Sameer Ahuja

“I am going to just go back to India. I’m just not responsible enough to do anything worthwhile.”

As I stood sweating in the hot summer sun waiting for the 3PM Tom’s Creek A to arrive, I could not seem to find words degrading enough to describe myself. This was my second day in Blacksburg, Virginia. And I had concluded that I was going back to where I came from. You see, when I came here, I came with the understanding that out of everything that I possessed, there was just one thing that was critical to my presence. My passport. This understanding had been ingrained in my mind by my father’s persistence in repeating it to me, even at the cost of me mocking him every time he did so, once every couple of hours for each day of the week before I actually left India.

And so I stood there; now almost soaking wet from all the sweat in that hot, hot summer sun; trying to avoid the realization of the enormity of the fact that I had lost my passport on my second day at Virginia Tech. Earlier in the day I had found that the passport wasn’t in its natural habitat: The leather pouch in the inner pocket of the document holder I kept in my backpack. Since then, I had traced every step I took the day before. I mean that literally. I had searched the dorm room I stayed at, the laundry room of the dorms, the pavements that I had walked, all the paths on drillfield (I didn’t remember the one I had walked on), and of course, the empty apartment I was going to stay in before I lost the only document that I was not supposed to lose. I had given up on the search.

I went back to the apartment and lied down on the bare floor next to the two trolley bags, the backpack and the handbag that represented everything that I had brought with me to the States. Everything except the only thing that I wasn’t supposed to lose. I tried replaying the last day for one last time in my head. No luck. I was as doomed as Windows Me was the day it released. Well, maybe not that much.

But I digress. Having resigned to my fate, I tried to go to sleep. Now the part from here to what happened next is a gray area in my memory. But here’s what I do remember: I woke up shouting “The Bag!”. I opened the zip of the front document pocket of the larger bag. It was empty. I opened the zip of the front document pocket of the smaller trolley bag. There, at the bottom of the pocket, my fingers touched the leathery material that makes up the cover of all passports issued by the Indian Republic.

The next few moments are hard to describe. So I won’t. Suffice to say, I really was the happiest person on the planet for those moments.

This is what had happened: When I had arrived in Blacksburg, my baggage didn’t arrive with me – it had been lost in one of the 547 transfers you need to make when coming to Roanoke Regional Airport from anywhere else in the world. Fortunately, the airlines found my bags soon enough. On the evening the day before, the airlines had called me and told me that they were sending the bags at the apartment. When I received the bags, I had to show the personnel my ID. The only ID I had on me was my passport. So I took it out of its natural habitat to show it to the personnel. They gave me the bags and went away.

Now these were heavy bags, filled beyond their legal limits. One person couldn’t lift them both together. Ideally, I should have taken them in one by one. But having lived in big Indian cities for all 25 years of my life, my brain was conditioned to believe that you never leave anything unattended. Anywhere.

So I had to pull in the two trolley bags together, one in each hand. But I was holding the passport in one of my hands. I could keep it in one of the pockets of my Jeans, but that might bend it. This was the most important document in my possession, I couldn’t let it be bent. Umm, wait, I’ll keep it in the front pocket of one of these bags. It’ll be safe there. Later, I’ll take it out and put it in its natural habitat. And then, something happened. I went in, and completely forgot about taking the passport out of the bag. Hell, I even forgot I put it there.

Well, now that this trauma was over, that night I went out of the apartment to the nearby park to watch the stars in the sky. I come from Delhi – I’m blown away whenever I can see anything more than the moon in the night sky. As I was watching the stars, I thought to myself – lesson well learnt. In the future, I would not let magical moments dictate my life, and no matter what happens, I would always keep documents where they belong.

Now, you must be thinking – “I read through this whole post just to read that? I mean, that’s a pretty bland story.” To which let me respond by saying that its less bland than watching kittens sleep for three minutes in a YouTube video – an activity I’m sure you’ve indulged in before. But anyways, the story doesn’t end there. I wish, oh god I wish, that it did. But it doesn’t. In the course of the next two years, I managed to (really) lose my passport once, and my I-20 twice. Over the course of these mishaps, my sense of self-deprecation has mellowed, and I’ve come to accept things for what they really are. Today, as I get ready to finish up with my degree and get started with the next chapter of my life, I still remember vividly that second day in Blacksburg, and often think of the real moral of my story – “Shit happens.”