The Inevitable

Once again you find yourself inside a plane and looking out of the window you watch clouds floating over an undistinguished brown and green landscape. You could be anywhere. But you are here. Inside this plane. The man seated beside you is sleeping. Oh! You know him. In fact, you are travelling together. And it has been a long, strange trip.

The yellow pencil in your hand taps the open page. Annoyed by the sound you close the dairy and catch the small print. Wood-free. Recycled. Handmade paper. How pretty the golden zari border next to the binding looks. It reminds you of your mother’s maroon sari with a gold border that you wore to the “Hostel Night”. How pretty we all were then and how naive! But that was long before we’d search for each other on Facebook and send friend requests and then promptly ignore each other after the mandatory, “You look just the same.” A chorus begins to chime these words in a not too melodious manner.

And then the lights are turned off. Damn these forced bedtimes on airplanes! But your fellow companion doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, he hasn’t noticed a thing. Blissful are the ignorant or is it ignorance is bliss? And so another day crawls towards the inevitable just like everything else around you.

Defying the stern announcement you push up the window blind and watch twilight gather the dying rays of the sun. And for a brief moment the window is illuminated gold. Could this be the moment? Could this be the day when luck changes? Pushing down the window blind you sigh. Maybe that too is inevitable.

On laughter

The toddler in the seat ahead of mine in the airplane laughs with pure joy. The sound possesses a rhythm and a flow and a memory. I recall neither Proust nor Kundera but that forgotten moment when laughter– abandoned and uninhibited– bound us together in an amorphous construct called family even as it set us all free. At least in that moment we were.

I scribble these words hastily while the pilot mumbles about altitude and speed or maybe he’s raising a toast to this and other such flights. But my mind is not quite focused on his words because I am distracted once again by laughter of two women in the row diagonally behind me. A quick turn in their direction furnishes the following details: female, around fifty, probably English, a little tipsy, going back home from an all women trek around Annapurna. The last bit I glean from the emblem on their T-shirts. But one cannot trust these conclusions I make for I am no good at such deductions and am often off the mark as far as age, height, and nationality are concerned. It is gender that I generally get right.

But there is still a good 7 hours to go and I try to obliterate all thoughts of the present and of the recent past from my mind. Of the long gone past I hardly have any concrete memories. And before I can complete that thought there is more laughter from diagonally across followed by more giggles from the front.

After 8 hours enclosed in a narrow steel tube, I gladly escape, and not a moment too soon from the manacles of laughter. Suffocating and all consuming.