My Mother's First Flight at Sixty
She gripped my hand at takeoff and let go of forty fears.
My mother has survived two floods, one bad decade, and thirty seven years of my father's driving, and the first time I ever saw her scared was at Gate 14B of Lucknow airport.
She was sixty years old and dressed for the occasion the way other people dress for weddings: her best blue saree, the good gold bangles, and a handbag that contained, among other things, a torch, a packet of glucose biscuits, and eleven theplas wrapped in foil for a flight that would last two hours and five minutes.
"They will give you food on the plane, Amma," I said.
"They will give me their food," she said, which ended the discussion.
I had been trying to put her on a plane for six years. Every winter I offered, and every winter she produced a fresh reason: the tomatoes were at a delicate stage, the neighbour's daughter's wedding was possibly happening, her knee was making a new sound. My sister said, leave it, she doesn't want to fly. But I had watched my mother stand on our terrace in Aminabad every evening of my childhood, watching planes cross the sky with her arms folded, the way you watch a procession that never once turns down your street.
So this time I did not offer. I booked.
Lucknow to Bengaluru, window seat, and I told her the ticket was non refundable, which was a lie, and that the airline would blacklist our family if she did not show up, which was a bigger one. She grumbled for two weeks and then... quietly got her blouse altered.
At security she was patted down by a woman constable and came out looking personally violated. They confiscated the small scissors she has owned since 1994. "For what will I hijack a plane," she asked me, loudly, "to go where? I am already going somewhere." A man in the queue behind us laughed so hard he dropped his laptop tray.
Then we sat at Gate 14B and she went silent.
My mother is never silent.
Silence, on her, looks like fever. She held her boarding pass with both hands, the way you hold something that might try to leave, and she watched the plane at the gate the way she used to watch me before exams.
"Amma. It's safer than the highway."
"I know the highway," she said.
When we boarded, she touched the outside of the aircraft door with her right hand, the same way she touches the frame of a temple door: a little knock, an announcement of herself to whatever is in charge. The purser saw it and smiled. I could have told him: my mother greets everything before she trusts it, gas cylinders, new sons in law, aeroplanes.
She took the window seat. I took her hand. During the safety demonstration she watched with the focus of a topper, and when the crew mimed the oxygen mask she nudged me: "See? First your own mask. I have been telling you this your whole life in different words."
Then the engines gathered themselves up, and the plane began to run, and her grip crushed my fingers flat.
I watched her face instead of the window. Sixty years old.
She shut her eyes at the exact moment the wheels left Uttar Pradesh, and something crossed her face that was not fear... or not only fear. It looked like arithmetic. It looked like someone finally being handed a bill they had been expecting for a very long time.
At ten thousand feet she opened her eyes, looked out at the clouds, and said, "It's malai." Cream on boiled milk. The whole sky, a kitchen thing. She laughed at her own joke and then could not stop looking.
Somewhere over Madhya Pradesh, after she had inspected the tray table, the safety card, and the moral character of the seatbelt, she opened her handbag and took out an envelope so old its corners had gone soft as cloth. She put it in my lap.
Inside was an aeroplane ticket.
Indian Airlines. Lucknow to Bombay. 14 March 1987. Her name on it, her maiden name, in faded dot matrix ink.
"Your Nana bought it," she said, looking out the window, not at me. "My brother had a job in Bombay. I was going to visit him and see the sea. Then your father's family sent word that the wedding date had to be moved up, some astrologer had found a problem, and everyone agreed the trip made no sense with so much to prepare." She smoothed the envelope flat on her knee. "Everyone agreed. I remember that part. The agreement happened around me, like weather."
"Amma. You kept it for forty years?"
"It was paid for," she said, as if that settled it. Then, quieter... "I kept it so I would remember that I had been the kind of girl someone bought a ticket for."
My mother was never afraid of flying. She was afraid of finding out how much of her life had been spent waiting on the ground.
I did not say anything for a while...
There is nothing useful to say when your mother hands you the exact shape and weight of everything she set down so that she could carry you.
The snack cart came. She accepted the airline's sandwich on principle, judged it, forgave it, and then fed me a thepla over the armrest at thirty five thousand feet, because some laws operate at all altitudes. She asked the crew member how high we were, how fast, whether the pilot had eaten. She pointed out rivers. She identified fields of what she swore was sugarcane from seven kilometres above the earth, and I chose to believe her.
When the plane began its descent into Bengaluru she took my hand again, but differently this time. Loose. Companionable. The grip of someone on a bus she has taken before.
Later, I wrote about that flight, about her palm in mine at takeoff and the old ticket in the envelope, and posted the piece where strangers could find it, because I had finally understood that a family is mostly made of the trips its women did not take. Someone read it and wrote to me that they had just booked their father's first flight at seventy one. I sent the poem version of it to a monthly poetry contest too. It did not win anything. My mother asked me to print the rejection email, and she kept it, because in her accounting, participation is also a boarding pass. She has always understood beginnings better than results.
On the return trip two weeks later, she checked us in herself at the kiosk, jabbing the screen like it owed her money, and demanded the window seat by name. Somewhere over Nagpur she fell asleep against the glass with her mouth slightly open, sixty years old, thirty five thousand feet above every road she had ever been driven down.
There is a small notebook in her handbag now, next to the torch and the glucose biscuits. On the cover she has written, in Hindi, one word: Places. The first entry is Bombay, to see the sea, pending since 1987. The second entry just says... anywhere. Window side.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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