Friday 1 June 2012

safar

I had no shoes on; only striped socks whose colours resembled that of my pullover. Maybe someone would find that cute, I thought to myself as I gingerly made my way to the toilet – past sleeping passengers, and some engrossed in the latest Hollywood film or TV series.

I pulled the door shut and turned to look at the mirror. I had not shaved for the past two days, stubble had begun to colonise my face. I searched my eyes for the brown that glows with kisses from the sun. It was not there. I guess the mist was covering it. I don’t know how long I stood there, watching a tear form slowly from one eye, sliding down with a suppressed urgency. It was as if I were entering an unknown space. How was that possible?

Within hours it would start: I would have to make out their individuality although that would be akin to forcing my eyes towards the sun. In the cab home, I would have to re-acquaint myself with my own reality – the people around me, the job I have been at for the past few years, the surroundings. Did I forget a folder with all that information in the hotel room, at one of the airports perhaps?

There is a certain sense of fatalism about being in a plane. You cannot choose where to get off. You can alight at an unknown bus stop, an unfamiliar train station. No one needs to know you do not belong there. You will make yourself fit in, somehow. You are in charge, you can determine things. But the plane takes all that away from you. Your free will is arrested the moment you check in your baggage. It directs you all the way to a final destination of the pilot’s manoeuvring. And as if to remind you who’s in charge, he makes announcements about where you are during your flight – how high, how far, how much time you have to prepare yourself before you land. And then you follow everyone else out of the plane: to a waiting immigration officer, a waiting taxi, a pair of arms.

I return to my seat and look outside the window. The TV screen shows that we’re flying over the Indian subcontinent. That’s Mumbai, I think to myself. So many friends are in that city. They are so small from up here, almost insignificant. In the same way, I am up here, so small, so vulnerable. How did our problems become so big?

I switch to the audio function and play old Hindi songs. There in the list is an album by Kishore Kumar, his greatest hits from the 1970s. Top of the list is a familiar song picturised on Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore from the 1971 film, Safar:

Zindagi ka safar, hai yeh kaisa safar, (the journey of life, what sort of a journey is it?)
Koi samjha nahin, koi jana nahin.. (no one understands, no one knows)

Was the 1970s a really miserable decade? Hindi cinema of that era seemed to suggest so.
Then again, perhaps it was not just the decade it was mourning.

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