The Wait

He looked around him in the desolate airport, the time beyond the witching hour. He saw the listless faces half sleepy, half irritated but uniformly wishing they were somewhere else rather than in that airport at that time. Outside, the rain was pile driving hard, a white sheet of canvas ready to take on the paints that one would splatter on them. He could barely see outside the window with the sheet of rain creating a bubble which was anything but protecting and soothing, a curtain blanking out the world beyond. Even the adjacent building which housed the next terminus, was only barely visible in terms of the outline, the lights in the windows showing up as a wet pinpoint, bleeding light on the canvas of the rain.

The flight was delayed six hours now. It had been raining since the afternoon and all flights to and from Delhi had got cancelled or re-routed. A number of passengers who had been trying to fly out had given up and gone back home or taken the airline’s advice and checked themselves into nearby hotels for the night. He remembered the newly married couple seated in the row facing his at the lounge. The bride’s mehendi decorated hand heavily laden with bangles that had peeped out from under the pallu of her bright red saree, seeming more like chain links than a celebration around her reed thin wrist, clutching the hand of the  husband and covered reassuringly by his other hand as his head had bent close to hear her and his hair had brushed hers in a touch neither felt.  He had strained to hear the whispers and caught shreds about the building water levels around the airport and how they should probably go to a nearby hotel. They had left soon after. Only brave or stupidly desperate travelers (like him) remained – trying to wait out the rain in the hope that the flights would resume that night.

He thought back to the irate passengers screaming at the lady in charge of the lounge, demanding to know when flights would resume. As if she could predict when the rain would stop better than the weatherman could, to the point of telling them when the flights would take off ! He had watched her smile become more fixed and plastic as time wore out and the passenger’s voices grew more whining and strident almost to the point of shrieking, as if they held her responsible for the rain that spoilt their plans. The passengers’ tempers had frayed and her smile was the barometer that read the level down to a decimal point. After a while, she had given up trying to smile and started nodding politely. That was until that loud mouth had started using French on her – he remembered her reaction distinctly. It was an initial shock – like a mill pond reacting to a stone thrown by a upstart boy – followed by a rush of indignation and then anger – like a volcano had finally found release for the lava seething inside for the past few hours. She had vented it all on him – much like the rain that was pouring outside. The man’s reaction was worth filming – almost like a child had been told to shut up and sit down. He had retreated into his corner and sulked for what seemed like an eternity. He had left the airport shortly thereafter, much to the relief of the rest of them there.

He remembered the elderly couple who must have been in their eighties, the man doddering and the woman loyally rushing to his aid every moment. He had wondered at their love and the bond that had kept them together and so devoted after all these years. They had been a picture of patience – must be all the years of life that gave them the overdose of that medicine. The woman was attentive to every twitch of the old man’s face rushing to get him a tissue, water or something hot. She had even made sure that he ate his meal before she started on hers. She had smiled at the lady in charge of the lounge, addressing her as ‘beti’ and enquiring about status of flights. Her demeanour must have been like a rush of fresh air to the lady herself, harried as she was by the rest of the crowd. She had taken special care of them – and why not, he wondered, finally advising them to leave for home and even getting a cab arranged for them and escorting them out.

Afterwards, when it had been past 10 PM, he remembered the staff trying to bring in food and the way the passengers had rushed them – reminding him of the pictures of the mid day meal scheme in schools when it was launched - a mad rush to grab whatever was brought in, monkeys in the mango orchard. It did not matter whether you got half of a sandwich and the filling had dropped on the floor. It did not matter if the cup contained tea or coffee or even water. People had to grab at whatever was there – almost as if this was the last supply of food in the airport. Then he thought – maybe it was.  With this kind of rain and the number of passengers stranded, there was no way they could have got in more food for another meal. It was actually good that most of the passengers had gone away, more so for the ones who stayed back, if that made any kind of sense.

