Crossings
THIS ONE'S about crossing floors. Not horizontally, as politicians used to be able to do once upon a charming time. That was before a killer legislation called the anti-defection law was tasked to assassinate at one stab two most adorable scallywags of the political stage - Late Aaya Ram and Late Gaya Ram.
They played at political caprice with chutzpah no longer extant. Free birds of utterly changeable feather whose only loyalty was displayed to the direction of winds. They switched sides, they stabbed back and front, they played governments like you'd play house of cards, crashing and erecting them; on occasion they didn't even bother with the labours of jumping camp, they merely changed the name on the existing one. In 1977, when the nation bundled out Indira Gandhi and the Emergency, the Congress government of the late lamented Bhajan Lal in Haryana overnight became the Janata Party government of Bhajan Lal. Regime change by regime defection. It seemed almost inconceivable William Shakespeare were not improbably alive in some mezzanine nook of Panipat and writing the even more improbable script of what was coming to transpire.
Alas, those inglorious uncertainties are a thing of the past. Or, they've been relegated to irrelevant peripheries of this stage. Such things only happen now in Arunachal Pradesh, but Arunachal, - please don't act anti-national and tell the Chinese - isn't part of our cognitive mainstream consciousness, or is it?
No this can't be about crossing floors as we understood it; this one's about crossing floors vertically, as passengers arriving at an airport might expect rightfully to do. You paid for it, now up and away you wish to head. Just how many floors might occupy 37,000 feet of space between earth and aerosphere? They'd actually afford you all the time to pull out your calculator - it happens, by special appointment to the beloved Prime Minister, to be a phone app these convenient days - and measure it. Except you don't want that time. You've come to the airport in order to go; temporarily that's not going to be possible. Flights are grounded; fog chal raha hai.
What we loosely call fog is actually not fog, but then, we love the embrace of our delusions. We want to believe we are an egalitarian democracy. We are a non-violent people who come with Buddha and Gandhi stitched into our genes. What we have in our bank accounts is the wealth of our own labours that nobody can keep us from accessing. The Delhi fog is fog.
It isn't. It is an alchemy of ingredients far less romantic than fog would suggest - street and desert dust, construction detritus, petroleum toxin, coal and firewood fume, the ionised mass of heat and humidity exuded by far too many humans. When early winter wetness comes to drop on such and more flotsam, it concocts an almost opaque plate and claps its overhead. Nothing's able to escape earth airwards, what's airborne can't touch down.
What you're allowed on the smaller of Delhi's two commercial air terminals during such times is a crossing - or many - through three floors, no more. Elevator, escalator, staircase, ride what you will, up or down.
The bottom is where the boarding bays are. If you are descending onto the concourse be sure you don't step onto another of your species, it's so packed. If you're leaving be sure some surge of human mass will push you to the elevator door.
The upper two tiers are where everything happens that's got little to do with leaving port - snacking, shopping, snoozing, schmoozing, browsing, boozing, and in a securely remote death-chamber, much smoking. Delays are good news on these floors, they bring business, the more passengers locked up between the security turnstiles and boarding gates the merrier - if you have nothing to do, please do it here, be our guests. Coffee? Whiskey? Beer? Burger? Shakes? Shoes? Silks? Toys? Backpacks or clutches? Watches? Sun-Shades? Gold?
Just pull out the plastic and it's yours. That's the promise the Prime Minister has hollered to you - all you need to do is to pull out the plastic. Never mind you couldn't get through the bank queue to the cash counter another time this morning, your bank's in your hip pocket, didn't you know, and it's tinkling with the promise of virtual cash.
Having secured his piping plate of idlis just ahead of me in the food court queue, this gent came undone by a mobile bank dysfunction. His card wouldn't cough up a receipt. Swipe, insert, type PIN; swipe, insert, type PIN, but the display on the machine would only ever say "Waiting for approval". Meantime, driven to hunger by serial departure postponements and seduced by the steam off the idlis, he'd bitten into one. Goods received and used, money not paid. We'd run into a serious financial stalemate - the bitten idli was the shape of a smiley, everyone else wore a frown. The idli muncher had no cash, and the plastic had decided to behave itself, it was being just plastic. The queue groaned and fidgeted; the desk remained in deadlock. Kya chal raha hai, an impatient voice intervened from somewhere down the tail of the line. Fog chal raha hai, sounded like an appropriate response. Nothing was moving, not the flights, not the food counter. Perhaps not this nation either. Last heard, it was queued up, awaiting crossings.
Sankarshan Thakur
