Ode to a Stranger

It was a long Geneva- Rome – Delhi – Bombay flight. I was 12 and bored. Sitting in a completely different part of the airplane, far away from my parents and brother, my ADHD ridden mind was going completely haywire. I remember having finished Anna Karenina and the in-flight magazine and three glasses of juice and being irritated out of my skull. We were stranded in Rome for about an hour and everyone was edgy. People kept telling us that someone’s luggage hadn’t been loaded in and we were being held up because of that. Sitting in the first class of a fancy airline, the very propah crowd kept murmuring about people who had no consideration for other’s feelings. There were plenty of empty seats around, including the one next to mine.

I sighed and looked out of the window for some excitement. A heavy sigh made me around. A corpulent Indian old man, sweaty and tired, with a grim face and a bushy mustache had flopped into the seat to my right. He made quite a meal of putting away his luggage and getting a drink and sighing loudly. Perfect. That’s all I needed. I took a second book out and began to read. Five minutes into it, I heard a “harrumph” and Mr. Growl. Looked at me and said, “Is that for school?” I was an arrogant kid. I tried my best to look down at him and said, “No, it’s for me. I read for school in school.” (Don’t think I was a wiseass, I was brought up on communist literature. Enid Blyton came later.) He looked surprised and said, “Isn’t that a bit high for you?” I just looked at him funny. He took the hint. I went back to my book. “You know, that’s one of my favorite books.” Now he got my attention.

“Really? Why?”
“Sure, he was the hallmark of social democracy”
“Really?”

This led to an entire discussion on the demarcation of social democratic parties and movements and democratic socialist ones. Marxism, Socialism, Kapital among others. Of course other writers came into the picture. Apart from other Maxim Gorky works, we slaughtered Greene, Pushkin, Chekov, even children’s books by Russians. I had never met anyone who could explain the nuances of books to me. That gentleman brought the dusty streets of Russia and the communist strain to life for me. I could see the chucking uncle and the golden bodied mistress through the eyes of young Gorky as clearly as I could see the snow topped mountains. Looking back, this was probably the first time I thought I could study books for the rest of my life.

“So how do you know all of this?” I wanted to know.
“Same way that you do. Books travel, age…”
“Where do you live?”
“Bulgaria. Have you heard of it?”
Of course. The capital is Sofia. The major crops are wheat sunflower grapes cucumbers..”
“Okay, how do you know this?”
“I studied it for a U.N test.”
“Oh, but that’s not all. It was a part of a medieval empire…”

And we were off again. The UN and NATO were discussed to bits, maps, drawn on tea cosies, flags discussed, topographies compared, a huge thrill for someone so young and naïve. But now when I think about it, I marvel at the sheer patience of a man who spent more than 16 hours talking to a 12 year old, only because he wanted to. He showed me pictures of his family, his two daughters, the dogs, the gifts he bought for them, the hundreds pf movies and books he was carrying with him. That old gentleman is single handedly responsible for my nearly religious interest in movies, books and writing today.

In all that time, not once did he talk to me like I was only seven. For the first time ever, I was given credit for being a person and my intelligence was challenged. I was given credit for using my head and for airing my opinions, however immature they may have been. And believe me, they were. But the greatness of that gentleman lay in the fact that he didn’t laugh, snicker, or do the”kids-these-days” headshake either. If he thought I was being an idiot, he explained his point of view and then would listen to mine. If there wasn’t a mutual meeting point, we agreed to disagree. We talked about deadlines, curfews, dating, boys, martial arts, traveling, languages, romantic languages, religious texts, eclipses, food, paintings, popular culture, you name it. We talked through three transits and two continents.

In the meantime, my mother came along to check on me, saw me jabbering away and leaned down to say hello. I still remember that conversation clearly.

“Hello. I’m Renu. I hope my daughter isn’t bothering you.’
“Not at all. She’s quite a smart kid. Knows a lot.”
“If you want to shut up, you can just tell her to. She knows she can be painful. “
“Why would I want her to shut up. Children have the best perspective. They look at life untarnished.”

That was his take on the unending trauma that is the conversations of a pre teen. I of course didn’t make anything of it. At Mumbai, we made our farewells, exchanged numbers and waited for respective cars together, When his car did arrive, I looked at it appreciatively.
“Nice car.”
“Thanks. One of the perks of the job.”
“Oh yeah, what do you do anyway?”
“I’m the Indian Diplomat to Bulgaria.”

I didn’t know anything about that except that it’s a fancy job. So I shrugged noncommittally. My mother’s jaw dropped to the floor. He got in his car, offered a ride and sped away. That’s the last I ever saw of him. I have no name or no number. That has completely slipped my memory.

I hope and pray that I meet him someday, that I recognize him. I want to tell him that he has influenced my life in ways I haven’t even known, he cultivated half my interests and fired my appetite for art of all kinds. Someday I hope to meet him and thank him. Someday I hope to talk to him about Bermuda Triangle and the Aghoris, to tell him about the little temple I found in a nook somewhere. I want him to explain the Tiger Valley theory for me, tell him I finally saw the Picassos but not the Louvre. Above all, I want to thank him. For listening to me. For acknowledging me. For validating me for the first time.

So, if by some happy serendipity, if you’re out there reading this, sir, with my hand on my heart, I thank you. Profusely.