When I was a boy, growing up in Mahim, Mumbai, the airport seemed to be in another city. It seemed to belong to another set of people: the film stars and the technocrats, the businessmen and the government officials. My father had travelled abroad and part of the family trove of pictures is a series of images of him at the airport with all his friends, my mother garlanding him, my sister looking bemused. These were the markers by which the middle class established to itself and to others how important air travel was. It was a rite of passage.
It’s quite different now. With globalisation and competitive pricing and the pressure of poverty, more people are flying now than ever before. The bargain flights mean that they bring their tiffin boxes and eat companionably. I have been offered everything from theplas to idlis, from momos to bhujiya, as I have waited for a flight.
The airports are large air-conditioned railway stations. They do not stink of urine as the stations do because when you defecate or urinate on an aeroplane, it’s not out in the open; every stationary train is an invitation to use the toilets. So much for the government’s war on open defecation; every train traveller is made into an open defecator so long as the trip takes place on a morning.
I am not an easy traveller, perhaps because of the time when airplane travel was such an important thing. I never sleep well the night before a flight and I like to get to the airport well in advance. But once I’m there, something relaxes inside me. I am now in a system and I know that the system sees me as a parcel that has to be dealt with. Each stage of the process wants to boot me out to the next stage where I can be someone else’s problem.
I remember a friend who was on his way to Delhi because he thought he would be going to Myanmar. He was on the flight to Delhi when he received a regretful call from the commissioning editor who said his visa had been denied. There was then no point in him going to Delhi so he asked to be off-loaded. This caused a great deal of commotion and a certain amount of barely concealed annoyance. They had dealt with him, they thought, what was he doing coming back?
No one at an airport is at home. The staff always seems to be drawn from a large pool of young people who are on their way to other jobs; we are all in transit. It is an entirely liminal space, and everyone is in motion. This sense of instability makes it a great place for the staging of emotion. This may be why so many Bollywood films use the airport as a stage for the climax. Things are thrown into sharp relief against those neutral colours, the endless cool marble floors, the strange atria rearing above your head, the odd bulges outside.
Nowhere is this made clearer than in Mumbai where the entry to Terminal 2 begins a process of cutting away the city. You are suddenly in a special economic zone, of manicured trees and no people. This is the city as it could be if we were all only moving through it at high speed.
You debouch in front of that strange flying-saucer and begin the process of disengaging with the city. Your last moment with it is shared by a taxi driver who is possibly annoying you by claiming that he has no change. If you are going away for a long time, perhaps your family or friends come with you but soon you cross that glass barrier that separates you from them.
Now no one else is with you. Your luggage has been stripped from you. You are what you are carrying and what your passport says you are and where you can go. When Indians get visa on arrival to the destinations of our dreams, we will stop using airports as these stages for emotion—though it is likely that we will not want to go anywhere that wants us, in Groucho Marx fashion.
Airports are full of us, people with a strolley and an attitude of ‘Don’t talk to me. I’m just too busy’. I understand why women would want to put on that look. The Indian man. ’Nuff said. It used to be a book or a magazine with which a woman shielded herself. Then it became a laptop which had the added advantage of suggesting economic independence, the relentless pressure of work and the indispensability of the worker.
Now it’s the phone and it’s interesting to notice how deep the focus in on the device, and yet how stoic the faces above. Films unspool, stand-up comedians work their spiels, patriots sing the praise of their nations, political positions are dissected and the faces remain bland and unresponsive. They are fully connected with their phones and the miniature dramas that are coming streaming through—and they are also aware that they are part of a spectacle.
I do not people watch, however it may seem from this piece that I do. I walk. I walk restlessly and relentlessly and I am aware of how my movements must seem, as if a centrifugal force were tossing me outwards from the departure gate and then a centripetal force were drawing me back.
I do not read in airports; I think of my friend, the film scholar, who has missed several flights, while sitting with a book at the departure gate, his boarding pass in his pocket. A chapter or two later, he has looked up to find his flight has gone and no one in the airlines could believe that anyone could be so engrossed in a book that…
But the call has come. It is time to face that line. It forms so quickly you would think seats were on a first-come, first-served basis. No, two lines have formed because we have never been comfortable with the notion of the line. And just to rub your nose in it, in Terminal 1, you must catch a bus to catch a plane.
The writer’s luggage is under the seat in front of him because the bounders and cads have already stuffed the overhead lockers.
