Alice in Border Land

A hand, calloused and brown, etched with a long history of days spent working outside, ratcheting bolts and rubbing grease into wheel wells, shakes me awake. 

"Passport", says the man's voice, thick with an accent I assume to be Indonesian. 

"What time is it?", I mutter, my voice cracking with fatigue. I don't expect a reply.

The man, tall and slender in his driver's coat, looks at me blankly, and, with an apologetic shrug, continues down the narrow aisle, his hands finding the thickness of other shoulders, arms and elbows; shaking to life limbs weighted down by the remnants of sleep. 

Slowly, I peel my cheek away from the dimpled, white-washed wall of the SJS executive coach, gingerly moving my head from side to side, stretching out my neck, which has been bent at an inconceivable angle for hours.

The road from Pontianak, Indonesia to Kuching, Malaysia, which resembles a hunk of cheese grated haphazardly around the edges, has been long and arduous. And the weight of the journey still bores into my physical body, throwing me off balance in the newfound stillness of the muggy night air. 

I gather my bag, clutching my passport to my chest and stumble out of the bus. The lights hit me first. Spotlights. Blaring into the darkness, and casting oblong shadows onto the gathering throng of people, pushing steadily towards a steel sliding gate, set into reinforced concrete walls. A large white sign, emboldened by a menacing arrangement of red block letters, reads "Imigrasi". 

It is my first time passing through immigration, and a tension sets into my shoulders and works its way into my jaw, which clenches and unclenches, my eyes searching for something, anything, familiar, which might ground me back into myself. What I find instead is a sea of dark eyes, watching me; watching each other. An energy, the kind you can feel buzz inside of your skin, ripples through the crowd as the padlocked gates begin to rattle. And then, as the gates swing open, a sudden surging forwards, of skin on skin, a frenzy of hands lingering in mid-air, as if poised to push and claw and fight, should the need arise. 

As I am jostled along, a sudden fit of terror coils itself like a viper into the pit of my belly. 

I turn in the dense horde, my eyes darting from side to side.

"I don't know my bus number." 

Cars and buses have begun to stream past on a side road, headlights cutting through the dense fog of the rain forest. 

More frantic now.

"I don't know my bus number." 

I count 7 buses crunching along the gravel road, before I am forced to turn back towards the gate, carried along by the swarm of people winding their way along the worn-out dirt path which leads to a second padlocked gate. My eyes flick back to the steady stream of traffic, an anxiety blooming inside of my chest like a poisonous flower.

As more people pour into the clearing in front of the gate, we wait for what seems an eternity, an uncomfortable intimacy swelling into the empty spaces between us. A man spits. A weathered brown face with charcoal eyes shoots me a rotten grin, and I smile back, a little too wide, my eyes crinkling like purple grapes, left to wilt in the sunshine. A woman coughs, and smears something into a suspiciously brown handkerchief. A smell, like sour garbage, fills my nostrils, and then retreats, a steady ebb and flow. 

When the metal grate finally slides open, and the herd pushes forwards once more, I see men in uniform, and I smell fear. For some odd reason, my thoughts are suddenly swarming with the images of all the faces of the refugees that I have come into contact with in the past couple of months. I realize that, at some point in time, they must have made this harrowing journey across the border themselves, with so much more at stake. Fake passports clutched to their chests, their frightened children tugging at their sweat drenched skirts, praying to god, to allah, to deliver them from evil, to give them a better life.

I feel close to them in this moment, because I feel some small inkling of their uncertainty, their vulnerability. I don't know the language, I don't know who to trust. This place feels dangerous, and I am alone. But I am buffered by my nationality, the fact that I am Canadian. And I know that, at the end of the day, I will come out of this experience unscathed. Even if I miss my bus, or am detained for questioning, or I am lost in this sticky, sweaty mess of unfamiliar faces, I know that I will eventually find my way home. 

I am once again, faced with my own privilege - defined by it. 

Lost in my reverie, I don't notice a large man, dressed all in black, with a smile like the Cheshire Cat, beckoning me from the shadows. 

"Miss! Miss!" he calls out, his grin practically splitting his face in two. 

I look around, perplexed. Surely he's not talking to me. 

"Come with me," he says, his voice a riddle. 

"Are you from the bus company?" I ask, and he nods, a slyness dancing in his eyes, his head bobbing up and down.

Without fully understanding why, I follow his teeth, blaringly white, as they make their way through the stream of people. Suddenly, we are at the front of a queue, which has formed in front of a small wooden building. After waving his hands, and speaking erratically in Indonesian, the man inserts me in front of an elderly woman, hunched over, her dark hair gathered in a precarious little bun on top of her head. 

She smiles generously at me, and I smile back apologetically.

Two young men begin pointing at me, shaking their heads and yelling at the man in Indonesian. Just as I'm about to scuttle off, the grin is back. 

"Stay," he says, his voice a steady drawl, "Pay no attention to them"

So many teeth.

"Stayyyy."

And just like that, my passport is stamped, and he is tugging at my arm.

"This way. quickly", he murmurs, and then we are off again, half running along another dusty track until we reach a second round of queues. Again, he draws me close, and with an air of authority, he pushes through the trunk of bodies, his smile stretching before me, as endless as the ocean. 

He jostles me in front of a young man, who smiles uncertainly at me, unsure of whether or not he's been swindled.

"Stay," says the Cheshire, his voice thick and reassuring, "Stayyyy"

He then sidles away from me, and surreptitiously hands a young man wearing a black hoodie a wad of cash.

"What in the fuck is going on?" I think to myself, amidst a fresh wave of jeers and cat calls.  I want to crawl out of my own skin and disappear into the night, but I stay put, gritting my teeth. 

When it is "my turn", I shuffle up to the booth guiltily and a somber looking man takes my passport. He turns it over in his hands. 

"Canada?" he says, and I nod, trying to look at ease.

"Lucky you", he says, as his stamp lands on a blank page, dancing with maple leafs.

I breathe a sigh of relief.

I am back in Malaysia. My requirement to leave the country every 3 months to renew my visa is fulfilled. I'm safe now, and everything is OK.

The Cheshire cat grins, and motions for me to follow him again. Miraculously, he leads me back to the SJS executive coach, and after exchanging some words with the driver, tips his hat and scampers off into the early morning mist. 

Bewildered and disheveled, I climb back into the bus, take my seat and exhale. I think again of my privilege. Of those weary and weathered faces gathered at the gates of the United Nations Refugee Agency. Those pleading eyes. 

Before long, the engine rumbles to life, the sound of it filling my ears. Those faces, languishing beneath my closed eyelids, blend together then into a turbid soup, and I drift off, once again, to sleep.