"Sir, you may take photographs of yourself; however, you may not take photographs of the crew."
The petite figure moved down the aisle without the air of someone who had been digitally molested in public and, with a smile, deleted evidence of the man's indecency. She handed him his smartphone with fleeting eye-contact. That smile, I noted amusedly, hadn't relented. He looked back at her as if she had offered a set of dentures and smiled back with faux kindness and tight lips. I vaguely remembered psychology experiments.
My eyes were slow to swivel away from her. She had the kind of nose that reminds you of strawberry sweetcakes. I had never liked strawberry sweetcakes.
As she walked back, I spoke to her in a voice that I hoped would not carry, "That was awfully polite of you."
"You have to be."
"Does this happen often, then?"
"All the time."
"Does it get any easier?"
"Never."
She smiled. This smile seemed remarkably less cold than its predecessor. Had she beamed at me? Had it lasted too short to matter? Perhaps she had offered me the best she could given the context? I stopped myself abruptly, having gone down this rabbit-hole before.
Ten minutes into a book on India's foreign policy, I realized I had registered almost nothing. For some reason, my brain now thought of General Musharaff in a slightly romantic light.
Stupid Pavlov.
Resigned, I lifted my head to see a lady dressed in immaculate navy-blue reciting the particulars of our flight. The white ribbon-rose on her neck made her look silly. She wore an expertly suppressed smirk that told me that had we met in a different setting, she would have agreed vociferously.
I looked down into my book. The author repeated his stance on terrorism for the fourth time. I groaned quietly.
I looked up.
The girl was back. She was miming the safety procedure that precedes every take-off. I wondered whether law forced her to repeat these with the hope that enough exposure to choreographed instructions would make them stick. I wondered if legislators understood the obstinacy of the average citizen in ignoring death and its affiliated protocols.
I gazed over at her more consciously. I focused on the way her lips shifted to the left every time the speakers blurted something inanely obvious; the way her hands soared above her shoulders, spending energy she could not deposit elsewhere; the way her hair was cropped in a bun that did little to take away her youth.
I was seated in the third row and my height offered a gorgeous view of her half-spirited movements over the head of a gentleman in front. I wondered how much of her soul died every time she tied the belt-buckle and displayed it to a crowd that was clearly not impressed with her effort. Something of my reflection must have been borrowed from her mind because for the first time in my life I was witnessing an air-hostess that was visibly bored.
She brandished a menu-card for expensive sandwiches and cookies, torturously unable to gesticulate the sentence: "...help yourself to our exotic selection in the finest cuisine...". She settled for holding it like she was auditioning for The Lion King and rolled her eyes in her head. I couldn't stop myself from grinning in her direction. She found me and her face gave way to a mini-chuckle. A small explosion on an alabaster face. I felt myself grow very interested in military coups.
Stupid Pavlov.
I was pushed into my seat as the plane accelerated and, almost as if the universe conspired to make me believe in a benevolent (or bored) God, she sat herself in a seat that was amply visible from mine. I would spend the next thirty minutes alternating my attentions between Benazir Bhutto and a face in perpetual blush. I did not mind her make-up at all.
I like to think I was covert. I probably was not.
At this point, the gentleman in front of me either grew smart to my efforts or thought I was flirting with his hair (or I was the protagonist of a cheap tragicomic production) because he maliciously moved to obscure my view of the girl whose navy-blue suit did little to hold the summer within her...
With a mental kick to myself, I realized I was in the dastardly rabbit-hole. I settled for enjoying my stay there in what can only be described as an act of desperate pragmatism.
The overhead button that summons flight attendants is genius, I realized. It is the closest we have to a magical lamp. Unfortunately, every time I was 'thirsty', the wrong genie would pop into my field of vision. My stance towards the white ribbon-rose graduated to belligerence. After my fifth glass of water, I wasn't even trying to hide my eyes from searching her whereabouts.
Ah! There she was! Row N. My aqueous needs were now rendered obsolete and disappeared as awkwardly as they had come into existence. I decided to work up the courage to ask her out for a cup of coffee when I unboard. Surely, she will stay back in Mumbai some time soon?
I sighed.
Something sarcastic in me asked me, "Does this happen often, then?"
"All the time."
"Does it get any easier?"
"Never."
---
It was a little awkward to sit on the third row from the exit and not alight. I was suddenly reading the book with more interest than I have ever paid to anything without a strawberry sweetcake nose. When the mob thinned enough so that I could ask her away from pleasantries for a minute, I stood up (less ceremoniously than I had imagined) and ambled slowly to the front.
And then I walked left, out to the stairs and breathed in the night.
She hadn't been there. In that small area where the crew stands and fares you well. She hadn't been there. I deflated like a pool of stars would if they weren't abstractions of titanic conflagrations floating in the indifferent vacuum of space. Both fit, the poet in me remarked. I politely asked him to shut the fuck up.
About fourty-three milliseconds later, her face appeared from the darkness, travelling up the stairway and I had the fleeting sense of being buffeted backwards by sheer intent. She threw a chirpy "Good night" at me. I caught it between the space of my ribs and nodded my head in acknowledgment. Something appropriately enthusiastic passed my lips while I descended and before I knew it I was looking at the passenger bus. It had never looked sadder.
I stood for a full minute in a night that wasn't appropriately cold. I looked behind and up into the looped canopy of the portable stairs. I was hoping to find light at the end of the passage. She wasn't there.
I moved forward.
I moved backward.
I climbed the stairs. I learnt that day that nothing is more irritating than being interrupted mid-climb to the girl of your (recently conceived) dreams. The security-bloke wouldn't let me pass beyond the third step and confiscated my ticket until I answered a few questions.
"Have you forgotten something, Sir?"
"Look, I will be down in a minute. Let me just..."
"Sir, we cannot let you do that. There are laws against this. If you just tell me what you have forgotten, I will get it for you."
"I haven't exactly forgotten anything."
He looked at me with anticipation. I gave him the kind of look I last gave my Chemistry teacher, bargaining for an extra 1/2 mark over a diagram I had guessed into creation.
"Look, I just need to speak to someone in the crew..."
"I am sorry but we cannot allow that."
And just like that, my shoulders fell by an inch accompanied by other changes I had read of in a psychology book more interesting than the one I was now holding. Suddenly, I did not like foreign policy too much.
Stupid Pavlov.
