The Four Words
I Knew.

I thought I had more time.

I'm writing this on my phone, standing at Carousel 4 at Indira Gandhi International Airport, waiting for a green suitcase that apparently has its own plans. It's 3:12am. The belt has turned twice without producing anything. A man about my age on the opposite side is openly weeping into a phone call in a language I don't speak, which is, in its way, a small mercy. Welcome to Delhi.

That's the thing about moving to a country. You spend months telling everyone you're moving, and then one morning you wake up and you've moved. The in-between bit never happens. The Duolingo owl kept waiting for me and I kept not showing up.

So I landed in Delhi at quarter past two in the morning with four Hindi words.

namaste · haan · nahin · dhanyavaad
नमस्ते · हाँ · नहीं · धन्यवाद

Hello, yes, no, thank you. I'd taught myself those on the flight out of Heathrow — a panicked twenty-minute burst somewhere over the Caspian Sea, using a phrase app I'd downloaded in 2024 and never opened. The man in the seat beside me was eating a samosa out of a crumpled bag, and I sort of sat there mouthing dhan-ya-vaad, dhan-ya-vaad, trying to make it land in the right part of my brain. It didn't. It was still skidding around somewhere behind my left ear.

He offered me a samosa. I ate it. I regret that now.

Immigration at IGI is a cold fluorescent hallway that goes on forever, and at the end of it sits a man in a white uniform who looks at your face like he has seen too many faces today. Mine was the next face. I walked up and set my passport on the counter and tried to smile, but the smile came out too big — the way it does when you haven't slept in thirty hours and you're determined to seem normal.

He didn't look up.

You can hear the whole encounter in the first episode — the officer's actual voice, his unhurried questions, the bit where I very nearly cried and he handed me a tissue with the same face he'd used to stamp my passport. I'm not going to re-walk it here. Podcasts are for the sound of a thing. Diaries are for what the sound didn't contain.

What the sound didn't contain:

I was terrified.

Not of him — he was kind in a way that caught me off guard. A crisp, professional kindness. I was terrified because ten seconds into that conversation I realised I had the four wrong words. Hello, yes, no, thank you does not get you through a real interaction with a real person. It gets you through a postcard. It gets you through a tourist's afternoon in Jaipur. It does not get you through a question about your purpose of stay in a country you have just, against all sense, moved to.

I said ta. I don't even say ta at home in Ireland, really — it's an English thing — but it came out. "Ta, very much." The officer laughed, waved me through, and I walked away with my passport stamped and one more word in my pocket than I'd arrived with.

Five words now.

"No problem, madam. I asked 'how are you.' You will learn."

The thing is, four words wouldn't have been enough on their own. But neither was English. The trick — I'm realising already, forty minutes into this country — is that you don't pick one. You use what you have, in whatever order it comes out, and you trust the person on the other end to meet you halfway. The officer did. I am very, very grateful the officer did.

I collected my bag — miraculously still containing my own clothes and not someone else's clothes — and walked out of the terminal into a wall of warm diesel air.

— the belt has started up again. there's a corner of something green. i think that's mine. i think that's mine.