seat no. 26 a ~discontinued~

1. abstruser musings

'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs and vexes meditation with its strange and extreme silentness.'                                                                                                                    

- samuel taylor coleridge, 'frost at midnight'

you would expect airports to be a hustling, breathless centre of activity, but from where i was sitting, it wasn’t really.

i was bored, to start with. which is probably why i started writing this.

i’ve been to quite a few airports in my lifetime, but the funny thing is that i can’t really remember a lot of them. that makes me feel a bit weird, actually, that i’ve been to all these places and seen a lot of things, but i can’t remember a lot of it.  sometimesihave weird thoughts, sometimes i think that in those fleeting moments at check in counters and transit lounges i may have seen someone i will see again, maybe i’ll see someone i’ll meet again  few years from now or maybe even decades, and we’ll never know that we’ve already met before, which is a quite strange if you think about. it’s serendipitous in a weird way too, but i’ve never been one for flowery words, so i guess it’s just strange.

i think the dubai airport is the most interesting airport i’ve been to. my memories are vague, but clearer than most, strangely. strange because dubai was a stopover, so i was technically not in dubai, i was in this no man’s land, for  few hours of my life, i was in a place which was no country, really.onlyi didn’t know that then, i thought an airport was automatically in that country’s territory, but it’s not. i learned that only after i watched that movie with tom hanks and catherine zeta-jones, I think it was called the airport, or the terminal or something, i can’t remember.

anyway, the point is that the dubai airport was pretty cool, despite the said vagueness of the memories i have of the place. it’sa haze of long walkalators and chocolaty, warm doughnuts from costa coffee, and a fly emirates travel lounge. the only thing i really remember with almost shattering clarity is the potted ficus in the corner of the lounge, and also the red shelf i saw in the corner of the terminal soon after we landed, with the emirates logo on it, the one that had all the baby strollers for people who needed them. andi thought it was pretty thoughtful, on the airline’s part, to have baby strollers that people could use. we used it too, because my brother was only a year old at that time and mum had a backache so she couldn’t always carry him.

i think i had my first doughnut there, too. and the best part was that it didn’t just have chocolate on top, it had chocolate inside too, which was just beautiful to my nine-year old self. I got quite sick of it though, after a while, so i gave it to mum to finish, even though she was at the peak of her weight watching at that time. she would boast to me about her twenty four inch waist till the day she…

well. till the day she died.

but that’s a story for another day, i suppose.

my waist was a twenty-six, and i think i was pretty content with it, because i didn’t really want to give up my morning tea and my late night snack, and all those moments in between when the only nice feeling i’d have would be on my tongue.

another fleeting transition – the doha airport. rainy nights, tear-streaked glass facades and people hidden behind veils, clandestine, hurried, furtive, in an almost guilty way. I wasn’t really paying attention though. i’d gotten some kind of kiddie hamper on the flight we’d just alighted from – i forget now what all it contained, but i do remember that it had a dr.seuss book in it – the sneetches, the one about the star-bellied sneetches and those who had none. it was my first dr. seuss book, and now that i think of it i wonder why i hadn’t started reading him sooner. the man is a genius.