He loved to sit on the low, rusty grill on the outskirts of the airport, his eyes fixed on the sky. He watched the big, growling aircrafts descend to the ground. Their wheels coming out and their nose facing downwards. He watched them all day long.
There was something about being just under the massive vessel that fascinated him, made his hands clutch the grill so tightly every time he heard an approach. The muscles of his feet would began contracting as the hum of the engine came nearer and then his eyes would shoot skywards, right when the aircraft was bang above him. Sometimes he felt the moment to be so exact that the two wheels of the plane were directly parallel to his eyeballs. If only for one millionth of a second.
He revelled in the fact that while the world saw only the surface of the polished craft, he saw the rusty, the ugly and the cork-screw underbelly. This vision was his alone. That’s why when an occasional car stopped at the airport perimeter to see a similar view, he would miss that one flight, visually, never mentally and stare at the strangers instead… That was always a moment of life slipping away from him.
No body stopped beyond one landing. And in that temporality, lay his triumph.
He didn’t remember the day when his life became equated with the descending of airplanes. It had been so long. He didn’t even remember the number of times that he had been questioned by the police-wallahs of various uniform colors: white, mustard, green, black and blue. How did the color matter? The wheels were all black.
It was a log walk to the airport from his his house in the dingy lanes of Mahipalpur. But he never minded. Not when he started at 4 AM on December mornings, nor when he walked back through knee deep water to reach his home last July. Or was it September?
The railing felt like burning coal during some months, but he still sat on it as ever. He never noticed the reddish-orangeish smears across his buttocks and the rust on his Levi’s 518.
He often looked back to the day, when he missed his flight. Or as his friend Dinesh always said, missed his chance, at sanity. It has to be several years back. He reached the airport, then a shabby, small and smelly place well before time. He even paid rs.5 extra to the auto-wallah who dropped him at the domestic terminal and wished him luck in his funny english accent.
He walked swiftly towards the entrance since he only had a small polybag in the name of luggage. He carried that in his right hand, his scholarship letter and a shabby printout of the ticket gripped tightly in his left one. They had looked suspiciously at his almost empty shaving cream tube. The tall guy had even smelt it once. Strange, he thought, as he went past the security and sat in the only empty chair in the corner of the waiting “lounge”.
For the sixty-seventh time since morning, he checked his flight timing, 16:45.. the ticket in his hand read. He gazed at the ticket for a while. The sogginess of his hands had crept into the paper. It felt almost wet. He folded it again and held onto it tightly. He tried to remember what it was that he had to say on the stage…something about wheels, the black rolling balls. Something that he wanted to make out of them… Something that they told him this scholarship would help him make. He knew he will change everything about aircraft wheels in some years. They will be unlike the screechy, roaring, angry, and dangerous monsters.
His would be gliders. Differently fitted and never for landing and lifting alone. No, his would be weightless things. Always on the plane. His would not shy back in the moments of glory of their carriers. His will glide and shine through the skies…
What was it that he had to say about wheels? He had prepared it well, but too many sleepless nights had fogged his thoughts out.
He kept on dozing and getting up with a start in the waiting room. He still remembered the face of the little girl who had climbed on his knee and tried to take his spectacles off. He, fresh out of a snooze, had thought that he had missed his flight and jumped to run. But there were still 80 minutes to go..
When a brawny voice asked the passengers of AI 416 to assemble in a line, he went to the washroom, splashed some water on his cheeks and ran wet fingers through his hair. He knew his beard had gone too wild but he will clean it in time. That was the purpose that his almost empty shaving tube was to serve.
He went and asked an uncle if this was the line for 416. He got a reply in the affirmative. So he just stood there, watching a thin stream of water trickling into the waiting room through the toilet. The sun was golden and white outside and the long black tarmac seemed like a shimmery mirage. People ahead of him walked directly into the mirage and disappeared into a yellow and blue box like bus.
He heard a female voice asking him for his identity proof.
Oh! so this is what Dinesh was talking about. He took out his faded brown leather wallet and produced his repaired college ID card… Dinesh had found it after hours of rampaging through their one room PG. He kept saying that they won’t let him pass without it. And when Dinesh finally found it he was shocked to see the condition of the poor thing.
The ID had no lamination and where his own name had been once, there stood only random marks of ink..blue or black no one could decipher. It was torn from one side and his photograph, nothing that resembled the present him was staring out from a dirty, spotted, white margin.
With a crinkled forehead and a painful sigh, Dinesh took it upon himself to give his ID a makeover. So he took the Before and with the aid of a lamination, a black marker and a wet tissue to clean the photo and make the college stamp visible, he churned out the After. Dinesh even ironed the paper by keeping a towel between the paper and their rusty and taped iron…
All this he recalled as he handed his ticket and the revamped ID to the female voice. She thanked him and looked. And then looked again, and then did a re-take. He casually ran a hand on his thorny beard and smiled in explanation. She didn’t smile in return. Instead, she asked him if he had another identification proof.
“I thought only one was required?”.. “Yes, but does he have another, a license, a ration card…anything?” “No, I don’t have anything else”. “Are you sure..anything else?”. “No, nothing.”
They both could sense the impatience of the people behind him so she asked him to step aside and beckoned a blue jacketed man to examine this “case”. The man came and the same thing happened, and then a police-man came and the same thing happened. It was like a same record playing over and over again, on some old, falling apart gramophone.
