A Mostly Complete List of Personal Possessions That the TSA Has Flagged for Extra Screening

1. 3-inch Fiskar Safety Scissors

Imagine you’re about to start first grade and your parents are taking you to go shopping for school supplies. You know this is important. You know your school supplies could very well dictate your friends for the rest of the year, nay, the rest of your life. The first thing on your list? Scissors. You carefully consider your options: Blue? Everyone will have those. You want to stand out. Pink? Too bright and you don’t want to be labeled a girly girl. Eventually, you settle on orange. The perfect blend of fun and relatability. While the scissors look tiny in your mom’s hand, they fit your chubby little paw perfectly. 

Yes, these are the scissors that the TSA decided merited searching through my bag while I was traveling with my high school debate team. They even tested the scissor blade against their fingers, as if I had the foresight to sharpen my elementary school scissors into a deadly weapon of destruction. They did not confiscate them, probably because it would have been difficult to justify when they could barely cut paper. 

2. Bharatanatyam Dance Jewelry

After my mom saw the classical Desi dance team perform at parent’s weekend, she encouraged me to go out for the team. As usual, she was right. It ended up being something I loved because it wasn’t a normal Desi dance team. Everyone got to choreograph a bit of our performances, and no one looked at me funny when I wanted to set Bharatanatyam against Nicki Minaj’s Superbass. In short, it was the Desi community I’d been looking for but hadn’t been able to find because I wasn’t a typical dance team Desi. 

Joining the team meant that I had to fly my dance jewelry back to campus the next time I visited home, though. The TSA decided they had to investigate the mass of metal in my carry-on, which, fair enough, I guess.

What was a little more baffling was their confusion when they actually had my jewelry spread out in front of them. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I thought jewelry was pretty self-evident from culture to culture. I could maybe understand the confusion about my ghungroo, but do necklaces appear completely unrecognizable in brown hands? Does melanin have the magical power to make a mirage of a knife appear above them? Am I simply unaware that a classical dance necklace looks like a bedazzled garrote? Please advise. 

3. Jewelry Box

I have a little jewelry box for the things I wear almost daily. It’s palm-sized and made of metal—small and sturdy—which makes it perfect for traveling. It’s not much to look at: bright yellow with a tiny battered purple rose on top, a metal grid studded with inlaid paste stones overlaying the yellow shell, most of the paste stones have already fallen out... The more I look at it, the more I feel the urge to describe it as something the ghost of an old white Victorian lady would design (but I still love it).

The TSA decide this small box merits extra screening about 40% of the time according to my very unofficial calculations. What makes it suspicious one trip and not the next? All I’m asking for is some consistency. 

4. A Girl Scout Tin Filled With Washi Tape and Embroidery Floss

I like to craft to destress, so sometimes I travel with crafting supplies. On one trip, I kept these in a medium-sized tin that was bright green and stamped all over with the Girl Scout insignia. The seemingly innocent container and contents did not stop the TSA from pawing through them. How do I make washi tape, embroidery floss, and Girl Scouts less threatening? I am increasingly convinced that bedazzled garrotes remain a major concern for the TSA.

5. Party Bananagrams

Another instance of the TSA’s extreme wariness of Desi people possessing containers of things: the time they manhandled my bag of Party Bananagrams. I am a sucker for word games, and I simply wanted to share my love of Bananagrams with my college friends (read: demolish them mercilessly). 

I wanted to be angry with the TSA for making my love of word games feel nefarious, but honestly, I mostly felt sorry for the TSA guard during this encounter. As he squeezed the banana-shaped cloth bag to make sure none of the rounded square tiles were sharp enough to pierce flesh, he asked me what this even was. I couldn’t be angry with someone who was living a Bananagrams-deprived existence.

6. A Bag of Jeelakarra (aka Jeera or Cumin)

When I was young, one of my favorite parts of dining at a Desi restaurant was getting to have handfuls of saunf (fennel), candied or otherwise, after we had finished our main meal. At home, I saw my parents cooking with what looked like a brown version of saunf, and I insisted on eating a handful. I didn’t realize that this brown saunf wasn’t saunf, but jeelakarra, and I kept insisting on having a handful whenever I saw my parents break it out to cook. As a result of my stubbornness, I developed a taste for the stuff.

That’s why I had decided to fly a 200g bag of jeelakarra from our local Desi grocery store back to my apartment. At the airport, I can only describe the TSA as groping my transparent, sealed, and unopened bag of the cooking spice after unearthing my treasure from my backpack. It didn’t burst open or anything, but it did leave me feeling slightly violated on behalf of my beloved jeelakarra.

7. MCAT Books

At the very least, I thought I would be safe in stereotypes. I was not. The TSA agent not only pulled my carry-on for additional screening because of my MCAT books, she flipped through every single one of them. By the time she was done, I was pretty sure she had seen more of those books than I had. 

What was she looking for? Hollowed out pages? If I’m ever cool enough to own a book with a hollowed-out space for as-yet-unspecified-contraband, please let the book be anything but an MCAT book. 

Bonus List: Things the TSA Deemed Unworthy of Further Scrutiny

1. Jewelry Pliers

I feel their pointy ends make them more dangerous than the safety scissors, but the TSA didn’t bat an eye. Is it because they were millennial pink?

2. Money Plant Starter in a Gatorade Bottle Plainly Displayed on the Side of My Backpack

I love houseplants, but I was not about to shell out 20 bucks for a pothos of unknown quality if I could help it. I decided to try my luck at transporting a clipping from my family’s money plant in Dallas to my apartment in Chicago instead. The TSA found this completely unremarkable–on both occasions that I attempted this. Is the TSA also full of houseplant enthusiasts? For the record, the pothos clippings seemed unaffected by the flight and happily grew in their new Chicago home. 

3. Liquids Under 3 Oz

Because it seemed like my luggage was going to get screened anyways, I stopped bothering to pack any liquids separately or take them out with my laptop while going through screening. The vast majority of the time, the TSA does not seem to notice or care. I was previously under the impression that these were contraband of the utmost priority. Has that changed? Are bedazzled garrotes truly the TSA’s new focus? My inadvertent research seems to indicate so.