He looked at the book lying beside him. He had finished reading it within the first two hours of the wait. It had been a long time since he had finished an entire book in one sitting. But this time, there was nothing to interrupt him. He had read it clean from cover to cover and put it down. He had briefly toyed with the idea of going across to the bookstore there and buying another book, found himself lacking the eagerness to tackle another book and had given up. Now, the bookstore had long closed down and he had no choice but to either sit idly or re-read his book, something he had not attempted to do in a long time, though it had been a favorite pastime in his idle youth.

He had then tried to get some work, found himself surprisingly productive and had completely all that he had kept pending for the last week or so in less than an hour. That was including all the to-do and the mails that he had to respond to. He had wished that he had this kind of productivity in the office and had smiled wryly at his own wistfulness. And had remembered the glare he had got from the newlywed husband who had thought he had been smiling at the demure coquettish wife. He had beaten a hasty retreat behind the dog eared newspaper on the seat beside him, realized only seconds later that he was holding it upside down, earning him a giggle from the bride and an even angrier glare from the groom, who then decided to vent it on his wife. Things had gone worse from then on until they had left. He had wished that some nothing-better-to-do inventory had conjured up a seat with a flush and that he had been sitting on one such and that he could simply reach up to and flush himself down the drain.

All that had been three hours ago. The last three had been torturous at the start. There had been a complete lack of anything to do. The TV screens had conked off in the rain and try as the airlines staff might, they did not come back on. For a man who had thought that a minute idle was a minute ill spent, he found himself strangely at an end that was completely loose. He had started walking up and down in the waiting lounge and quickly realized that it was not that big an area at all and that if you passed by the same people thrice in half an hour, they tended to view it almost as an infringement of their personal bubble space. So he had been forced to quickly cut short his walking and retire to his seat, a dog licking its wounds after being kicked rudely in the teeth.

Then a period of intense brooding, almost shutting out the rest of the world, had begun. He had found himself in a complete void of thought, no specific thing in his head that he could hold onto, almost like his mind was in a one of those banging cars at a fun fair which was rebounding off each thought that he encountered without being able to hold onto anything, a blank mind caroming into space. He had been strangely unable to focus on any specific thought or image and hold onto it long enough for him to start thinking more about it or expanding on the subject. It had become so chaotic that his head had started to pound. He had physically put his hand to his head in a bid to ‘steady it’, shaking it from side to side to clear it. Finally, when he had opened his eyes, he found that his neighbors in the lounge had surreptitiously vacated their seats and moved away to other seats a little distance away. So, while he had shut out the rest of the world, the rest of the world had started shunning him. The irony seeped in slowly. To prove to the others that he was still sane and normal, he had walked across to the lady in charge and had asked her loudly what the latest information on the departure situation was. Seeing her strained face, he had however, smiled and apologized and retreated to his “hole in the wall”.

Then he had hit upon quite an interesting game. And that had been to guess who each of the people around him were and what they were thinking. He had started with an old couple sitting diagonally across the lounge, both seemingly in their early sixties, the man dressed in a white suit that seemed uncomfortably tight and polished shoes and the woman dressed in a demure moss green saree with a golden border. The man had sprawled sleeping with his mouth slightly open and the woman sitting with her hand on her cheek, staring into space. He guessed that the old man must have been a civil servant, a convent educated, middle class origin, a man who had spent his life working at a government desk and had retired there, influenced by his bosses and their culture in his aspirations and dress sense. Must have been an arranged marriage where the docile wife from back home in the village stayed at home and looked after the kitchen. Two kids, he had guessed, both having been educated in convents again and maybe a combination of a doctor / engineer (both boys).  Both kids working abroad, he had guessed, parents visiting them once a year. While he had been busy spinning this yarn, the old man had woken up and asked something of his wife  who had then walked across to the lady in charge and asked her in a cultured English as to when she expected the flights to resume. And the husband had then picked a packet of what appeared to be chewing tobacco and had taken a pinch of it between his forefinger and thumb and had tucked it into a corner of his cheek, proceeding to chew in a fashion reminiscent of a ruminating cow going at some regurgitated cud. After a couple of minutes of going at it with gusto, he had started looking around for a place to spit and then proceeded right to the dust bin next to the Café Coffee Day counter and spit right into it, much to the disgust and shock of the girl manning the counter who had not been able to muster anything to say. He had noticed the wife’s expression harden and a few curt words had been directed at the tobacco chewer who chastely retreated to the rest room and had came out with a clean mouth, conspicuously wiping his mouth with a dirty handkerchief that had seen better days. So much for his first attempt at being Sherlock Holmes, he had thought, as his hypotheses had been blown away like a cotton ball caught in a twister. 

