Poliphilos

Landside

The taxi coupon already paid, forty rupees folded into the driver’s visor anyway because some transactions end with a tip and this one ends with a year, the window down, the driver saying something about the traffic at Andheri that the radio was also saying, while the August heat was pressing against the car, the terminal appearing in segments between hoardings, Kingfisher blue, a Cement mural gone pink at the seams.

Arrivals curb, departures curb, porters in maroon waiting along the railing in a row that holds men with hands on carts and bags on shoulders and neither can be explained to anyone who hasn’t stood in it. Ninety minutes to final call, bags down, trolley claimed, one wheel square and complaining about it the entire way, ramp, ramp, the ramp smells of diesel and rain that hasn’t fallen yet, X-ray queue outside the entrance, bags on the belt, body through the frame, a stamp on the hand-baggage tag, the seal of a man who stamps a thousand a shift and has developed opinions about luggage that he shares with his neighbor on principle.

Tag tied, queue one of eleven, a chai counter on the left doing brisk business in small glasses, the tea sweet and hot and correct, the seller checking out white people leaving his town, the board flapping its destinations, Mumbai to Frankfurt, gate closed, no plan, new gate, new plane, gate changed, gate open, last call, final call, the announcements in Hindi and then in English and the English always arriving slightly after the meaning has already left.

Sixty-seven minutes, the check-in counters in their rows, a family of nine negotiating one scale and winning, a crate of mangoes being wrapped in newspaper and tape, the tenderness of a bride being dressed, prepaid-taxi booth, STD-ISD phone row, four receivers, one occupied by a man arguing with a daughter in Dubai, currency exchange listing rates on a chalkboard nobody believes, the ceiling fans turning the heat into weather.

Eighty-nine minutes at the entrance, the two-note chime of the boarding announcement, ting-ting, overlapped and buried under a trolley wheel, a vendor calling chai garam, garam chai, the doors opening and the outside pushing in, dust and horns and the smell of the drain by the flower stall.

And somewhere in the stack of all of it the thought arrives once, uninvited, that she knows the flight number, and he puts it down immediately, the way you put down a hot glass, not thinking about why you know it’s hot.

A rat moves along the base of the chai counter with quiet purpose. The chalkboard is corrected by a man with a wet rag who changes one rate and rubs out a different one. An airline crew pushes through the crowd in formation, wheeling their small cases, smelling of a different country already, and the crowd absorbs them without comment. Seventy-eight minutes. A child is asleep across three chairs. Somebody somewhere is winning an argument about a samosa. The departures board contemplates Frankfurt and decides nothing. Outside the glass the evening comes on the airport all at once, the sodium lights coming up orange through the dust before the sky has finished deciding, and a baggage tractor crosses the far apron towing its train, and a wallah cries water, bottle cold, and through all of it, at seventy-four minutes, ting-ting, the two-note chime again, half-heard, already gone under the flapping board.

Goodbye was said on Tuesday.

Properly, in the room, sitting on the bed, with the fan going. It had been said in the register of things that are finished being said. There was nothing scheduled for tonight. The terminal was only a terminal.

She came through the entrance at seventy-one minutes.

Cotton dupatta, the same sandals she wore in Goa, the walk through the melee unchanged, unfussed, the crowd making room for her without being asked. She sat down on the bench beside him. He had two glasses of chai brought over.

They talked about the flight, about the rain that was coming, about how her car had to be pushed over the flooded highways, a leak in the kitchen in Kochi that would need fixing before the monsoon did what monsoons do. She said the auto fare had gone up again. He said he would miss the food. She laughed at that, once, and looked at the board, and put her hand flat on the bench between them, and did not move it, and neither of them said anything for a while, and then she stood, and touched his arm at the shoulder, and went back out through the doors, and that was it.

The flapping board recommenced.

