A Little Further From Fact

I reluctantly accompanied my friends to the airport four hours before my flight time, all three of us fooling me that I would be able to spend the one hour between their flight and mine watching birds. Little did I know that I would have preferred watching hens hatching eggs to that long wait.

On hindsight, I am glad to have waited.

The first three hours passed tolerably. The three of us sat there ignoring the soundtrack from Guru Dutt’s movies, checking out the long waiting faces, the persuasive vacant smiles, the noisy high-heels, our own dirty fingernails, and dozing off to each other’s monologues. I examined my ticket and learnt that the flight was thirty minutes later than what I had imagined. (I usually apply my limited imagination to project deadlines and train timings.) While collecting the boarding pass, the airline receptionist informed me that the flight got delayed by forty minutes with the well-trained smile that a nurse gives while poking a large needle up one’s bottom. “Nice,” I said, more to myself.

My friends were called for their boarding. They too smiled and waved and proudly walked off like the astronomers about to board the Apollo 13. I felt not like their left behind family but the clumsy astronomer who couldn’t pass the test.

I finished reading the third third of Khushwant Singh’s Death at My Doorstep, and while checking out whether the girl sitting opposite me was checking me out too, reread about Protima Bedi’s lust for life and Amrita Shergil’s sex-filled modus vivendi. The girl did not check me out, and instead made more calls on her mobile than I have contacts in mine. She probably got one of those new plans that all service providers have been tirelessly advertising, or I recommend that she do. Then she left, and then the family that came after her, and the fat foreigner who had been sitting nearby all along.

I finally heard my boarding call, and in the queue got sandwiched between two refined middle-aged women in the front who were animatedly cursing the crassness of the airline service, and another man and woman behind me who were loudly praising a pessimistic tune from Kaagaz Ke Phool. The four and two others belonged to the same group and each took turns confirming with every other that the song is indeed from Kaagaz Ke Phool and marveled at the pessimism in its unaired lyrics. 6C2 combinations. I stopped short of joining them, remembering how Mr Singh had remembered Mulk, and softly pressed my forehead.

On the bus that took us from the terminal gate to the plane I got a seat between a sardar and those two refined women. Much to my amusement. The sardar offered his seat to an older woman. A few older folks looked at me longingly. I smiled. The more refined of those two refined women, I will call her Dipica, looked at me contemptuously and said, “Won’t you let her sit?” showing me an old woman standing beside me.

I never offer my seat to anyone, thanks to the handy kneecap that I wear at an arm’s distance. But this time I didn’t want to use that excuse. I remembered House, once again becoming acutely aware that I didn’t possess a fancy walking stick with me nor his talent for snarkiness, and resolved to put an end to that nagging feeling once and for all.

“No, I won’t,” I said.

Appalled, Dipica slightly opened her mouth.

“Why, you think women can’t stand like men for a few minutes?” I asked, controlling my tone with great effort. “Don’t you believe in the equality of sexes?”

“But she is old.”

“You think you will have difficulty standing for two minutes twenty years later?”

Dipica looked the way Cameron used to in the first three seasons of House M.D. and shrugged. My co-passengers were all either looking straight through me or anywhere else but me.

I made my point and further comments weren’t necessary, but I couldn’t stop the flow. “Had she been so unwell to have difficulty standing she would have asked for a wheel-chair before walking all the way. And if she didn’t realize the difficulty until this moment, it is better – for her and us – that she discover it now than after boarding the flight.” I stopped myself before hinting her to offer her seat if she wished to.

Dipica turned away, whispering something in the ears of the other refined woman. I looked around, still with that smirk, and saw people’s stiff expressions of disdain. Had these been any Indians other than plane passengers, they would probably have lynched me. I wondered what I had had for dinner. Nothing. I was famished. My heart ached from the heightened pulse more than my head did in the last four hours from all the sugary announcements. I felt cruelly contented.

The head hostess greeted me with a plastic smile proudly showcasing her full lips glowing in glossy lipstick and said, “Good evening.” I smiled back with all the energy that I could summon – I had a lot of it – and said, “Can you guess how many in India must be sleeping at this moment?” It was close to mid-night.

The night didn’t end there. The captain, more powerful than all passengers together, more powerful than the one wearing a Superman sweat shirt, more powerful than even me, announced a non-apology and that a VIP plane had presently stalled seven planes on the runway including this one. Just when I had been celebrating my uncivilized victory.

My seat, beside a young woman, had been taken by someone else and I was asked to sit beside another middle-aged man who was staring down Katrina Kaif’s cleavage on the tabloid held by a person in the front. As I attempted to dwell in my triumph, jotting down notes in my pocket diary, he kept staring down whatever I wrote whenever I wrote. I first tried to cover it, and then to shun him with my newly powerful smile, but he couldn’t be tackled that easily. Struck by a brainwave in my hyperactive mood, I stopped covering my diary and wrote in large legible letters “Peeping Uncle won’t mind his business”. It worked. It was like Twitter, only better.

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