 He had tried the same game on the pretty, vacuous lady sitting next to them in a formal pinstriped blue shirt and a dark grey pencil skirt and black shoes with high heels that ricocheted off the floor every time she walked. He had guessed - ambitious career executive, maybe in a bank, a foreign bank, probably a management school graduate. She had been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” and not some pretty fiction written by a popular lady author, legs looked waxed beyond the sheer stockings,  her watch was expensive, the small stones on her earlobes seemed deceptively expensive. After a few minutes of guessing, he had realized that there was no way under the sun that he would be able to figure out whether he had guessed right or wrong. No Hercule Poirot to explain his deduction to the surrounding devoted audience who lapped up his giant sized brain’s amazing powers of reasoning and the culprit’s disbelief at having been caught out at the last moment on the last page of the novel. That had taken the wind out of his sails and left him feeling curiously peevish – like a child who had dropped his lollipop and been told that he cannot get another one.

So, it had been back to his brooding. The mind works in really mysterious ways, seeking avenues of distraction when there is none obviously presented. His thoughts drifted to the trip itself and the sense of foreboding he had felt when leaving for the airport. For a seasoned traveler who had been able to pack and leave at an hour’s notice, he had felt uneasy when packing the previous night and then when he was thinking about going the next morning after dinner with his wife. For some reason, he had not been able to sleep the whole night and had tossed and turned in bed, finally turning off the alarm at 4 AM even before it went off. He had to take a taxi at 5 AM for the trip and though he had packed the previous night, he had been struck by a repeated misgiving. He had felt like checking his packing again and again for something he had missed. He had been searching for one excuse or the other to delay the departure to the airport. He stopped by his sleeping son and spent a good few minutes saying bye. He had even thought of cancelling the trip stating he was sick – his boss would not have said anything. Finally, shaking himself loose, he brushed aside all the nagging worms that threatened to become full blown butterflies in his gut and had got into the taxi for the airport..

The trip itself had been memorable for all the wrong reasons – late flight in (something unusual again), being late for meetings, facing irate clients, stuck with the same sleepless phenomenon across the last three days, having numerous problems with his phone signal, getting shunted out of his hotel room, losing his laptop (and then finding it with the lost and found at the hotel), getting lost on his morning walk …. The list of the things that had not gone his way on this trip was endless. It was like there was a dark cloud that was building up negative event by event and blow by blow culminating finally in this interminable wait at the airport for his return home. He somehow felt that if he got back home and the cycle was complete, he would get back to normalcy. His home, his family, his refuge, his cave hideout. He somehow had to do that.

His thoughts jerked back to the present, ran across the drowsy, irritated faces that stared back as if he was intruding just by looking. Suddenly a commotion rose up as an airline official made his way across the lounge. He was almost mobbed by the passengers seeking more information and demanding to know when the flights would depart. The poor man looked harried to the point of giving up, his shirt half tucked in, his tie crumpled and askew, his pants crumpled as if he had been sleeping in it for the past two days, a stubble on his chin adding to his bedraggled look. He was already bald and if he had not been, this episode would have lost almost all of his hair anyway. The crowd surrounded him with hardly any space left to even gesture or move about. The voices rose, strident and annoyed, raised to the point of anger. It was almost as if they demanded that he should stop the pounding rain outside for a while and get their flight to leave. The poor hapless man retreated as much as he could but soon got fenced in against a wall.

