I admit - I was a bit nervous. Even though I've taken kickboxing, I have not had to fight against any customs officers. But there were several other new faculty in the same boat, so maybe we could do a choreographed fight number.
We were driven to a (hot - no ac) warehouse, where there were some chairs and a lot of big boxes, several of which were torn open. There were lots of guys in green outfits and some guys wearing white shirts and one woman in a black sari (I'm not sure whether she was real or just a symbolic apparition - she didn't seem to do much). Our school had sent two men to "represent" us - they were quite nice and basically did all of the negotiating for us while we stood and looked like stupid white people who
can't speak Hindi.We sat in some chairs against the wall (hmmnn. . . ) and sweated (a lot of that goes on here) while people came over and called us one by one to come over and watch while they went through a shipment. And the routine was the same - watch the green guys go through everything in each box, then the white-shirted guys stop them when they get to a valuable item or anything you were dumb enough to leave in its original package, and then everyone starts arguing while you stand there and feel . . . well, even strong men looked close to tears.
Justin and Luke were apparently in the biggest trouble. Now, remember that "trouble" here means having to pay import duty - we had $500 of new stuff we could bring in, but anything over that was subject to up to 50% import duty, depending, of course, on how they valued it. There was a LOT of stuff, apparently, that other people had "decided" not to pay duty on and left at the customs office. A lucrative job, being a customs officer.
Luke had a lot of athletic equipment, which is tres expensive here, but he charmed the black-sari woman and the green guys and soon they were all smiling. But Justin, oh, that was bad. He had not been there when his stuff was packed and EVERYTHING new (which was most of his shipment) was still in its original package: new stereo system, new hiking boots, new fancy cookware, etc. Justin looked increasingly unhappy as more and more people gathered around. Let's see: how many customs officers does it take to . . . .?
Guess which guy in the picture is Justin? Guess which 10 guys, as soon as the picture was taken, stood up and yelled, "No pictures, no pictures!" I thought it would be like the scene in a movie about the daring journalist - that they would take my camera, open it up, and throw the exposed film on the ground. Except that I had a digital camera, and they looked unhappy but didn't make a move for the camera. I was ready for it, though.
Debbie's family had also sent a stereo system - Bose - but at least had unpacked it. Debbie, however, is an overseas teaching veteran, so when 5 or 6 white-shirts gathered around here and asked about it, she told them without blinking that it was 5 years old and worth $200 today. Justin was mumbling, meanwhile, "They're having a field day with my stuff." All of us were imaging $1000+ customs bills, because we had heard "stories."
At one point a white-shirt guy came over to where we were and asked for me, along with two other people. I thought maybe they were going to extradite us to Pakistan for further torture, but instead he looked at our passports, looked at us, and then said that our shipments had already been repacked and "sent on." In other words, we could have been at the TGIF party instead of sitting for two hours in a hot warehouse.
It gets even better.
We were then led by our two school reps into a crowded customs office where there were lots of people and computers. We stood there for a moment and then turned around and went out. It was like a Cultural Revolution parade - we just needed the "capitalist" signs hanging around our necks. Then we got back into the van and started laughing about the whole thing, now that it was . . .what? Why are we stopping at this big pink building? It was the "Customs House" - land of big shots. Our reps (who drove separately with two other guys in front of us) came to the van and asked for two people: Luke and . . . Tim (not Justin?) to come with them. Tim had brought another high-value item: golf clubs. While we wondered what was happening, we sat in the van by the side of the road for 1/2 hour, watching two mangy dogs scavenging for food among a large pile of discarded styrofoam food containers, plastic bags, and other things we didn't want to look at too closely.
Luke and Tim finally returned, smiling. They told us that they had walked up two flights of stairs, stood there waiting in a hallway, and then walked back down. Our reps had done all of the talking, just keeping them outside the door. But the result was that the maximum duty any of us would pay was $150.
The book I'm reading, "In Spite of the Gods," says that government jobs are coveted in India, largely because most of the income comes from bribes, and that India is one of the most corrupt, if not THE most corrupt, places to do government business in the world. What do you think?
But the important thing here is that we got back to school 12 minutes before the end of the TGIF party, and those of us who weren't exhausted from the heat went to the party and enjoyed ourselves for a couple of hours - we had a good story to tell.
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