. What would happen to us when life got tough, as it inevitably would?
But the wedding was still two months away. Just then, all I wanted to do was go home, take a hot shower, and sleep for two days straight.
The line moved slowly, and eventually it was our turn. The dour immigration official barely glanced at my fiancée’s American passport, but flipped slowly through my battered Indian one. He typed into his computer, frowned, and then addressed me.
“There is a problem here. Sir, you need to come with me to secondary inspection. Ma’am, you can go ahead.”
I had never been sent to secondary inspection before, and felt a surge of panic. “Why don’t you get the bags,” I said to my fiancée, trying to sound relaxed. “Wait for me outside. I’ll be right out.”
“No.” She got that stubborn look on her face. “I’m not leaving you here.”
“Suit yourself, Ma’am. This way.”
The immigration official led us both down a back corridor to a room with scuffed white walls and glaring fluorescent lights. Handing over my passport to an official behind a high counter, he vanished.
We sat down on the hard metal chairs and looked around. The room was packed with brown and black immigrants, all looking terrified, and the officials behind the counter moved at a glacial pace.
“Are you sure you want to wait here?” I tried again. I desperately didn’t want my fiancée to see me like this.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m sure it’s just some sort of bureaucratic mix up.”
We sat, staring at the blank walls. As the minutes slowly passed, the outside world faded away. Soon there was only this cramped room with its buzzing fluorescent lights.
A young Hispanic woman was called to the front. She was questioned about taking her stepson illegally out of the country and then taken away, silent and white-faced. A Pakistani lady sitting next to me, her head covered, began to weep softly.
Taking out an academic text, my fiancée began to read, underlining as she went. How could she read at a time like this? Was this her way of distancing herself from the situation? Because I was definitely a part of this situation, and the longer it went on, the more panicked I felt. I had a very common Muslim name; what if the immigration officials had me mixed up with some terrorist? I was a freelance writer, with no employer to vouch for me. Hell, my income last year had been eight thousand dollars.
I watched a Saudi man being questioned about how much money he was carrying. He unbuttoned his shirt and produced a money belt, and was handcuffed. I imagined the same thing happening to me; I imagined myself wearing an orange jumpsuit, buried deep inside Guantanamo.
An hour turned into two, and yet my fiancée read on calmly. When the immigration official finally called out my name, I jumped up. My fiancée took her time putting her book away, behaving as though we were at the dentist.
“So.” The official began to scrutinize my passport. “You’re a writer? What do you write about?”
My fiancée smiled broadly. When she leaned forward to address the man, my heart sank. As every immigrant knows, the best approach with bureaucracy is to only speak when spoken to.
“Hey, you like the Knicks?” she said, gesturing to the logo on the man’s key ring.
“Yeah.” Surprised, the man returned her smile. “Too bad they suck this year. You with this guy?”
“We’re getting married this summer. Ah, the Knicks. They’ll break your heart every time. I saw them play in the 90’s. Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Charles Oakley. Now that was a good team.”
“Yeah, remember in ’93 they went 60-22?”
Chatting easily with my fiancée about basketball, the official typed into his computer. My name came up on a terrorist watch-list. He called a number in Washington, and spoke into his phone, describing me. Yeah, about five-seven. Black hair. Brown eyes. Nope, no scar.
The official finished his call, apologized for delaying us, and handed me back my passport. I was free to go.
“Good woman you got there,” he said. “Congratulations on getting married.”
I was too drained to reply.
We found our bags, and my fiancée drove home.
“Back in there,” I said to her, “you were… you were…” I searched for the right words, but tiredness fogged my brain.
She just reached out and grasped my hand. We drove through the dark night like that, breathing in the muggy summer air.
Later that summer, I stood at the altar in the candle-lit chapel, watching my fiancée walking down the aisle towards me, looking beautiful in her hot-pink ghaghra-choli. Gazing out at the sea of familiar faces in silk dresses and saris, I realized that I felt calm and steady. All my qualms about the marriage ceremony had vanished.
I realized that our commitment ceremony had already happened, two months ago, in a small, windowless room deep inside JFK airport. I was ready to make my vows.
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Photo: Mark Hillary / Flickr
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Read also by A. X. Ahmad “Structural Failure“, which is one of the 31 stories in The Good Men Project anthology (free with a Premium Membership).
The post Love in Secondary Inspection appeared first on The Good Men Project.
