When I went to the airport this January to board a plane to the US, I found the people there in a relaxed mood. Yes, all of them were wearing masks and quite a few of them were in that mock-space suit. I was asked that routine question, ‘Why now?’ The US then was reporting a high number of deaths and Los Angeles, where I was landing, was spoken of as the very cesspit of the virus. I had to tell them my wife and I longed to see our grandson and we were prepared to take the risk.
LA International Airport was far removed from the one celebrated in Susan Raye’s great hit. It looked forlorn and lost. We hardly encountered a human being when we moved towards the domestic terminal, pushing our trolleys slowly. The only noise seemed to be the ruckus made by the trolleys. “We are in a deep hole”, said the lady who was at the airline counter. “How is India doing?”
“Oh, we are doing very well,” I breezily replied. “The virus has almost disappeared from our land.”
The journey from Los Angeles to San Jose was tense. We were wearing gloves but afraid to touch any surface. My son, who picked us from the airport, was also equally paranoid. We had our N-95 masks and face-shields. Still, he asked us repeatedly whether we had observed all the precautions without being casual even once. As soon as we reached his Sunnyvale residence, we were quarantined. We underwent the RT-PCR test after five days and were relieved when it came out negative.
I was determined that we should be vaccinated as quickly as possible, but the Santa Clara county website said clearly that the vaccination was open only to residents of the county. It also gave a dire warning that anyone who gives wrong information about his or her residency status would be guilty of perjury—a grave offence in the US. Many friends also told me that vaccination was open only to residents and not temporary visitors. My son did not give up and finally found that Bay Area Community Health, one of the centers for vaccination that did not specifically ask for a residency proof, but only an identity proof to establish that my wife and I had crossed the 60-year threshold. We were in a dilemma. Would we be rejected because we didn’t fulfil the basic condition of residency? We decided to take a chance. We registered and got a slot almost immediately.
The drive-through vaccination centre worked almost like clockwork. Except the guy who poked the needle into the person to be vaccinated, the rest of them were all volunteers. When our turn came, the volunteer asked for the age proof and we produced our passports. She took them away for a few minutes and returned to tell us that we were good to wait in the line for vaccination. She also made a comment that we appeared to be widely travelled persons! Our turn came in about five minutes and our vaccinations were over in a few seconds. Our turn for the second dose came on March 12. This time we had to walk to the vaccination counter. There was some confusion in finding my wife’s records; it took a few minutes for the volunteer to locate them because of the way her name was spelled. The supervisor personally came and apologised to her for the delay.
Risk levels in the US are classified into four stages—widespread, substantial, moderate and minimal—and Santa Clara County in California was hovering at the substantial level. But I didn’t see panic anywhere. Protocols were being scrupulously observed everywhere. The only place where people were lax was the Indian store I visited. It may be a coincidence but the only news of prosecution for vaccine profiteering that I came across involved a person of Indian origin! Yes, the US is a rich, well-run country; maybe the state of California is exceptionally administered too. But I will not be true to myself if I deny that my personal experience was very pleasant indeed. When I started my return journey to India on April 24, the same question was asked at LA airport: ‘Why now?’ My answer was, “I am an Indian and more than 1,300 million people live there.”