notes on underground aerial voyages
1:45 a.m.
As I sit here in my room, I go through my phone gallery and recall all the times last year when I had secretly boarded flights and flown all the way back to New Delhi, sometimes every 20 days. In 2019, I had made a total of 4 round trips to India and all of them were taken before August with the first 3 taken on the sly. Things people do for love and in love can be quite astonishing. In retrospect, I marvel at how I managed to evade my parents’ scrutiny, complete my coursework in my first year of Ph.D., and pass my secondary qualifying exam.
( 1 ) January 26, 2019 to February 10, 2019
The first trip was borne out of a grayscale immensity of thunderstorms and gunmetal clouds. I waited, my eyes darting every few minutes to the digital clock hanging in the waiting area of London International Airport…
The plane is nearly two hours late. It is a small aircraft, nothing like the Boeings that I have been familiar with. I sit next to the window and a very handsome older man with salt and pepper hair sits beside me. We begin talking as the plane takes off. He works for 3M and is from Montreal. He asks me where I am originally from and I tell him I am Indian, already smiling because I know he’s going to be very surprised. “You look Eurasian!” He is not the first to mistake my nationality and ethnic make-up.
When I arrive at Toronto Pearson Airport, I am informed that my flight to Munich left 20 minutes prior to my landing. I am panicking. My entire journey to New Delhi was supposed to be 18 hours long. I go to the help-desk and frantically whine and demand a contingency plan while furnishing the attendant with a medical emergency back home which demands my presence. I don’t have any check-in baggage—just a cabin bag and a carry-on. Quite melodramatically, I am reluctantly put on a plane to Heathrow at the stroke of midnight.
Heathrow Airport is enormous and I somehow end up getting a van instead of the shuttle to take me to my terminal. I am glad I will be reaching directly instead of being subjected to shuttle detours. Weary with everything until this point, I become careless. At security, I lose a beautiful earring. It is alright. I had bought it during the Black Friday sale.
It is an 8-hour layover and so I decide to call him up. He appears on video. He is sitting in his favorite Beer Cafe outlet already celebrating my arrival. I ask him if he is drinking Erdinger Dunkel. He shakes his head and says, “It’s our beer. We’ll drink it together.”
Eventually, my conversation with him ends and I make my way to the smoking room. It is an uninsulated, cagey room made of grills exposing me to the grayness of the original London. I can feel the chilly, moist breeze make its way between my clothes as I take out a cigarette. For the lack of a lighter, I approach two British men in their late twenties or early thirties. One of them hands me the lighter and I make small talk with them as we all smoke together. They are going to Sri Lanka to be a part of a boating and forest exploration where they won’t be connected to the world in any way. I smoke away and tell them that it certainly sounds thrilling.
I go back inside to wait where I befriend a British woman of Spanish descent and then an Italian man who is tapping away on his laptop. The Italian man tells me he met his wife on a mountain trip he took with his friends. His flight, like the woman earlier, is before mine. He leans down to hug me and I receive my first la bise. I am pleasantly startled and hastily return the courtesy before he walks away. At last, I take my flight finally and fall asleep once again.
The plane lands after what feels like a test of my patience and I walk out after immigration, enervated but relieved, to be greeted by the blinding Delhi sun and him. It is the Indian Republic Day. It took me 3 days and many stories to finally make it home. I have arrived.
( 2 ) March 4, 2019 to March 24, 2019
I am on the Greyhound bus to Toronto Pearson Airport. Not risking a connecting flight from London. Everything is in order. I breathe a sigh of relief as I board my flight. The air hostess apologizes for not having enough cabin space for my carry-on. I reassure her that I am tiny and I like to keep my carry-on under the seat of the passenger in front of me. I get a call from my house-mate. I tell her that I am about to take off and that I’d be grateful if she could take my corrected undergraduate assignments to my office. The plane is airborne and I see the CN Tower jutting into the tilted skyline—Canada’s obelisk of modernity. As I put my phone on flight mode, I shelve my academic responsibilities and sink into this 14-hour flight.
( 3 ) Airport Impressions
— Amsterdam Airport has become like a second home to me. I like the size. It is compact enough to go from one end to the other. I love to buy airport snacks. The regulars are chocolate milk, granola bars, and chocolates.
— Another sojourn in Heathrow Airport comprised sleeping through the night to board the flight scheduled for the next morning. Waking up at 5 in the morning resulted in sampling the limited beer that the terminal offered. On his recommendation, I settled for Island Record IPA.
— On yet another layover in Munich Airport, I ended up buying a small, roundish, and extremely adorable Shaun the Schaff for him. A mother and son duo sat opposite me while I admired the undeniable adorableness of Shaun the Schaff. The woman was half grieving and reprimanding her son. Until the very end, the teenage boy did not meet her gaze or respond. He was as silent as I was. Finally, he murmured some words of reconciliation and I decided to drop my spectatorship and grab a free mineral water bottle.
— My favorite airport is the Frankfurt Airport. It is big and very aesthetically designed and decorated. Whenever I come to Frankfurt, my heart is filled with an artistic sophistication and industrial grittiness. It is like a 24/7 art gallery of sorts. What I distinctly remember are the white ceiling lamp shades, twisted up like lambent, giant flat noodles.
( 4 ) Inflight Memories
I have usually chosen to sit by the window on every flight that I have taken. There is something spectacular about watching the sunrise or sunset in the sky. I love how the diffuse sky radiation colors the expanse of milky clouds reminiscent of a Mark Rothko painting. Sometimes I see cities laid out like a sprawling, transparent organism complete with pulsating lights and luminous capillaries—an iridescent clash with the astral opalescence. I am flying over the Atlantic Ocean and I remember Tennyson’s short “The Eagle” that a professor had recited in my second year of undergraduate—
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
( 5 ) Inertia
Catching an early morning connecting flight after an overnight stay like the one I took in Heathrow is perhaps one of my most singularly surreal experiences. Time becomes a distended and independent entity transcending human reason and traversing the territory of the Kantian sublime. People mill in the Airport unremittingly from all over the world. It is where all these disparate time-zones coalesce to form a space that is cut off from the rest of the world populated by people who are only focused on hopping onto another tangential time-zone. The Airport becomes a piece of prismatic, blossoming thread art. Exhaustion shackles my mind but I wander in this miniature floating world, knowing that it is like a dazed dream cradling me through this inertia of ceaseless motion. I am a thread finding its way out of the weave.
Airborne, March 5, 2019
