Flight

Flight Geeta Kothari (bio) There is a reason we were planted in a certain place. . . . Our people have a saying: The whole essence of travel is to go back home. —Chinua Achebe, interview in the New York Times, January 10, 2000 1. According to Hindu tradition, after death, the soul leaves the body and is in transit for 14 days as it leaves this earthly plane. When my mother died, my aunt advised me not to cry as it would make it more painful for the soul to detach. I cried in private then, at three in the morning while my father slept in our hotel room, and at the café in Khan Market where I went to write—and every time I cried, I thought about my mother's soul on the move. And then I cried some more. Among the many items my mother left me after she died: some notes and a stack of old passports, including her first two Indian passports, issued in the 1950s when she first left India for the United States. Multiple visas fill the pages: Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Laos, Switzerland, Germany, Israel, Norway—and the G-4 visa for the United States, the one constant in all her passports for the next 40 years. I should frame these passports and place them next to the Pan Am posters on my kitchen wall, for when I think of my mother, I think of her flying. I think of her in transit. The framed posters feature propeller planes flying over the island of Manhattan—one in daylight, the other one at night. Both [End Page 79] planes hover over the southern tip of the island, with the Statue of Liberty visible at the bottom of the nighttime scene. In these twin landscapes, there is an Empire State building, but no United Nations. These are not the planes my mother would have flown when she left India in 1951, but when I look at them, I imagine her hovering over New York, full of anticipation and excitement, homesickness and nerves. She was the first in her family to travel such a distance. She was 23, unmarried, and alone. 2. My mother flew all over the world during the early days of commercial aviation, apparently fearless and unfazed by the rudimentary conditions. Until the late 1960s, most airports were nothing more than shacks on the side of a dusty, unpaved runway; all of the glamour of flying lay in the actual airplanes, the thrill of being waited on in the air, the exotic destinations. As the demands of commercial air traffic grew, the contemporary airport—a mini-city and destination in its own right—developed in a number of hubs, including Gander, Newfoundland. Like many other airports, Gander began its existence as a military base. Constructed during World War II, it evolved into a refueling stop for commercial planes, and eventually became one of the first self-contained airports, designed to serve a transient population. In its best days, Gander had a laundry service, a restaurant, a hotel, and a post office. By 1968, Gander was the largest international airport in the world. Thirty years later, on a bleak day in May, when my husband and I stopped by the airport, the runway was empty—a perfectly paved highway leading nowhere, uncluttered by ramps, fuel trucks, and planes. Everything was shades of gray: the sky, the tarmac, the U.S. Air Force carrier a greenish-gray cigar parked on the apron. There were no planes roaring through the air, skimming the treetops and thundering down the runway. There were no people waiting for their flights. The baggage carousel stood still, the Arrivals hall was deserted. I've been thinking about my mother and Gander. There are no photos of Gander in her albums, no stamp in her old passports. There wouldn't be—it was a transit stop, a place where you did not leave your mark and which [End Page 80] did not leave its mark on you. The transit lounge was a Gander innovation, developed so that passengers would not need to clear customs just to stay in the country for a few hours...

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