The day had come… more accurately, the night – around 1:30AM in Winnipeg, Canada in late August of 1981. The mind, the body, the universe was confused. Time-zones do that to you. My would-be Ph.D. supervisor was not there this late at night.  The university’s India students association had no welcoming service. Google was born only in 1998, a full 17 yrs after the fact. Cellphones were in a pre-natal stage (the first commercial ones came out in 1983). No family or friends, an unfamiliar country! It felt foreign – the airport, the people, the phone-system, the transportation system – everything! At 22yrs old, I found myself struggling as a freshly-landed, lonely foreign student in Canada.

The night marked the end of a maiden flight that had taken me straight out of my native India.  My previous international travel was as a 16yr old accompanying my parents on a bus to Nepal.

Clueless about my whereabouts, it only made sense to stay put at the desolate airport for the night. As the sun came through, the pocket phone diary my parents had handed me yielded a contact. This gentleman had been a professional contact of an uncle of mine, many years prior. How I made the call on that coin-operated rotary phone in Canada dodges the memory, but it turned out to be a lifesaver. He and his wife very kindly picked this stranger up from the airport, fed good hot breakfast, and then dropped me outside Tache Hall.  Exhausted, I did not notice the beautiful colonial design of the dorm building.

That breakfast surely helped me break an unintended, prolonged 18+hrs fast. I had given up eating food a few hours after taking off from Delhi on Air India flight to NY. Whenever the air-hostess brought the meals my confused body rejected them; the body clock had lost its rhythm. Emotions had consumed me; this separation from my family and my land was going to be a long and uncertain one. My parents have had to borrow money just to put me on that flight. The finality of the moment dawned on me as the excitement of travel in previous days yielded to home-sickness.

Travel from NY, onward to Toronto, allowed no breaks to eat.  The US immigration officer looked perplexed as  he examined my papers. I had no US transit visa to enable ground transport  to LaGuardia, a connecting airport several miles away.  My travel agent had not advised of this detail. The officer drew me aside and went to get his associate.  He came back with an African-American lady officer to escort me out of the airport. She walked with me to the bus station, sat on the bus through to LaGuardia, navigated to the check-in counter for NY-Toronto flight, and accompanied me through security until I had securely boarded the flight. Had it not been so, I’d likely be stuck in NY that night! Thank the travel agent!

The final flight from Toronto to Winnipeg was uneventful, but it was too late for any food service. That breakfast in Winnipeg had ended the forced, prolonged fast.

It was Friday morning that I flung my bags on the bed in the dorm, and went into a deep slumber almost immediately.  The morning after, on a beautiful Saturday, I woke up again. I had literally slept for nearly 24hrs since the last breakfast.  Hungry and weak in search of food, ventured out of my room on the University of Manitoba campus. Not a soul was in sight. Coming from a hugely more populous place buzzing with a constant din 24/7, I had never seen a place so desolate.  A single car parked outside another colonial structure on campus – later learned it was called the Admin Bldg –  gave me some hope. 

The owner emerged nearly 30mins later.  In my unpracticed Indian English, I mustered enough courage to ask for help. “Nothing on campus would be open for the next 3 days” I was told. It was the Labor-day long weekend. It was also my first encounter with this vocabulary. He was a kind man. He dropped me off at a McDonald’s a few short kilometers from Campus.

I had never heard that name before. For almost all of us Indians, Canada was a far away fantasy land where Eskimos lived in Igloos. No internet or Google existed to help us know any better. That McDonald’s went into the history book (my personal one!) when it fed a hungry, vegetarian Indian kid his first meal in Canada. Of course in 1981, neither McDonald’s, nor Tache Hall, or for that matter even the city of Winnipeg or the province of Manitoba, would know what ‘vegetarian’ means. Nevertheless, found enough to fill me up – some French Fries and Vanilla milk-shake! I was happy that the meal only cost a couple of dollars; my total cash assets of a few hundred dollars was all I had. That’s ALL the foreign currency that India could afford to let international students take out of the country, including their fees.

As a side note, years later McDonald’s declared that their fries were not vegetarian; they used ‘formula 47’ which included beef tallow. I felt corrupted. Unwittingly, a lifelong vegetarian Hindu boy had enjoyed the fries at the cost of the cows slaughtered for his eating pleasure.

How the next few days passed on campus remains a complete blur. I only recall not having enough mental resources to seek out the Physics department or my PhD supervisor for another three days. When I did finally reach him his relief was palpable; he had finally found his lost student. It became clear that he did visit the airport to receive me but returned baffled that I was not on that flight from Toronto. He had misread my telegram “arriving at 00:00hr”. He went to the airport a full 24hrs later!

My parents in India had no inkling of these 36+ hrs, or even whether their son had reached the destination, until over a month later when my first hand-written letter reached them in Bhopal. It leaves me bewildered as I think about how they might have felt not knowing for all those weeks. I will never truly know.

The ability of humans to survive through much worse situations is incredible. Thankful I am well equipped to write about it today!