Hold my Hand (Penguin Metro Reads)

by Durjoy Datta

  After going through my suitcase scores of times, I sit back and try not to freak out as the three of us wait in the living room waiting for the cab.

  The cab arrives and Dad takes the front seat, while Mom and I huddle at the back. She holds my hands, rubs them, and occasionally cups my face and kisses it. I miss her already; I miss her kind face when she cries (she is always crying— stupid, loving Mom), I miss her hands, calloused from all the cooking and washing, I miss her incessant calls to track my whereabouts; I miss everything about her. I wish she could go too; she has never been outside India. Even though Dad hasn’t ever left the border because he reads a lot, he has been to a lot of places in spirit—Mom hasn’t.

  ‘Please don’t starve yourself. Try to eat. And try to find good Indian restaurants there and call me whenever you have time. I will miss you so much, shona,’ she kisses me; the frequency rises with the diminishing distance between us and the airport. I’m more scared about the airport than the flying; hundreds of people rushing to catch aircrafts made of a billion little pieces welded together flying to a thousand different destinations routing through hundreds of transit cities; the complexity is insane. I have a stopover at Bangkok which only doubles my chances of not reaching Hong Kong.

  The cab drops us at Terminal 3 of the gigantic Delhi airport which stands in front of us in all its modernity and glory. Cars stop, people pour out, dump their suitcases on trolleys, hug their relatives briefly and disappear behind the retracting doors of the airport, while I just stand there, drowning in my mother’s tears as she hangs on to me for dear life. I’m in tears as well.

  ‘He has to go now. It clearly says three hours before the departure time,’ Dad says, now embarrassed, but with tears in his eyes.

  ‘Okay,’ Mom says and unwraps herself from around me and looks away in anger.

  I kiss her and she kisses me back. Dad smiles and pats my back. Waving them goodbye is tough, trying not to trip and fall over the trolley is tougher. I clear the security check at the gate and wave them goodbye again as they keep watching me from the glass door, my mom with her mouth covered with her palms, still crying, and Dad waving at me, his hand around Mom’s shoulder.

  I need them to go now. I don’t want to cry because there are girls and young kids watching.

  There is a black LED display flashing in three languages the names and timings of all the flights leaving that terminal that day. I look for my flight’s name and head towards the check-in counter, constantly checking my pockets for the ticket and my passport. The ground staff for the airline checks my passport and the ticket; I ask him if I can get a window seat and he nods. He gives me two boarding passes, one for Delhi to Bangkok, the other for Bangkok to Hong Kong, and wishes me luck for the flight.

  The middle-aged man at the immigration counter looks at me like I am a terrorist, a well-rehearsed doubting smirk pasted across his face makes me shiver, but then he deems me harmless and stamps on my virgin passport. I am ecstatic now.

  I tuck my passport inside my back pocket, proceed for the security check where I place my laptop and my cell phone in a plastic bin and get myself frisked by a young security person who stamps my boarding pass. I’m on a roll!

  The first thing that strikes me post-security check is the dazzling lights, even at noon, of the Duty Free area, from outlets selling chocolates to alcohol to expensive Louis Vuitton bags to watches and laptops and computers, none of which I can afford. It’s cleaner and glitzier than any mall I have been to. I can see my face in the floor, and yet it’s being polished again. I can’t help but notice how skinny and tall I am, like a praying mantis, or a grasshopper, or their love child.

  Two hours in an airport is a long time—watching people shop, scurry to their gates, and tap on their laptops can only amuse you for so long.

  I walk into an open bookstore, a rather large one, that’s also selling chocolates and wines, and magazines about pregnant women and dogs. I run my hands over the new hardback releases and though they seduce me like a woman with a plunging neckline, they are too expensive for my pocket.

  I choose The Mystic Masseur by V.S. Naipaul, his first book, released when he was just twenty-three (which means I have another four years), and I start reading it. I might be sitting on the warm carpet of Indira Gandhi International Airport, but I am also in Trinidad and Tobago, living the protagonist’s life in the tropical land.

