"So what do I do?"
"You must go to the consulate and apply for a fresh one."
"Won't immigration question me anyway?"
"No, man. Canada is easy," Kadir assured me. "I promise you'll have no problem. You won't even have to go through Customs. When you get to the Immigration desk, they'll give you a coloured card. There are two kinds. One says you pass through—just pick up your bags and walk out. If you get the other card, you must stop at the Customs counter."
"I thought everyone had to go through Customs."
"No, man, only Canadians. Since you're a U.S. citizen, you won't have to unless the immigration man gets suspicious, in which case he'll give you the Customs card. But you'll be spiffy. You must buy a classy dress, a handbag—I'll give you money—fix your hair. You'll look straight, so he'll let you pass. Anyway, man, even if they did check you, they'd find nothing. Tomorrow take you to see the cases. They are excellent. No one will suspect a thing."
"What about dogs? Don't they train dogs to smell hash and marijuana?"
He shook his arm dismissively. "That's nothing. They have one or two dogs that can only work two or three hours a week. The animals go back and forth from Montreal to the Toronto airport. Forget the dogs, man. They only use them for cargo, anyway, not luggage."
Next morning, I went to the Breach Candy section of Bombay, where the consulates were located. I'd been to so many countries my passport had been completely filled with visa stamps, and in Athens I'd had to get new pages glued to the back cover. They folded like an accordion. Before I left the hotel, I tore them. At the consulate, I asked for a new passport.
"We could just glue this back, doll," said the consulate women as she looked over her glasses at me.
"I'd rather have a new one, please."
"It'll cost you twenty bucks."
"Fine."
The passport would he ready at the end of the week, and I left the building charged with excitement. I felt daring and mysterious, like a spy on special assignment. As I passed people on the street, I had a secret sin inside me. I looked like your average blonde foreigner on vacation, one more holiday hippie, a vacationer, but I was really this bold, brazen adventurer embarking on a dangerous mission.
I stopped in a store to buy a Five Star candy bar and spotted astrology books in English. I bought the Aries volume for 1976 and looked the predictions for the end of February. Don't take chances, it said. Don't do anything out of the ordinary. Don't travel.
I shrugged my shoulders and threw the book in a garbage can. If it had said something positive, I would have believed it.
That afternoon, I went with Kadir to a shop near Crawford Market, a typical Indian store—minuscule, things piled to the ceiling, one on top of the other. An Indian greeted Kadir's "Shambo, man" with a sneaky grin and took us to the back room.
True to Kadir's description, the cases were excellent. A large one and a smaller one, both made of expensive, light-coloured leather.
"You see, man," said Kadir. "They are soft cases." He tapped the sides. "Nobody can get suspicious because there's no place to hide anything. The hash is in here." He pointed to the top, narrow sides, and bottom. "Now you know where the shop is, man. Maybe one day you'll do your own run."
Before returning to the hotel, we stopped at an opium den on a roof across the street from the store. Over a few pipes, Kadir handed me a wad of hundred rupee notes to buy clothes.
"You must have standard things to pack," he said. "In case they look inside, man, you can't have hippie stuff."
Feeling super gutsy, this time I smoked the Opium without taking a nausea pill. I get sick.
Three days later, Kadir gave me the news: "The other girl isn't going, man. There's a problem with her passport. You leave Sunday night."
"Yippy! So soon?"
He handed me the mirror of coke. "Are you ready? You have the passport?"
"Tomorrow I pick it up."
"Sharp clothes?"
"I'm having a dress made at the Mj. It's disgustingly conventional. Uhlili! With a knee-length skirt in the most boring shade of beige."
"What will you do with your hair?"
"I'll make an appointment at the Taj salon for Sunday. I'll get it teased into a chignon. I bought a pair of nylons. Nylons! I haven't worn nylons since junior high. I have dumb little shoes . . . I even bought a creepy pair of clip-on earrings. Red nail polish—can you imagine me without blue nails? A hideous leather handbag . . ."
"Good, man, good. Saturday you'll move to the Grand Hotel. No Freaks ever stay there."
Sunday night at eleven, I was ready when Kadir came to take me to the airport.
"All packed?"
"Yup."
"MAN! Look at you! What a hairdo!" he exclaimed. Wearing the dumb dress, the earrings, the nylons, the dumb shoes, I had hair piled four inches above my head and eyes lined with black in a style I remembered from an old Annette Funicello movie. "I can't believe it, man. You don't look like the same girl!"
"Look at this handbag, it's worn over the arm. Do people really dress like this?"
We snorted a humungous amount of cocaine and hurried out of the hotel. In the taxi Kadir gave me three hundred dollars cash. "They might ask to see money before letting you into Canada," he explained. He gave me three hundred rupees. "You might have to pay overweight." He dropped me at Bombay International and kissed me goodbye and good luck.
The coke had been a serious mistake. I would have been nervous enough without it, but with it I was a wreck. As an added precaution, Kadir had timed it so I'd arrive at the airport just in time to board the plane. This strategy, he figured, wouldn't give anyone a chance to search my luggage. Another mistake. Since the hash weighed eight kilos by itself, I was way, way over the baggage allowance of ten kilos. After weighing my luggage, the airline personnel presented me with an enormous bill in overweight charges. Not only did the bill have to be paid at another counter, it had to be paid in rupees, of which I did not have enough. To change dollars into rupees I had to wait in a line that snaked the length of four airline counters and threatened to last all night.
Close to take-off time, I was still in line at the bank. The woman in front of me had a daughter who had nothing better to do than play with the dumb bow on my dumb shoes. I would kill myself if the kid put a nun in the horrible nylons. The coke was wearing off, and I sweated with anxiety and post-cocaine depression. I grumbled and swore at the bank; ran to the line to pay the overweight charge and grumbled some more there; ran back to show the receipt and collect the boarding pass. By the time I reached Indian Immigration, I was a disaster. After Immigration, and a frisking for weapons, I still had to go to a baggage area to identify my luggage, answer questions ("Do you have any museum pieces?"), and watch as a man chalk-marked my bags. Finally, finally, I boarded the plane that had, by now, been waiting just for me.
In the seat at last, heart pounding away, I worried that the man had not put my bags on the plane after he'd marked them, and I swore quietly to myself, that I would never, NEVER do coke again in tense situations.
I only managed to sleep two hours during the flight. I arrived in Montreal exhausted and too excited about being in America to worry about anything. The nice Immigration officer gave me a smile, a wink, and a card in the colour that said "pass through." After watching, luggage circle the baggage wheel for ten minutes, I saw mine come down the chute. I collected my bags in a cart, walked smugly past the sign that said "Customs," handed over my card, and proceeded straight out the door.