My Name is Not Konnichiwa by Rodney Ee

Author:Rodney Ee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814484572
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International

A TAJ OF LOVE

It was a sweltering weekend in June. The mercury was flitting above 40ºC when two happily married men decided to ditch their wives and spend the weekend together at the Taj Mahal, the world’s greatest monument of love. Personally, I didn’t mind the homosexual undertones of our trip. After all, I was going to see man’s greatest erection for a woman in all its glory. I was just praying the Oberoi hotel had a room with twin beds!

I had postponed this trip before due to terrorism alerts and my own attacks of procrastination, but I was running out of excuses, and my friend was not going to be stationed in Delhi much longer. So I bought my plane ticket and left him to plan our entire trip.

Two days before I was to depart for India, it suddenly dawned on me that I had forgotten to apply for a visa. While Singaporeans are eligible to apply for visas on arrival in India, I had read about an unfortunate Kiwi couple’s three-hour ordeal to get their visa through this channel and was determined not to suffer the same fate. I decided to seek out a travel agent in Little India early the next morning to process the visa on my behalf.

“How can I help you?” asked the man behind the counter. I explained that I needed a visa by 5pm the next day as my flight was departing at 7pm.

“Impossible!” he declared in a thick Indian accent, his head swaying emphatically from left to right. “We can have it ready for you by 8pm tomorrow.”

“But my flight leaves at 7pm!” I protested.

“Maybe if we rush, we can have it for you at 7pm tomorrow,” was his calm reply.

I sighed and suppressed an eye roll. “Isn’t there an express service that I can pay for?”

“No, no. No express service here. If you want express, you go embassy. We are not allowed to do express here.”

So off to the embassy I went, where I discovered that the exorbitant fee for an express visa made the potential three-hour wait at Delhi airport more than worthwhile. I braced myself for the worst when the flight touched down, but all it took was just ten minutes for me to get the all-important stamp on my passport. The immigration officials were even nice enough to give me a few more days on my visa, “just in case”. I tried not to imagine what “just in case” could mean. This was India after all, and I was prepared for all contingencies, especially with my bulging medical pouch. But as it turns out, there was just one tiny unimportant thing I had forgotten to do before leaving Singapore… purchase travel insurance!

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