Happy
and master of himself
is the man who
for every day of his life can say:
“Today I have lived;
tomorrow if God extends for us
a horizon of dark clouds
or designs a morning
of limpid light,
he will not change our poor past
he will do nothing without the memory
of events that the fleeting hour
will have assigned to us.” —Horace, Odes, Book III, 29
Philosophically I don’t feel allegiance to arbitrarily drawn geographical boundaries, but now practically, I don’t know what government will have my back. I grew up in India, but have been living and paying taxes almost my entire adult life in the US the past 14 years (I still don’t have a green card) – New York City is my home – and right now I’m in Portugal waiting for my H1-B transfer to my future employer. At any one time I’m looking up coronavirus advisory for three countries, often furious at the US response, and often wondering if it is safer for me to stay put. Practically, I feel stateless, and despite there obviously being a lot of global collaboration, I tangibly sense a lack of coordination and its effect on my freedom.
View from my bedroom window in LIsbon’s Santa Catarina
I woke up Thursday morning to the sounds of birds chirping outside my bedroom window, looking out into a delightfully sunny Lisbon, and to a text from E saying that Trump had issued a travel ban on most of Europe.
I didn’t have a flight ticket to return to New York because I wasn’t sure when my approval notice would arrive in Lisbon – the delivery estimate was for Monday, March 16th. I sent out an email to my future employer and lawyers to figure out what my options were. Once it was business hours in New York, my future employer worked with my lawyers to come up with some ideas on what I could do. There were a couple of options: maybe I’d start working remotely from Portugal and return whenever the travel ban is lifted; another, less ideal option, was that I could try to fly to New York using a copy of my approval notice: this isn’t ideal, but it’s not very high risk either. I decided to take a chance. At around 11pm local time on Thursday, I had a flight the next day out of Lisbon that would get me to JFK at around 8pm ET, a few hours before the travel ban took effect that day at 11:59pm ET. (Later I would learn that passengers on any flight from the Schengen area to the US that was in the air before 11:59ET would be allowed to enter.)
Next morning, after a fitful night of sleep, I woke up to the same chirping birds, and briefly they made me cheerful. My package was currently in Vitoria, Spain. It was probably getting on a truck from there, since that’d make the delivery date of Monday make sense. I went to get coffee down the hill from me at Neighbourhood. Vicky’s brother had just left for Los Angeles a couple days ago, so we indulged in our shared lamentation of the news that everyone in Europe had just woken up to. I went around the corner to make a copy of my approval notice, and then walked back uphill to my apartment in Lisbon’s Santa Caterina. My package just made it to Lisbon!
As if by instinct, I called the local DHL customer care and asked how long it would take for the package to be delivered to the service point. Rosa said the earliest it would arrive there was 2pm this afternoon. Luckily, the package hadn’t been loaded onto a truck yet. It was only around 10am at this time, so I asked them to hold it at the warehouse, which was around 11 miles outside Lisbon. After I got the address from Rosa, I hung up and got myself a cab to the warehouse. I arrived at the reception at the DHL warehouse, showed my ID and picked up my package! I returned to my apartment and it was only around 11am. I had the documents I needed to return to the US, I had a flight ticket, and I still had around 5 hours before I’d take off.
DHL’s warehouse in Póvoa de Santa Iria, some 13 miles outside Lisbon
The plane ride back was uneventful, but different: there were a few masks, and pretty much everyone I saw on the plane wiped down their seats thoroughly; I sensed a hesitant tense energy from the potential shared risk we were all putting ourselves (and others) through that we all did our best to muffle. I arrived in JFK a little after 8pm. There was practically no line for immigration, and once my turn arrived, I made it past border control in less than a minute.
I am, of course, relatively privileged to have been able to even consider being stuck in a beautiful city for an unknown period of time and have a job that lets me work remotely, but privilege comes in many shapes. The arbitrariness of being born Indian made the difference between my being able to return home and being stuck outside for at least a month, probably more.
Airplanes are a little too fast. Now I’m in New York, and I don’t quite understand what just happened.