The Prayer I Only Say on Airplanes
At thirty thousand feet, my skepticism develops a sudden humility.
On the ground, I am an agnostic with footnotes. At thirty thousand feet, in weather, I am a medieval peasant offering the sky my firstborn. The conversion takes approximately one chime of the seatbelt sign, which makes it, as far as I know, the fastest religious experience commercially available.
I want to describe the prayer itself, because I have never admitted its contents to anyone. It is not a real prayer from any real tradition. It is a casserole. There is half a verse my grandmother used to blow over me when I had fever, pronounced so badly she would revoke my inheritance if she heard it. There is a line from my school assembly, lead kindly light, which I retained for twenty years while forgetting all of trigonometry. And there is the load-bearing wall of the whole structure, which is the word please, said between eleven and four hundred times depending on conditions.
I do not believe in God on Tuesdays, at sea level, with coffee. I believe ferociously somewhere over the Caspian Sea at 3 a.m. My faith is not dead, it turns out. It is altitude-activated.
For years I found this hilarious and slightly shameful, in the way of all hypocrisies that keep you comfortable. Then came the Frankfurt flight, and the old woman in seat 34B, and I stopped finding it hilarious, because she took my prayer apart like a customs officer and showed me what I was actually carrying.
It was a night flight out of Delhi, and somewhere past the third hour we hit the kind of turbulence that reorganizes your relationship with physics. Not the polite kind. The kind where the plane drops and your organs file a formal complaint, where the overhead bins rattle like teeth and a baby three rows back goes silent, which is somehow worse than crying.
The seatbelt chime went off. The crew sat down.
When the crew sits down, my theology begins.
I gripped the armrest and started the casserole. Grandmother's verse, kindly light... please please please. I promised to call my mother weekly. I promised to stop lying about being five minutes away. I revised my carbon footprint. Somewhere in the fourth drop I heard myself promise, absurdly, to learn swimming, as if the Caspian would grade me on effort.
And next to me, in 34B, an old Punjabi woman in a grey cardigan was eating peanuts.
Eating them slowly, with total composure, a wooden rosary looped around her left wrist, watching the wing flex through the window the way you watch a grandchild on a trampoline. The plane dropped again, hard. My stomach relocated. She picked another peanut.
She caught me staring and leaned over. Scared? she asked, in Punjabi-flavored Hindi.
No, I said, in the voice of a man who is lying at altitude.
She smiled and went back to the wing. And because terror makes me talkative, I asked her how she could be so calm, and whether it was the rosary, and I may have said something desperate and stupid like... does it work.
She considered this with real seriousness. The beads are not for the plane, she said. The plane will do what it does. The beads are so my hands have somewhere to be. I stopped being afraid of dying a long time ago, beta... I have said all my goodbyes properly. Everyone I love knows exactly what they are to me. There is nothing pending.
Then she looked at me, one eyebrow up, gently ruthless.
You are not afraid of dying either, she said. You are afraid of dying with pending.
At thirty thousand feet, everyone's theology gets very simple: please, then thank you, then I'm sorry, and the order tells you everything.
The turbulence went on for another twenty minutes, but I barely noticed, because I was doing something I had never done before: listening to my own prayer. Actually auditing it.
And she was right, the old customs officer. Under the please and the verses, my prayer was not a request for survival at all.
It was a list.
It went: my mother, who I had not called in three weeks. My father's knee surgery, which I had asked about exactly once. Sana, who I let drift because apologizing felt expensive at the time and now cost more every year, the way debts do. And my brother... Mostly my brother, with whom I had not spoken in two years over a fight about our grandfather's flat, a fight neither of us could narrate anymore without checking notes.
That was the prayer.
It had never been save me. It was let me land so I can fix the pending.
I had just been mumbling it in code, in borrowed verses, five miles above the earth, the only place I was honest enough to say it and coward enough to need a plane to fall before I would.
We landed in Frankfurt in flat grey light. Everyone clapped, which the woman in 34B found very funny. Pilots land planes every day, she said, collecting her cardigan, nobody claps for me when I make rotis. She patted my hand once at the jet bridge, said, go do the pending, and disappeared into the crowd at the speed of all life-changing strangers.
I sat at the gate for my connection with a coffee I did not drink, looking out the huge window at the planes queuing in the drizzle, and I called my brother.
Two years.
He picked up on the fourth ring and said, hello... in the exact suspicious tone of our father, and I laughed, and that broke something open, and we talked for forty minutes about nothing, which is the only subject that matters after a long silence. Neither of us mentioned the flat. Some negotiations begin by agreeing on a different agenda.
I would love to tell you I became a person of settled faith after that, or a settled unbeliever, either one. I became neither. I remain a man whose beliefs are altitude-dependent, and I have made peace with the comedy of that.
But two things changed. The first is that I write the list now instead of only praying it in emergencies. It started with a prompt I stumbled on months later, ten words: what would you say if you had ten minutes left. I recognized the assignment immediately. I had already drafted it over the Caspian. The poem that came out was about my brother and forgiveness, and how it is less like a gate swinging open and more like two people quietly deciding to stop billing each other.
The second thing is smaller. I still say the prayer on planes. Every flight, every chime. The casserole, the grandmother verse, the kindly light, the please. But I have added a line at the end, my only original contribution to the liturgy, and it is not a request. After the please, when the shaking stops, I say: nothing pending. Some flights it is even true. I am starting to suspect that is what hope actually is, not the belief that the plane cannot fall, but the state of having made your calls before it boards.
Last month, on a bumpy descent into Kolkata, the woman next to me was gripping her armrest and whispering to herself. I leaned over and said, scared?
No, she lied, at altitude.
I offered her a peanut.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.