They didn’t let him go. He heard his flight shriek and go to the clouds… He remembered how the people had turned to look at him when he was being led away, loud in protest, yet mute in resignation.
Not that he expected to be shut in a cellar or something. There were too many people who’d take him out. He wasn’t even angry at the injustice being belted out to him… he was just numb, like a static buzz because he knew he would miss the function.
As he sat in the small cubicle answering questions and seeing the contents of his polybag strewn all around him, his eyes were fixed on the wheels… the wheels that went in every time the vessel touched the air. The wheels that were visible from the windows of the PCR at the rear tail of the airport.
Dinesh and his landlord came to take him away. Dinesh said something to the police-wallahs. He also talked to airlines people. He said that they can arrange a seat on tomorrow’s flight, but all that didn’t matter any more. After a silent auto-ride back to their room, he went to his bed, shoved to the floor the pile of clothes on it and slept for 18 straight hours…
It was raining when he got up. The window of his room was a cloud of white mist, veins of water streaking down the muddy glass…it smelt of mud too, wet, damp mud. As if a new earthen vessel had just been filled with water. He too felt full, brimming to the edge, but with what? What was it inside?
Dinesh sat on the computer typing frantically. He offered to make some black tea, but nothing registered with him. How could a person already full hear something. His ears were already jammed. But with what?
He got up and went hazily to their small stinking toilet. 15 minutes later, he walked out. Clean shaven and freshly clothed. Dinesh smiled. He smiled back. And then he walked out…
…The airport perimeter, he figured out after 50 mins of walking, must be around 9-11 kms from his room.
Ages later, sitting on the cold iron on that densely white day he tried to put a date to the event that they say made him a “lunatic”. But it seemed like a far, unreachable, untouchable memory. It was like a root of a dead plant, so deeply welded into the soil that you couldn’t touch it… even when your hands disappear in the soil and your eyes are closed and your fingers are groping hard. You can reach many other roots and shrubs and shoots..they feel like hairy pricks..but you can’t touch that one root… only that one.
His memory was as foggy as the day was. It floated in front of his eyes and settled on his nails. And it was white. So white that his black beard shone in contrast. So white that the white of his eyes dissolved into it.
He knew that there will be no aircrafts descending today. The fog will engulf them. But he reached there at his usual time. Feeling the mist settling down on his bones as he walked the narrow lanes and then the broad expressway, lit up by thousands of car-blinkers..like a kaleidoscope of red and gold.
He just sat there. The grill was cold and his feet were numb. His vision white and breath smoky. In his mind was the perpetual never ending growl of the engine. The hum that vibrated in some pulse of his neck and touched some vein in this thigh. The buzz that made him speak and walk. The buzz that deafened the silence that had filled him up, years back..
He could easily discern the churn of his soul from the roar of the engine. But today he wasn’t trying to. For his years told him that the white envelope that surrounded him, licked at him and caressed him will not let any engine come alive or any wheel screech.
… He thought he is imagining it when he heard a bang somewhere. Loud. Piercing through the cold. And then there was a glint of orange in the white sky. A trail at first, and then a wild, fluttering robe. It blinded the white, it dispelled it. It pervaded the white of his eyes. It shone in his teeth. He stood bathing in it… Unless he heard the shrieks.
Shrieks. Sirens. People. Thuds. Metal. Rubber. And then the growl. The engine growl. Close. Real close.
“Its caught fire. Its fire” was the chant in the air that got mixed with the growl that was a wild blast, nay, a series of wild blasts now. A piece of metal came flopping down, emerged from the fog and clanked loudly against the grill on which he sat. He ran to pick it up. It was hot. And charred. Then another sooty chunk landed on the grass beyond… A hint of silver still gleaming on it.
They were shooting water at it, from below. Some streams reached. Others stooped and went tumbling down without any contact with the orange ball. He could smell aluminum now, burning aluminum.
And as his eyes took in the untamed orange, the wheels appeared. Black at the core, but haloed by a shivering orange. It was coming down, the orange ball was hurtling down. It was obvious that the plane won’t reach the tarmac. Everyone knew it.
… It hit the grass first. The green lit up. It blinded the white fog. There was a deep scar of fire as the wheels dug into the damp mud. The poignant smell of wet earth brushing past his nostrils once again, only this time it was mixed with the burning smell.
The grass flew towards them with the flurry of hair that has been caught unaware by a dust storm. Some of it struck to his shirt too…
There was metal everywhere. And shrieks. And sirens. A small black ball of mud struck his leg with force. He winced in pain but didn’t bend down, and the ball settled itself beside his lose shoe-lace. The clanking of the metal grew louder and the orange animal was moving no more. The grey and the white fog had caged the beast at last.
…….. He knew it was the end. For him. Because the engine had died and the wheels had disappeared. He knew that there will be no more wheels today. Only shrieks and sirens. He turned to walk and stepped over the ball of mud the pain of which still reverberated through his thigh.
It felt soft and surprisingly warm beneath his thin shoe sole. His nostrils took a breath to tell him that this was rubber, not mud..
It felt hot in his palms, even though it was wrapped in cold mud. He shuffled it around. He rubbed off the mud and saw the black. The black of his eyes. The black of the wheel. The black that was laced with orange a few seconds back…
He gripped it tightly and brought it closer to his chest. And he started his walk back. Towards home…
He held onto the black tightly and let the fog that had settled on his fingernails seep into the wheel.
