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| Toronto Diary by Ramachandra Guha |
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 I had planned to spend the day of the US presidential election in the town of Berkeley, California. I was quite looking forward to the experience. What would the streets look like, I wondered? Would those lining up to vote be neither for Kerry nor Bush but (this being the original centre of counterculture) for Ralph Nader?
My plans were brutally torn to shreds at Toronto airport by an American immigration official named (as I recall) McCullough. I had spent a week lecturing in Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia, and was now on my way to Oberlin College, Ohio, and, from there, to the University of California at Berkeley. I'd been an itinerant migrant worker for the past decade. It was a way of life I was used to and so, I believed, were the Americans. It was thus with a certain casualness that I placed my papers on the counter.
My cool did not please McCullough, my papers still less. "What visa are you on?" he barked. "A B1/B2," I answered. "But you can't earn money on this," he said. "I can indeed, and have done so a dozen times," I shot back. "Don't raise your voice," said the big fellow, "I don't allow even my father to talk to me like that." Keeping my passport, he directed me to a room to await a meeting with his supervisor.
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The waiting room I was sent to was no more welcoming. In this American piece of Canadian soil, the heater had been turned off. In its corners huddled various travellers who had, like me, been pulled out of line to be given the once-over. The room was cold anyway, but the loss of our passports had left us all feeling naked.
I looked around for comfort. It came from a male face coloured a reassuring brown. I sat next to him, and asked where he was from. "Now a Canadian, but before that from Bangladesh," he answered, casting a nervous eye at the sign in front of us. This warned that closed-circuit TVs were watching us, and videotaping every snatch of conversation.
Judging that the TVs were monolingual, I switched to bad Bangla, picked up in four years doing a PhD in Calcutta. He answered in worse Hindi, learnt, he said, by osmosis from his wife, who loved Bollywood films. His problem on the day was that his father had named him Mohammad. A software engineer in Toronto, he was on his way to meet his principals in New Jersey, if the Americans would let him. "Don’t argue with them," he counselled me, "otherwise they will put a black mark against your name." The minutes ticked by. The room got colder. McCullough strolled in, looked menacingly around, and went out again. After an hour-and-a-half, Mohammad was called in. He came out with a shy smile of victory. As he picked up his bags, he complimented me on mine: "Tomaar Shantiniketan jhola khub bhalo."
Now I too was called in. The supervisor—as it happened a lady, and African-American—was more polite than her colleague. But her decision was as unhelpful. She/they could not let me in as I did not have a regular teaching, or J-1, visa. She handed over my passport, which I grabbed and ran out of the door. Into the warm wide world beyond.
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Why was I stopped? One reason might have been my jhola, a patch of mirrorwork on red which must have been as dangerously exotic to McCullough as it was appealing to my friend Mohammad. Another, certainly, was the letter of invitation from Oberlin, which specified a fee for my lectures which greatly angered McCullough. "How can they pay you so much," he said more than once, adding, "And for teaching history." (Also relevant perhaps was my place of residence, a city much demonised in the presidential campaign for "stealing American jobs"). Finally, there was a general paranoia in the week before the elections, fuelled in this particular instance by a daily target of suspects to be detained.
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On my return to India, I checked the rules again. Under a B1/B2 visa one can do paid work for up to nine days at a time and in as many as five different universities. Berkeley and Oberlin are now planning a joint letter of protest. Meanwhile, they’ve written me handsome letters of apology, expressing shock at "such discriminatory and unjustified exclusion", and anger at the "terrible injustice you had to endure... [from] these cretins". My host at Berkeley pleads: "Don’t give up on us. Hopefully, there will be a new president elected on Tuesday." I write this on Monday, but I fear that even if John Kerry wins, the paranoia towards the foreigner shall persist.
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In 1960, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, by then an Indian citizen, was invited to lecture by Columbia University. When he went to the consulate in Calcutta to get a visa, he was asked to "name all the organisations of which I am or have been a member of affiliate since my 16th birthday (with inclusive dates)". He refused, writing to his American host that he did not know when he joined the Association of Scientific Workers or the anti-fascist front, or whatever. The visa form, he noted, was "unworthy of the land of the free and the brave". A year later, when Senator Hubert Humphrey wrote asking for reprints of his scientific papers, Haldane complained to him about the visa form in these chillingly prescient words: "If I wished to blow up the Empire State Building or subvert the Republican Party I should doubtless be willing to sign false statements. But I happen to have a professional prejudice in favour of the truth.... It seems to be ridiculous that a great country like yours (or rather its government) should be so frightened of what I can do as to make such demands."
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