Then the official was almost killed when he finally announced the bad news – that the meteorology department had forecast an intensified rain across the next 24 hours and that the airport had been declared closed. All incoming flights had been diverted to nearby airports where incoming passengers were being given accommodation. For the local passengers, shuttle facilities were being made available to drop them at their residences. For the others, a hotel accommodation was being arranged near the airport so that they could wait out the rain. Anger bubbled over in the passengers and some of them started accusing the official of intentionally delaying their departure from the airport by withholding information. He was captivated by the way their minds arrived at this rationale since the rain continuing and the met office reports were recent developments that the airline or anybody else could not have predicted. The human mind needed a target for transference, he thought. Anything to take the reason external, any one for a target as long as it was not oneself.

He was caught in two minds as the passengers started discussing around him. As he tried to decipher the waves of noise, he found that most of them decided to take the hotel option. Who could refuse a freebie and that too with room service, he thought wryly. The airline official had beaten a hasty retreat by then and had left the directing to a pair of burly security guards who looked as if they could take on the combined temper of the audience for a snack and then move onto the main course. The passengers had to necessarily be polite and ask for directions to the coach for the hotel or the shuttle. A few enquired about their luggage and were told that their luggage was outside the lounge waiting for them to claim it. The crowd started filing out in groups – seeking relative comfort amongst their neighbors. Soon, he realized that he was one of the last few left and that he had not made up his mind. One of the burly guards asked him whether he was planning on taking the shuttle or going to the hotel. Finally, he made up his mind to go to the hotel and hefted his book and his laptop bag and moved out of the lounge. Collecting his overnighter from outside the lounge, he followed the guard’s instructions to go to the coach.

He found that the coach was bursting at the seams but the airline apparently did not have another one and neither did they seem to want to make another trip. So, he squeezed into the coach. Stuck between a fat man with a paunch that seemed like a end stage pregnancy and the side of the coach, he turned to the side – anything to get away from the smell of sweat and that paunch pushing up against him. The rain outside calmed his thoughts even though it was still pounding down. Little streams of rain water cascaded down the side of the coach weaving this way and that as the coach turned and the wind played havoc with the falling water. The streams somehow were cathartic and he felt cleansed and pure in some unknown way as he watched it stream down. His lethargy and numbness left him and he felt positive and energetic for the first time on the trip. Maybe his luck was changing and things would be okay after all.

The trip in the coach was a short one, made shorter by his reverie from which he was rudely awoken as the coach man announced that they had reached and the passengers literally poured out of the coach. It was almost like a beached whale throwing up it’s last meal. Even though he had been close to the door since he was one of the last to enter the coach, he found himself to be one of the last to disembark. The crowd had already descended on the reception and had started haranguing the lady there for their rooms. He stood by waiting for his turn to get a room. People walked off as their rooms were allotted, showing their boarding passes for confirmations. As they neared the last 10-12 people, the hotel official said that there were not enough rooms left and that the passengers would need to share.

Businessmen got paired off and a couple was lucky to get a room to themselves. Finally, there were three of them left - two women and him. One was pregnant, heavily so. She reminded him of the man on the coach.  The other was an old lady who mentioned that she had been travelling to Chennai to visit her daughter who had just had a baby. The hotel official looked at him expectantly as if he had the answer to this problem. The pregnant lady just seemed to have got an attack of pains and she held her bloated stomach and added herself to the line of people giving him expectant looks. The old woman mentioned something about his looking just like her son who was in the US. The emotional overdose was the last straw and he had to fold. It would be inhuman not to. And where would his misplaced sense of chivalry go?

He let the two women take the last room. He then asked the hotel official if he could park himself in the lounge for the night. She hemmed and hawed her way through an explanation looking really apologetic which in short left him understanding that the hotel officials had to use the lounge since they had to stay on and double up for the next shift. His sense of chivalry gave way to a sense of resignation as he asked her where he could spend the night. She politely told him that the airport lounge would be most comfortable. She could arrange for a dinner in the hotel after which he could take the coach back to the airport, she said. He thought about it and decided against dinner. It was already almost 3 PM. Food at this time would not help his acidity prone stomach at all. He asked her for a bottle of water and with it, he made his way out to the lobby with his luggage in tow. There was no sign of the coach whatsoever.

