He is seated in the Calgary Airport, with a magnificent view of the snow capped Rockies in the distance, eating lunch and re-reading an essay by Pico Iyer's essay on airports and their place in modern psyche. However, when Iyer opines:

"Airports have become something more than just an intra-national convenience zone, and it is easy to see them as models of our future"

he mutters to himself, "yes Mr. Iyer, only for a certain slice of the world population", for certainly, he wouldn't have been able to consider airport existance as normal, as that much younger self, who at 12, watched mesmerized for the first time in his life, a plane carrying his mother on a voyage to America, from a huge viewing gallery, for which his father had to buy tickets to enter. And who could only a decade later, at 22, be able to board an airplane for the first time, as he left on a voluntary exile to America.

On Air Canada, all announcements are made in both English and French; in English first followed by French. And when is Toronto pronounced in two different ways, the French way of saying it is of course sexier. O Frenchies, if only you had managed to beat the Brits in taking over Hindoostan?!

At the baggage carousel, going round and round, waiting for his manna (he can't live without his 30 lbs heavy mobile library - this is how he accessorizes anonymous hotel rooms "tailored for the discerning business traveler" like himself) to be delivered, a poem of Vikram Seth's, revolves in his mind.

It would make perfect sense to use an airport as a circle - perhaps the fourth circle given that the most frequent users of airports, i.e., frequent of frequent fliers (I include myself in this group now) tend to be capitalists - in a post-modern version of Dante's "Inferno"

On a CBC News TV Kisok next to the signs for baggage claim, Canada's (more popular) version of PBS, a news report on the next book chosen for the "Canada Reads" program (some of the books with this sticker that I have seen in bookstores are excellent) is followed by a report on a Mickey Mouse's sold out exhibit in Montreal. Thusly has literature to live, cheek and jowl, with pop culture in these best of times and worst of times.

When at the baggage carousel, a woman unfolds a beautiful Japanese fan to beat the thermostat turned on too high, the waiting time speeds up a little.