Before leaving town for a few weeks, I walked over to my favourite food stall on Elgin Road to get a last fix of alu puri. The basic combination is available all over India but I’m particularly fond of my local guy’s product: his alu gravy is complex in taste but not darkened by an over-bombardment of spices. Sometimes the gravy is mined with peanuts, on other days it’s dotted with kala chana or some other texturally contrapuntal ingredient. The puris here also vary, matarshutir kachori-adjacent in winters, much lighter in the hot months, but always fried just right in fresh oil. I was about to leave the country for a stay in Lyon, one of the great food centres of the Occident, but what I wouldn’t get in that city was anything approaching this most craved for home street food.
When I reached the stall, I could sense a general pall of unhappiness and it didn’t take a sociological Sherlock to figure out that this had to do with the sudden shortage of cooking gas in the city. “You weren’t serving yesterday?” I asked. “We’d run out of gas.” The man filled my tub with the gravy as if giving tithe to a cruel zamindar. “Today we got some, but only enough for two days.” I asked him what would happen after two days. “Either we’ll stop,” he gestured to his labouring team, “or, since we also have to survive, we’ll move to wood.”
I’m old enough to remember the petrol crisis of 1973-74 when the oil-producing Arab states decided to squeeze supplies to the West as a punishment for supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. My memory of that moment is that of a somewhat precocious child reading about how the shortage of one crucial product had sent the automobile-addicted US and western Europe almost into a survival challenge. I remember looking at photographs of long queues of cars at American petrol stations and wondering whether cars would be forever disabled in India as well. As it was, whatever its impact on our country, the oil crisis was a minor and temporary player in the large cast of economic depredations then mauling the twenty-three-year-old Republic. In any case, nothing from that economic and political moment left any life-mark on a bourgeois South Calcutta thirteen-year-old. There was certainly no threat of any alu puri or samosa stall shutting down, probably because cooking on gas was not even a distant dream for those stall owners.
My recent, post-alu puri flight from Calcutta to Delhi was uneventful, almost till the last moment. As the aircraft wrestled through the updraft to the tarmac, something suddenly shifted from the normal sequence. The wheels fizzed along the ground for a few seconds before the engines went into high complaint and ripped the plane off the ground, taking it into a steep climb. I’m one of those people who are hypnotised by videos of passenger aircraft trying to land in heavy winds, so I immediately understood what was happening: the wind had made the landing approach untenable, and the pilot had decided to execute a ‘go-around’. In over fifty years of flying (or rather air-passengering), I’d only experienced aborted landings twice before, both times abroad and both because the pilot had spotted another aircraft on the target runway. This time, as the jet circled over Gurgaon, the hot winds punching it from different directions, there was no doubt that this go-around was caused by global warming, by dangerous ground-level winds from the same damaged system that produces the extreme turbulence aircraft now face at higher altitudes.
In the past, there was a general rule that held — the larger the airliner, the more stable and less affected by turbulence it would be. The airliner that took me from Delhi to Frankfurt was a Boeing 787-9, one of Air India’s largest planes, along with the Boeing 777s and Airbus A350s. While most of the flight was smooth, there were two moments — probably no longer than five minutes each but which felt like much longer — where the plane hit clear air turbulence. Suddenly, the sleek, secure pomp of metal and plastic disappeared and it felt as though we were in a plywood glider about to disintegrate 38,000 feet above the sands below. Maybe it’s age that has made me more sensitive to bumpy flights but I doubt that. Every report you read tells you that turbulence during flights, especially clear air turbulence, has become much worse over the last two decades because of changes in the global climate.
