In Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, there’s a paragraph where the main character remembers on the stupid decisions made by herself and her friend at the age of fifteen. She reflects that people should be locked up for a year at that age in a paragraph that seemed puzzling as a teenager, and then grew funnier and funnier as I distanced myself from my teenage self and headed into my twenties.
Here’s a piece of my own fifteen-year-old idiocy.
I flew to Hyderabad, India from Buffalo, New York to rejoin my parents and sisters. I had begun the trip as an unaccompanied minor, under the care of flight attendants, but as you may have read last week, in Doha it was forgotten that I was an unaccompanied minor and I ended the trip on my own. For the most part, I was happy about it. But naive as I was, it did leave me open to getting conned.
Immigration went without a hitch, but at customs, I got pulled aside. I was traveling with one or two large suitcases. A suitcase was marked with chalk, and I was told that because of those markings, I had to go talk to the customs officer at the desk. I went over to the desk.
The man behind the desk asked me if I was traveling with electronics.
“Not many,” I said. Just some cords and a phone. (Why I was carrying a phone in my suitcase I don’t really remember.)
“You have to pay a tax for electronics,” the man told me.
My heart skipped a beat and then started to pound. I envisioned losing everything in my suitcase. “I didn’t know that.”
The man named a sum of money that I was supposed to pay. Terrified that I would have to give up my entire suitcase, I went through the contents of my wallet. I don’t remember how much I had, but I think it was more or less $50. Whatever it was, it was less than he had told me to pay, even if I converted it into rupees.
“I don’t have that,” I told him. “But my parents will have come to pick me up. I could ask them for the money. Can I just leave and get the money and come back?”
“You can’t come back if you leave the secure area,” he told me, “and you can’t take this suitcase without paying the tax.”
“But I can’t pay,” I confessed. “I only have US dollars.”
“That’s no problem. How much do you have?” he asked me.
“Only fifty dollars,” I admitted.
“Well, I’ll let you off this time,” he said magnanimously with a smile. “But you know next time, you should carry more cash.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling terribly relieved. I handed him what money I had.
“So your parents are picking you up, then?” he asked.
“Oh, yes!” I told him, now talkative with relief.
“Your parents are American?”
“Well, yes, but my father is from India,” I told him, and happily explained how we had moved around and ended up moving to Hyderabad purely by coincidence. The customs officer nodded and smiled as he listened, and I felt reassured. Eventually, I finished my story and confirmed that it was okay that I now leave.
As soon as I got out of the secure area, I met my father. I told him about the nice customs officer who had let me pay a reduced tax on the electronics because I hadn’t had the money.
My father frowned.
“Did you ask for a receipt?” he said.
I blinked and said I hadn’t.
“You were conned,” he said bluntly. “There is no tax. Think about it: have you ever heard of a tax like that? And if it had been a tax, why would they let you go without paying in full? This sort of thing is common in India: people will try to trick you into giving them money. You’re going to have to learn to be more street smart. You should always ask for a receipt.”
Oh, how foolish I felt.