At the customs inspection and quarantine department in Beijing last week, I naively assumed it was finally getting to the end of the surreal ordeal of getting six small cartons released from the cargo department. My family had migrated here from New Delhi and the boxes came to Beijing on air freight. The noble, thankless job of getting them released from the customs department located in the city’s back-of-beyond had naturally fallen on my middle-aged shoulders.
After completing a small hill of paperwork over one day and spending the last two hours in an empty customs office during lunch time on the second, I felt reasonably optimistic when the counters reopened and satisfied, well-fed and well-smoked young men and women in smart black uniforms took their seats behind the counters.
I was ready for the cartons to be torn open for checking. But that didn’t happen.
Instead a senior officer summoned a younger colleague, who I realised knew a smattering of English.
He was brandishing a piece of paper; a list of items in the cartons: clothes, utensils, crockery, toys, posters and books.
“Books?” the official had pain in his eyes when he asked me the rhetorical question.
I said “yes, books,” adding that there was only about 150 of them.
“Problem,” the bespectacled guy said as he asked me to follow him to the inspection area where I saw the cartons dumped on one side, conspicuously away from other air freight.
“Which carton has the books?”
I said I don’t know but volunteered to find out by trying to locate the heaviest.
When I pointed out the carton to the official and his stern lady colleague who had joined him by then, he simply said: “Open the carton. You have to throw away 80 books.”
Incredulous as it may sound, China, it seems, allows individuals only to bring in 50 books. And it didn’t matter if not a single book was on China or Chinese politics. From what I could gather from the official was that to bring in more, one had to get permission from some Orwellian branch of the government called Department of Culture.
“You want to do it?” he asked me, indicating that If I did not, he and his colleagues would do it gladly
Feeling a bit like James Franco in 127 hours, I opened the carton with the officials hovering around. By then, a small crowd of other customs workers and packing agents had gathered around to see what was going on.
At the top of the heap was an illustrated book on the LTTE with the picture of a woman cadre holding an AK-47. The official quickly picked it up. I tried to explain to him that I was not in China to incite terrorism, separatism or extremism – the government’s three pet peeves – but he didn’t seem to be convinced. His stern colleague then peered into the book as he turned the pages. “Ok, ok,” the official said as he returned it to me.
Anyway, the next 30 minutes was spend lightening the carton. Out went a precious and prized book on authentic Bengali cooking, “President Mahinda Rajapaksa – Fourth Year in Cartoons’, a biography on Hitler, a few Follett and Forsyth, few more books on Sri Lanka and so on.
In the end, the customs officials took pity and let go without making me get rid of 80 books to the count. Probably, they shouldn’t have; there was another unopened carton packed with books that I got back home. At last count, it had just a few more than 50 books.