From the Land of Eder

With  a pranam to my father, beaming down at me from the wall, I bid farewell to my mother and wife, an hour past midnight, and walked down to the car waiting in the drizzle under my Tollygunge flat. The Messengers and Whatsapps from the  wife and daughter hardly gave me time to reflect, and in under forty five minutes of drive on roads bathed in the yellow of headlights and sodium vapours, I was at the airport. Quick immigration , thanks to Samaddar and Talukdar, hugs to my loyal three- Fatik, Pankaj and Shaligram, a brief halt in the lounge and I was soon inside the swanky Business Class of a Dreamliner of Qatar Airlines.

Though the talk of this Guinea Bissau assignment as Senior Police Advisor in the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Guinea Bissau( UNIOGBIS) had been on for quite sometime, the finale was a sudden rush. I had flown  to Delhi on 17th August early morning to be there for the last mile formalities of getting the release order issued.  It had been over two and a half months since the UN had communicated my selection after an interview that was teleconferenced from Bissau, New York and probably Brindisi way back in March, 2016. The small formality of being  released goes through various processes of bureaucratic cooking, and the bureaucracy reserved its most favoured culinary style for me- that of the slow cooking variety ! So when I got the order in my hand and informed Norma at Human Resource Division, the ticket arrived within six hours. They wanted me quick before I became cold as it were.

Rushed back to Kolkata by the 5:30 evening Indigo, and with a little luck with an ace pilot and sufficient fuel in the tank to hover over a very stormy Kolkata sky, managed  to land just an hour after ETD -  previous three flights had already been diverted to Bhubaneshwar. After a late night of quiet celebration, the following day was as rushed as it could be. Two suitcases became three, last moment purchases, a rakhi visit and one of Single Malt,a final repacking and explaining all documents to Simi , the last illish rice meal, a small rest and I was off.

It didn’t take me much time to lose my cellphone  which slipped through a gap under the seat mounted on complex technology. It was just as good that I decided  to sleep, leaving the mobile worry, on advice of Vinay of the Qatar crew, to ground engineers at Doha. A two hours’ sleep towards the latter half of the flight really relaxed me a bit, and soon,  after skimming over huge balls of altocumulus, touched down the tarmac of the Hamad International, constructed largely on land reclaimed abutting the Bay of Doha. Doha, a city whose fortunes were founded on piracy, pearling and petroleum in successive waves , is now one of the emergent financial centres in the Middle East  and an education research hub as well. It is one of the seven wonder cities  of the world - the other being Beirut, La Paz, Durban, Havana, Vigan and Kuala Lumpur.Brand Doha has been considerably hyped by the city hosting a succession of sporting events like the 2006 Asian Games, 2011 Pan Arab Games and the AFC Asian Cup as well, and possibly the 2022 FIFA cup - unless the cocktail of controversies surrounding its bid do not blow up at its face.

My brief halt at the airport was not exactly very comfortable.  The plane halted away from the aerobridges - India as an originating doesn’t seem to be a favoured  one.The air-conditioning of coach to the airport put up a rather feeble show against the  50• C around us. Once inside the airport, I was struck by the sheer volume of human traffic, and greatly impressed by the  smoothness of top class  security check- in for the multitude of people milling around the various frisking points. And then I walked my longest walk yet in any airport to reach gate E21, weaving my way through people from practically all parts of the world, not forgetting to take a selfie with a camel next to  marmalade Bazaar which is actually a gourmet's delight.

Gulf Times has something for everybody, a mirror of the country’s cosmopolitanism and I found the issue of the day quite absorbing in the second leg of my journey. Two movies, a short nap and I was in Casablanca, made famous by the eponymous movie and numerous mentions  in the world of literature. So far, one of the worries had been that I was carrying only a visa on arrival at Bissau, emailed from the Human Resources  section of the UN Mission and was quite apprehensive of an immigration officer behaving funnily. So used to a web of contacts and arrangements of facilitation during my travels in various parts of India, I was feeling a bit diffident, and very soon at Casablanca, I hit the expected roadblock.

‘Ah ha, India!! What have you brought  for me ?’, the policeman at the transfer counter asked me, and for a moment I thought I am done. But to be fair to him, he was fairly gracious at my absent mindedness in forgetting his gift and he allowed me in, After this, whatever little plans I had to go out after exploring the chance of getting a visa on arrival during a ten hour transit were put to rest.

The Mohammed V International airport lounge is fairly basic, but then I made the most  of my stay before settling down to yet another hour of sleep. The crowd here was much more African, the braids and the colourful headdresses  could be seen in large numbers, and I pottered around in the shops selling the famous Moroccan babouches ( slippers) , lanterns, wooden chess boards, and other colourful items of pottery. And of course, I was entering a new part of the world where English was not spoken, nor understood much.

Just after midnight, I boarded  a much toned down first class in Royal Moroccan, and fell asleep almost immediately after a light dinner . A close to four hour flight ended in a rainy touchdown and I ran down the airstair  fairly wet, and sufficiently shaken up from my sleep.Half drenched, I  reached the airport terminal building and was pleasantly surprised to find my three items of booked luggage arrive quickly. The check in formalities at Osvaldo Vieira airport, named after a liberation hero, were fairly smooth, a pleasant contrast to my first touchdown in Africa- at Conakry in  2004, when I found coolies climbing over the carousel to grab pieces of luggage to claim first charge for portage . It helped that Henry from Police section of the local UN mission was around, and in less than half an hour I reached Hotel Lisboa . Before grabbing my key , I noticed that the central of the three clocks at the reception displayed Portugal time. The country, it seems, was till in a time warp.

Of course you must be wondering, where is this country called Guinea Bissau. I don’t blame you, even earlier when I served in Sierra Leone over a decade ago, it was quite common to be asked where was it in South Africa, , and to be even told that I could easily meet an uncle at Johannesburg or cousin in Durban during a weekend.  An average Indian’s idea of Africa is generally limited to South Africa, the only country in the continent which shares its name with it, and also probably because the Father of the Nation started his professional and political career from that country . For many Indians with inherited wealth , guinea is not the name of a country but a gold coin- true, the quarter ounce of gold coin was minted in 17th century Britain from gold mined from West Africa, a region called Guinea. Actually, there have been many guineas at different points of time - Guinea, Guinea Bissau and Equatorial Guinea still exist while not in the very distant past there was also the Dutch Guinea which became a part of modern Ghana and German Guinea which had become Togoland!

I can relate Guinea Bissau to you in two ways- if you are a football fundoo, then Guinea Bissau you will know as the country of birth of Eder, the fellow who brought a smile on the face of a sidelined CR7 in the Euro final. If you are not exactly poor in geography, and for a moment find some similarities between the shape of Africa and India sans the northeast and the states of Punjab and upwards, then Guinea Bissau would be somewhere near Dwarka  in Gujarat if South Africa is where Tamil Nadu is.

But more on this country where I have to work for one year at least later on.

Tchau!