On the trip back home, I am waiting at Bombay’s Sahar Airport (more recently renamed Chatrapati Shivaji Airport, after a seventeenth century local king, just as Bombay reverted to Mumbai, after a local Hindu goddess Mumbadevi), alternately walking around and sitting down to escape a swarm of persistent mosquitoes. India is also defined by such persistent species of life.

Next to me three jewelry laden Gujarati ladies, who are as equally persistent, speaking in rapid fire Gujarati. I am assuming they are discussing business, as they eat something wrapped in a greasy newspaper. The younger one makes a few ineffectual gestures, as if asking the two older ones not to embarrass her by eating their homemade snack in the lobby, where perhaps such activity is not allowed, before she joins them.

Facing me are a couple and a newly married women friend of this couple, an interracial couple next to them with the woman, who is Caucasian, appearing totally out of place due to her height and girth, and at the end of a row, a few sleepy kids watching Bollywood junk on TV. For the last thirty minutes I have been alternately trying to read Ved Metha’s essays from the New Yorker (one dealing with his adventures to become an American citizen was quite a humorous read), squashing a few more mosquitoes as well playing a guessing game to write about the inner life of these fellow waiting room passengers.

Finally we are called upon to board and I find myself seated behind the wing of the 747. Seated next to me is the couple that was waiting opposite to me previously. Now I notice that the woman is expecting a baby. The plane takes offs to Delhi and I fall into an uneasy drowse. I wake up when the pilot comes over the intercom asking us to fasten the seat belts, and see a thin slice of sun over the far horizon. Directly underneath me it is still dark. In this I am reminded of an earlier dawn I had witnessed from Tiger Hill above Darjeeling, in the Eastern Himalayas, where I had gone to see the sun rise over the snow covered ranges extending into Nepal and Mt Everest.

We soon descend into a foggy Delhi for an hour’s layover to pick up some more passengers for the run to London.

And now we are off to London, flying west over the plains of Punjab and Pakistan (patches of green and rust, cut by ribbons of five rivers – Punjab means the land of five rivers) and then westwards over mountain ranges of Persia. This time there are no clouds between the plane at thirty five thousand feet and the ground, enabling me to see the mountain highways and the barely perceptible trucks on them. I also see patches of snow. The whole ground comes off as a fantastic abstract canvas.

The plane is now flying over Tehran. It appears as if it has snowed hard down there over the last couple of days. I can make out the two main avenues that run east west in Tehran. I shall be visiting this city sometime soon to research a novel I want to write, exploring the close connections between Hindustani classical music and Persian music, and since I am a sucker for them, a tragic love story. If I had lived a few centuries ago, I would have made the same trip from India on horse and camel back, yes only if I were a rich nobleman in the Mughal court.

End of Turkey and we are now over the Black Sea onto Romania. I had first wrongly guessed it as the Mediterranean before the in-flight map corrected me. Eastern Europe occupied my consciousness in the late nineties when the dictatorial regimes in these countries were collapsing like ninepins. I remember that when the protesters burst into the Presidential palace in Bucharest, they found that Madame Consenscu (sp?) had a precious shoe collection, which easily rivaled that of Imelda Marcos, wife of the deposed Filipino dictator.

Meanwhile the husband sitting next to me is getting dangerously drunk on the free whiskey they have been serving in-flight. He has been weeping for the past ten minutes and the wife has been trying to console him. Later when I get up to go to the restroom and return I see that he had done the noble deed all over the seat. So I currently find myself seated between two fat gentlemen, who are discussing the very interesting topic of cheap intercontinental airline fares and deals in Hindi across the space called me.

I doze off again fitfully and wake up as the plane descends towards Heathrow, London for a break of about two hours. We disembark and are checked out into one of the vestibules of the airport and asked not to wander for too long as we are required to get back on in thirty minutes. I stand against a wall and watch various types of humanity pass by me. Arabs in their flowing khayaeffs (sp?), Europeans with styled coiffures, Muslims returning from the navel of Islam, Mecca and Hajj, a Tibetan lady with a thick layer of prayer beads around her neck and in a skirt that I have till date only seen in photographs or movies, Hasidic Jews dressed in regulation black with top hats speaking Hebrew. All this makes me muse on how airports form the caravanserai of our modern world. Airport cities such as Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong have gone farther and have tailored their existence around the travelers passing through them.

On the intercom, a British voice asking us to get back on the plane. We are herded into a waiting lounge and await entry back into the plane’s mouth. For the lack of anything better to do I start reading a travelogue of someone who had chased the monsoon in India and then wrote about it. The page I read about details his hospitalization for a nervous disorder in London and how he gets the idea to chase the monsoon from a maverick Indian businessman he meets in the hospital. People clutching red passports, which I later learn are British, sit next to me and talk in whispers. Across the aisle a rather fashionable girl, who is wearing bright red lipstick, is desultory thumbing the latest John Grisham ‘novel’. A girl walks up to where I sit and sits in the empty chair next to me. I suddenly find myself getting wary about people watching. So I go back to reading the travelogue.

A boarding call and the passengers rush to get in line to get on the plane. I watch the surge. The call however proves to be false. And I am amused, boredom enables one to be amused by inanities, the so-called TV humor shows with their canned laughter, the best proof. The girl seated next to me, who also heeded to the false alarm, sits down again and I smile at her. I begin a conversation with her, surprising myself given that I find it difficult to open conversations and then make small talk. I question and she answers, inanities such as where she is headed to in the US, what does she do, where did she study and so forth. She has soulful eyes, is quite pleasing to look at and her English has a distinct Southern Indian accent. Soon the call to board the plane is made and we join the queue for the final leg of the journey into JFK. It is only later I realize that we didn’t even exchange names.

I have a whole row of seats to myself, so I lay down for a nap and sleep most of the way into New York. I wake up as the plane descends into JFK over Long Island. Only as we land, I glimpse the unmistakable spire of the Empire State Building, tiny in the distance. Soon I find myself in the line at the Immigration desks, where I am thumb printed and photographed sans my spectacles (irises offer a more foolproof personal identification), in order to enter Fortress America. The Romans, i.e., the citizens on the other hand zoom through the gates. Here I think of Salman Rushdie’s book of essays, ‘Step Across This Line’, in which he details of how for people who desire to step across borders, with global village remaining a cozy sentimental myth travel wise where a simple matter of crossing a street entailing a torturous obstacle course, passports become the most important and prized possessions.

I am on the final leg of the voyage to Atlanta. The plane is taxiing and we take off into the night sky. Out of the window, I see the web of brilliant light that is New York City. Such a sight is capable of impressing even the most jaded of the philistines. I press my face closer to the window. Manhattan is simply a blaze of light for this height, ten thousand feet. The Brooklyn Bridge, subject of that Hart Crane’s rhapsody, is a lovely sight, lined with violet lights. In the bay directly below the plane I see some ships as I scan the sea for the Statue of Liberty. I finally see the lights of the island.

We are now traveling over the Eastern seaboard, a continuous swath of lights. And finally land at Atlanta. I return home and sleep for eighteen hours straight.