He turned back to see the guard locking up the hotel main doors behind him. He was left with no choice now. It was either stay on the hotel porch all night or find another way to get back to the airport. He thought about how his being nice always got him in trouble.  He looked around for one of the hotel taxis, walking a little bit into the rain which was still pouring buckets. The lawn lights were turned off which made it even harder to see anything beyond a couple of feet with no help from the rain at all. There seemed to be a conspicuous absence of anything that was remotely locomotive in the near neighborhood. By then he had got sopping wet like he had just come out of a pool with all his clothes on.  His luggage was dripping water as well and he looked like the senator that was made a mutant by Magneto, walking out of the ocean and leaving dripping little bits of him on the path.

He trudged onward trying to figure out which way to go for the airport. Suddenly he almost collided with a signpost that pointed to the airport. He turned and headed in that general direction. About 15 minutes later, he started seeing bright lights in the distance, large wet splotches of light that seemed like a beacon, a homing signal for him to move in towards. So he homed, like the moth that went to the flame, literally. His overnighter dragging behind him, the laptop bag seeming to weigh as much as Atlas must have felt, he wondered why the hell he was carrying the bottle of water still. Stopping, he decided to down it and move on.

The road seemed to disappear where he was, turning sharply to the right. He left his luggage on the road and walked to the edge to see what was there. He almost fell off as the edge cut off on a sharp sandy decline. The drop seemed to go on a long way, much more than the poor light could show him. He stood there, shaking his head at the near miss and then suddenly felt thirsty. He opened the bottle of water and threw his head back to drink. While the water was pouring down this throat with blessed relief, he saw a streak of light shooting across the sky. Momentarily distracted, he followed it’s trajectory like tracing a moonbeam on a wet windscreen, leaving a shining path of light behind it.

The driver of the coach was tired and sleepy after having made multiple trips the whole day. The airline had got a call from the hotel that a passenger wanted to go back to the airport and so he had been rudely woken up and asked to make a last trip for the day. He drove almost on automatic as he knew every twist and turn on the road like the back of his palm, almost nodding off back to sleep. Ah! There was the sharp turn, but since there was sure to be no traffic, he allowed himself to take it wide straying to the wrong side of the road. As he rounded the bend, he heard a thud of something that his vehicle hit and stepped on the brakes. The coach screeched to a halt and he jumped out of the driver’s cabin and ran around to the other side. To his horror, he saw a big red mark on the left front of the coach. He ran back down the road for about 20 meters, the rain making it difficult to see anything. He almost tripped over the body as it lay face first on the ground.

The impact was more of a surprise than anything else. He almost felt no pain at first. The fact that there was a vehicle on the roads at that time was so much of a surprise and the fact that it was on the wrong side of the road added to the element of shock. The pain came after he landed with a thud, his flight rudely cut short like a bird hit by an air gun pellet, the body crumpling on impact. He thought that it had finally come down to this, his whole eventful trip which had been a series of mishaps strung together with the sense of foreboding. His thoughts went back to his wife and son as he wondered if he could call them on the phone to let them know. He wanted to move his hand but discovered that he could not get it to move at all. The darkness was like a blanket that was settling down on him, a cold numbing darkness that seemed to seep into his very bones with a chill that set his teeth chattering. His skin felt curiously clammy and cold like it was in some way not connected to his body but draped over it. A mist of red came over his eyes and he realized that he was dripping blood from his ears and nose. He heard someone running across to where he lay. As the footsteps came closer, he sank into the blackness that seemed to beckon like an oasis in the desert. His last thought was that he had waited all night and acted like a nice guy for the last time.  Nice guys finish last ….