  Two hours aren’t that long when you have the company of a good book and soon the name of my flight is announced and my pulse shoots up. Soon there will be thirty-five thousand feet between me and hard land, and jumping out will not be an option. I close the book, leave Trinidad and Tobago behind on the bookshelf, hang my backpack over my shoulder and walk towards the gate. There is a long line of people already waiting at the check-in counter. A guy from the airline tears off a part of the boarding passes and hands it back to the passengers with a smile. I stand at the end of the line, wait for my turn, and hold out my boarding pass when it’s my turn.

  ‘This is the second boarding pass, the one from Bangkok to Hong Kong. Can I have the first one please?’ the Airline Guy asks me. I check and it’s indeed the boarding pass from Bangkok to Hong Kong. I check my back pocket and look for the one that says Delhi to Bangkok and can’t find it.

  He asks to me step out of the line. My stomach churns and I panic. I flap around the pockets of my shirt and trousers, and I can’t find it. I check my bag and it’s not there. I am out of breath. The Airline Guy looks at me disapprovingly.

  ‘I can’t find it!’ I say to him and he points to another man in a different uniform. He is the Airport Guy.

  ‘I can’t find it. I can’t find the boarding pass!’ I say, frantic with worry.

  ‘When’s your flight?’ he asks.

  ‘In twenty minutes,’ I say, sweat trickling down my brow.

  ‘I’m sorry. You can look for it,’ he says. He contacts the Information Desk and asks them if they have found a lost boarding pass; they say no.

  ‘What should I do now?’ I ask.

  He continues in a cold voice, ‘There is nothing we can do. You will have to miss your flight. Can you tell me your name? I will offload your luggage.’

  ‘What! I can’t miss the flight. I have to go!’ I protest. ‘Can’t I get a new boarding pass?’

  ‘You can, but there is no time. You will have to go through immigration and security check all over again and that alone will take an hour,’ he says. He checks my passport and tells someone to offload my luggage on his walkie-talkie. I am in complete distress. This can’t be happening!

  ‘Stop looking for the pass and issue a new one. He might get on the plane,’ a voice from the other side says.

  ‘But there is no time,’ the guy answers.

  ‘Try,’ the woman from the other side says.

  ‘Let’s issue a new one!’ I protest.

  ‘I’m not talking to you,’ the guy says. He tries to argue with the woman on the phone, clearly a senior, who asks him to get me a new boarding pass.

  And just as am ready to bury my face into my palms and weep, I see a middle-aged woman in the far corner talking into a walkie-talkie. I run to her and shout, ‘I really need to get on that plane! Can’t we issue a new one?’

  ‘Oh, it’s you?’ she says and sizes me up. ‘Come with me. You kids, you lose everything. My son lost it once too.’

  She walks hurriedly towards the last line of security that I crossed and I follow. And then she runs and I run after her. She ask me my name and shouts it out into her walkie-talkie and with the instruction to print a duplicate boarding pass. We wait beyond the security check line and she passes my passport to a junior to get the boarding pass stamped by immigration. She says the immigration men are hard to convince to stamp a boarding pass twice; they are old government people, cautious and lazy, and that’s dangerous, she explains and I sweat some more.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘How much time do we have?’

  ‘Five minutes,’
I say.

  ‘Oh!’ she says and asks the person on the other side to run. I see two guys running to the immigration counter, argue with the man who doesn’t seem to be in a hurry or interested in my fate, and finally cajole him into stamping it. They run back to us and hand me the boarding pass.

  ‘Now, run!’ she says. It’s one minute from closing of the gate. I run and she shouts, ‘Have a great trip!’

  I wave as I run, and I board the plane seconds before the gates close. A smiling flight attendant points me to my seat and I blush. I am still panting from the running. After pushing my handbag under the seat in front of me because the overhead bins are closed, and I don’t know how to open them, I take my seat. My legs are too long for the cramped seats. I snap close the seatbelt after I fumble with it and a fellow passenger helps me out. It’s a six-year-old kid.