A direct flight from Delhi to Frankfurt normally takes between seven to eight hours, depending on wind conditions; my flight took ten and a half hours. Following the route map on the screen, I did a mental mapping of all the India-Europe routes I’d been on in all my years of travelling. In the late ‘70s, well before the advent of onboard TV and real-time flight maps, the route between Delhi and western European destinations was simple — you took off and flew directly west by northwest over Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, curving somewhere over Turkey and the Black Sea, first into Warsaw Pact Europe and then NATO Europe. Around the early ‘80s, the route shifted a bit as the Iran-Iraq War kicked off. I remember an Alitalia night flight back to India in 1982 that curved south from Milan to fly over the Gulf states. Sitting on the left of the plane, I suddenly saw pulsating flashes outside my window and wondered how we were seeing Aurora Borealis so far to the south. It took me a moment to realise the flashes were coming from the artillery exchange between Iraq and Iran.
Political upheavals kept moving this east-west air corridor, almost like a river shifting its bed. At various points in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, Pakistan and Afghanistan became no-flight zones for Indian aircraft but no such limitations applied to airlines such as Air Jordan. At one point, the flight from Calcutta to Amman was a great option, with a changeover at Amman that allowed you a lovely Arab mezze meal before you caught the flight to your western European destination. Flying out of Indian airspace, you would traverse the raw beauty of the Afghan mountains, wondering how such a sublime landscape could host such a violent history. The New York attack of 2001 put paid to Afghanistan and then Iraq as over-fly routes. Indian commercial aircraft were corralled into curving south under Pakistan and then up through Iran to get to Europe. That was when the various airlines of the Gulf states began to take over. There was Gulf Air, later joined by Emirates, Etihad and then Qatar Airlines. The direct flights westward still left from India’s more successful metros — the Delhi-Bombay-Bangalores — but flying from Calcutta, the change-overs in Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Doha became attractive options.
At this moment, all three of those Gulf hubs are under bombardment as, of course, is Iran. This means my Air India flight goes straight across the Arabian Sea and over Oman. From there, keeping well south of the missiles hitting the war zone, we traverse the Saudi desert, turn right (north) just before Mecca and then slice a northward diagonal between the Sinai Peninsula and Cairo. I get to Frankfurt, one of the largest airports in the world and curse the confusing signage as I barely make my connecting flight.
Everything shifts, everything changes, even as some things remain the same or retain the DNA of the earlier actions and models that begot them. No world event or political phenomenon happens by itself — disasters always come in teams, upheavals always come riding posse. Looking at just the arc of the last 70-odd years, I realise the period of liberal democratic stability in the West and in India was a long, passing phase and hardly eternal as one had naively assumed. The political turbulence absent or tamped down in a few Western countries was gathering strength from storms those countries had caused elsewhere. One realises yet again that the degradation of our environment and the destruction of millions of people’s democratic hopes for a better life were part of the same death dance being choreographed for the planet by rampant capitalism and barely closeted white supremacism.
Looking back at the last half-century, one can see that evil, racist individuals like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu don’t come out of nowhere, they are the spawn, respectively, of evil, racist Richard Nixon-Ronald Reagan and Menachem Begin, just as today’s psychopathic ayatollahs owe their longer provenance to the Iranian mullahs who actively supported the CIA’s overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. One can observe today how those venal fundamentalists were then betrayed by their Western puppeteers with the imposition of the Shah. One can see how, once they gained power in 1979, successive generations of these regressive old men of Qom have spent forty-plus years exacting a kind of self-damaging revenge on the West while destroying the lives of the people they call their own. Even as Trump, Netanyahu and the latest ayatollah join hands in a circular dance, across the globe, one can see previously compartmentalised poisons breaking through their silos and mingling into new toxins.
In Lyon, as I wander through the Sunday market on Boulevard de la Croix-Russe, I admire the variety of produce, the myriad kinds of cheese and charcuterie, the intoxicating smell of freshly made sausages, choucroute and duck lasagna. I think of the alu puri stall on Elgin Road and how even that is affected by cynical mass-murdering decisions made in another part of the planet. I wonder how long it will take for the turbulence to reach here, how long before these Western pockets of heaven feel the breath of hell that engulfs us in other parts of the world.