Frankfurt delayed, thirty-eight minutes, apologized for in two languages. A porter asked him if he wanted help with a trolley he was already pushing. The tea counter called out its garam, a pigeon achieved the rafters, the STD man was still arguing with Dubai. At fifty-eight minutes he stood to join the check-in queue, and his eye passed over the bench where she had sat, and there on the molded plastic, pooled in a small bright circle, lay the silver chain she had worn all year at her wrist. He sat back down. He picked it up. It was warm from the bench and lighter than his wedding ring had ever been, and it fit in the watch pocket of his jeans, and he put it there, and he did not take it out again, and he could not have said whether she had missed it in the touching of his arm or placed it there on purpose, and he did not try very hard to say, and then the queue had moved on without him and he moved after it, and the counters gave him a boarding pass printed on stock that curls at the corners, seat 3A, and the girl at the desk wished him a pleasant journey in the voice of someone reading the weather, and the Immigration officer, stamping, asked him a question in Marathi that had clearly been a joke, and he laughed at the right place, and the officer stamped anyway, and the final call for somewhere else entirely was announced over the top of all of it, ting-ting.

An old man asks him whether Frankfurt is on time; the honest answer is that nothing tonight has been on time except the tea. A police inspector with a rifle slung backwards over one shoulder discusses last night’s match with a porter, both of them delighted, one team having evidently betrayed them both. A curtain of passengers parts and closes. The entrance exhales.

Airside

Security. Shoes in the tray, belt in the tray, watch in the tray, the chain forgotten by the machine and by the man and staying exactly where it was. The hold room at T2-C is not large. Duty-free in glass, samosas in paper, a television mounted high playing cricket with the sound off, and the sound off makes the crowd provide the commentary, and they do. Forty minutes. Thirty. The seat plastic. A child playing.

The rented room: the fan had a tick in it, the first night he lay counting it, the tick going on through the heat with a slow, steady tick through the wall the neighbor practicing the harmonium, patient, the same phrase, patient, forty minutes, and the phrase was two notes, spaced evenly, quarter-note patient, the kind of interval that waits, and the neighbor never got it quite right or never got it finished, either.

The office, the work, the year of the work: October, the blessing and opening ceremony. The office full of smoke, Saffran coloured garlands everywhere. The chai wallah at the corner tapping the ladle on the pot rim, twice. December, the school by the station, the temple bell across the street struck twice and let to fade. The rain on the tin awning of the paan shop, May, water in blobs, fat blobs spaced evenly, trouble breathing, trouble sleeping. The conductor on the red devil bus leaning on the horn, tonk-tonk. Sacred cows. Traffic jam. Religious procession. A building block on fire. More cows. Demonstration. Huge traffic jam. February: the elevator in the office block, repaired that week, announcing each floor with a two-tone chime — the second tone always slightly late — and he had ridden it up and down in the lunch hour, eight floors, standing still inside and telling himself it was the heat. A year in which he had hummed a thing in queues, in lifts, at the sink doing dishes to the rhythm the water made, and had never once heard himself doing it.

Final call in two languages.

Final call means the end of final call. The queue at the gate files itself into the jet bridge, and the bridge is long, and it turns once, and the last stretch has a window, and the tarmac below holds a truck, a maroon porter shirt, a luggage train, a light to steer by, and the window holds the whole country at departure-lounge scale, and he keeps his eyes on his boarding pass, which tells him 3A and nothing else. What he did or did not do with his eyes at that window is between him and the glass.

Aboard

The drone comes up through the floor before the terminal finishes. Announcements in German. Pushback, taxi, the whole machinery of leaving assembling itself around his seat, and the engines replace the terminal with one monotone, and the announcer cancels herself out against the roar, and the roar becomes a hum, and the hum becomes, at rotation, at the tilting, at the grey of the monsoon haze flattening into cloud cover below the wing — quiet. First quiet of the year. In it, with nothing left to bury under, two notes, evenly spaced, patient, unmistakable now.

I held you once.

The pattern had followed him since October, since before her, since Nariman Point or Juhu beach, or begun with her, or waited for both of them in the wall of the room. He did not sing it. There was no need. It was already complete, and it was small, and it was carried, and the chain in the watch pocket rode cool against his hip through the climb, through the level-off, through the long flight home.

A year of noise. One terminal, one goodbye, one quiet at 30,000 feet — and only then, what the sound was. Some patterns only disclose themselves in silence. This newsletter is the quiet part: the lore under the songs, written for those who wait out the noise. Join Those Who Know.