Baggage restrictions

The one thing all international travelers have in common is that we get only two suitcases.

When I moved out of college, I needed two suitcases just for my clothes. (I'm not necessarily proud of that, but it's a fact.) Compared to everything I own, two suitcases is silly. It might as well be zero. What do I put in these mysterious two suitcases, the contents of which are supposed to see me through two years in a foreign country?

Obviously, not quite so many clothes.

Everyone I talked to told me not to bother with clothes at all. "You'll buy new ones there," they said. I ignored this good advice, of course, and crammed my case with suits and hats that were meant, at least in part, to allay my own anxiety.

The things I'm bringing with me aren't just physical, they serve as buffers against the unknown. Why else would I feel compelled to pack "The Collected Poems of Derek Walcott," for God's sake, when English books are available in every corner store for half the price? Why the "Gita," when you can get it for free in every language known to man? Why T-shirts, when the export reject business thrives in most street bazaars, and almost-perfect brand name clothes sell for pennies?

Of course, all this is available if you know where to look. Which I don't, not yet.

So, back to the question of what to bring. Notebooks, books, camera, and a digital voice recorder. The last is a tool of the journalist's trade, but it might be useful. For months now I've been wanting to record an oral history of my family. My grandparents were born in the 1930s, before India won independence from England. My great-grandfather, who fought alongside Gandhi in that struggle, later lost his vocal cords to throat cancer. Before the surgery, he recited all the chapters of the "Gita" onto cassette tapes. Long after his voice was gone, we had the memory of it. The morning after he passed away, I came downstairs and heard my mother listening to those tapes. Which is when I realized that the voice that tells the story is as important as the plot and the characters. Perhaps more so. We accept this is true in literature: a novel like "As I Lay Dying" could be summarized in one paragraph, but that summary wouldn't be worth anything.

When my mother came to the US, she packed her two suitcases and then gave them to her mother-in-law for safekeeping while she visited her parents one last time. Her mother-in-law, uninvited, emptied one of the suitcases and replaced the contents with cooking implements. Nowadays, of course, this would be grounds for a civil suit, but my Mom only discovered the swap after she'd gotten to the US, so she made the best of it.

Except for the pots and pans, it's surprising how similar our packing lists were, despite the difference of time and the obvious difference in the purpose and length of our stays. She brought clothes and books. I did the same. She brought cooking utensils, albeit involuntarily. I brought fancy consumer electronics. Neither of us brought a cell phone. In 1981, when she flew over, cell phones had yet to be invented. In 2009, a top-notch Indian cell phone already waited for me in Mumbai.

So actually, our packing lists were nothing alike. She planned a permanent move to a country where she knew only one person, with little real information about the United States and little hope that she'd be able to stay in touch with folks back home. Compared to that, my trip isn't even that: it's just a change of location.

This is not just a sign of the changing times. Even now, there are plenty of people who immigrate the same way my mother did. Plenty arrive with less than she brought with her. Some arrive illegally. If my "reverse immigration" is part of ageneral trend in recent years (and it is - more second-generation kids are leaving the United States for careers and graduate work in the places their parents grew up) then we have to accept that immigration, itself, isn't uniform.

But we all have baggage restrictions.