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 luggag