Journeys | Arrival in Taipei

From the Quarantine Hotel Balcony

I was living out of a room on the third floor of a building that housed a construction materials shop in a village called Munirka. On three-wheeled trolleys, weather and work-hardened bodies loaded bricks, bags of cement and sand to deliver to the construction sites where the narrow width of streets and by lanes forbade a motor vehicle. Even if it did allow trucks, some economies love to work human bodies like machines and price their sweat and blood with a pittance.

My friends made a surprise visit to wish me farewell. I had to leave much behind despite weeks of shipping books, blankets, and boots back home. There was still so much I could neither carry nor dispose of. I had to leave it all behind. Airlines restricted check-in baggage to under twenty kilograms. As the moment of departure ticked closer, on scales that had been used to weigh plaster, my friends threw in my luggage. To bring the thirty-two kilograms reading down to twenty, I knew I had to lose the weight of many books behind that I could not take with me.

The cab took us to the airport, and my friends were sitting in the car with me. Though some things were said, there was a palpable silence of meanings that words will always fail to convey, but their presence more than made up for. They hugged me goodbye, and with a faint heart, I disappeared behind the glass doors of the third terminal of Delhi airport. Briefly, I caught the last glimpses of those who had carried me thus far.

The long layover at Singapore’s Changi airport I spent sleeping on carpeted floors, and dragging my carry-on from terminal to terminal, gazing at the shops selling wares of the modern world tax-free. Perfumes, coffee beans, gadgets and gizmos, every store shone with brilliance that blinded my tired eyes. In some corner, iron chains curtained a garden of butterflies. I soaked in the sunlight, saw the giant fair of travellers arriving, waiting, departing as planes pulled into gates and trucks and trailers loaded and unloaded the conveyor belt of possessions.

Taxi before takeoff jolts the tin can of Bernoulli’s marvel. On runways of asphalt, the projectile gathers speed and leaves the embrace of one land for the company of clouds and stratospheric skies above. Ships marooned in the harbor, castaway in the sea, like the streak of a comet in the night sky, visible from the window below as the plane tilted and corrected its course towards an island floating on the vast ocean.

Crew provided meals, drinks, snacks, and moments before landing, arrival forms to us foreigners. Hidden amidst tropical green hillscapes is the Taoyuan International Airport. Though on that night, I could only make out the city lights, unaware of the geography of arrival. The airport resembled a hospital, and though its sanitized corridors, we were received by an official from the Ministry of Education. He helped us fill out our forms, the immigration officer stamped my passport, arrived in Taipei, 18^th September 2022, valid for 90 days per my visitor visa.

Cordoned in pairs, we made it through the maze of health inspection officials. In a booth, a nasal sample was taken, and I filled a tiny plastic canister with my spit. Bar code labels identified the spit and sample with my identity. Emerging out, I felt the breeze of the city, its feeling of summer night’s warmth laced with tropical humidity.

I got inside the backseat of a Quarantine cab and showed him the address of the hotel where I will isolate myself for my first week, ‘Bear Inn’ in the Sanxia district of New Taipei City. He read the Chinese characters and spoke to the GPS, a route lit up on the navigation screen, and he floored the gas.

Airports are usually a little farther away from the cities. They are spaceports of arrival on the highways of the skies. In the quiet night, we blurred past the highways and flyovers, snaked through silhouettes of hills and arrived in a valley, with grids of avenues and streets, nestled in the lap of mountains.

Nestled in a Valley

Distinctly, that smell rises in memory, so novel, so new, and how unused to it I was then and how longingly I yearn for it now. From the confines of my room and the balcony overlooking the intersection, I glimpsed at the streaks of cars, scooters and limbs in motion, breathed in the flavors I was yet to taste, and listened to the music of a language I was yet to learn to speak a single word of.

On the corner was a Seven-Eleven, the first one of the many convenience stores that light up day and night like an oasis of Edward Hopper’s imagination. The hotel staff left the meals on my doorstep, and the Line chat pinged with a message, “your meal has been served,” followed by a bowing bear emoji.

After the third day, upon showing a negative result on a rapid test kit, I was allowed to roam for a while with the excuse of buying some groceries and making necessary purchases. Winds leapt at me and swept me up on the streets that framed green hills tinged with crimson of a setting sun in the distance, where infinities meet. Greek statues stood at the entrance to residential buildings and condominiums.

A Greek Figure at Doorstep

Carrying an empty canvas in my heart, I had left Delhi, a feeling of departure without a sense of arrival, to be suspended in a nowhere nowhen interstitial space time. Taipei will steep that canvas in its scents in the seasons to come. I will witness a city unfold, envelop, and transform a traveller to be at home in the invisible cities of this world.

For now, I will enter the Seven-Eleven, run my fingers through the shelves with magazines I could not read, imagine the flavors of chips and ice cream from the colors of the packaging, point at a power adapter, fumblingly ask how much it costs, and pay in cash and pocket the change, walk out and pass the nights looking at a movie shoot from the perch of my quarantine balcony late into the night and listen to the lullaby of a city putting its residents to sleep.

Manning a Midnight Movie Shoot