  The aircraft starts to rumble, the beast pushes off laboriously at first, and then it moves fast, really fast. It feels unreal when it finally lifts off from the ground, tonnes of metal and people, just like that. My heart thumps so furiously that I can tell one ventricle from the other.

  I look down to see the buildings get smaller, the people turn into specks and then disappear, the roads become lines, circles become points, points become pointless, till all I see are the colours red, green and blue.

  The clouds surround us. They are made of cotton.

  The beautiful flight attendants take turns to ask me if I need anything, and it seems unfair that they, pretty and fair and perfect, should listen to me. Every time they ask me if I need wet towels, or water, or help, I refuse, trying to be as polite as possible.

  I keep staring at the spectacular view outside, and even though there are movies on-board, which is like amazing and I hadn’t believed Aman when he first told me about in-flight entertainment, for the next four hours I continue looking outside the window, my nose pressed flat against the glass, as the aircraft glides over the cotton clouds, with the sun shining at a distance, yet seeming so close—it’s single-handedly the most the incredible moment of my life.

  I am flying, literally.

  7

  The stopover at Bangkok passes by in a jiffy. I wanted to window-shop and gawk at the glittering new cameras and sunglasses, most of which cost more than my house, but I didn’t want to take the risk of loitering around and losing my boarding pass again.

  I am suddenly hit by homesickness and I strain my ear to hear a word or line in Hindi. Every face waiting in the line is a stranger, and I realize I will soon be surrounded by people who talk and dress differently, eat and behave differently; I will be an awkward alien.

  In the aircraft, I listen closely to the safety announcements, once in Thai and once in English. It’s already dark outside because, well, the earth rotates.

  It’s a three-hour flight and I read the magazines cover to cover, calculate how much the perfumes listed in the Duty Free magazines cost in Indian rupees, watch part of a movie I have already seen before, and then doze off with the earphones still glued to my ears. I’m woken up by a very cute flight attendant, and I sit up, my mouth still open and drooling.

  ‘We are about to land,’ she says. ‘We need your seat to be upright.’

  I nod, my chin wet with my drool.

  Perfect. Just perfect!

  I am cursing myself for having slept during the second flight of my entire life, as I listen to the captain’s voice in my ears who informs us that we would be landing in Hong Kong soon. But when I look outside, I can only see unending darkness punctuated by little specks of light, which at first I think are reflections of the cabin’s light on the glass window, but later I find they are weather bobs floating in the ocean. The flight attendant asks us to fasten our seatbelts and switch off our mobile devices, and I am still struggling to spot land. The aircraft banks left, my stomach lurches.

  There’s just water beneath us. Damn it!

  And then it appears, seconds away from landing, a strip of runway, a stream of yellow neon lights separated by a wide painted road, and more yellow lights. Other runways and parked aircrafts are also visible now, but they look tiny, like parts of a Lego set, and we touchdown. It’s like landing on water. As if the captain said, ‘I can land on water too, but today, let’s just land on the runway.’ It’s that close.

  I sigh with relief.

  After claiming my luggage, getting my passport stamped on again (Yeah, I am that good!), peeing in the urinal that is fixed a little too low for my comfort (being six feet four inches is a huge disadvantage), I exit the airport building, clutching tightly a printout with the address of the hotel I have to check in to. There is a long file of taxis, all old Toyota Camrys, in red and white, and people are hopping into them at an inconceivably rapid rate. It takes the fifty-odd people ahead of me in the line just a couple of minutes to get a cab, and when my turn comes, I dump my suitcase in the trunk and slide inside.

  ‘Where to?’ The cab driver asks in a thick Eastern accent.

  ‘Causeway Bay, The Park Lane,’ I say, thrusting the paper to his face, which he reads aloud, the same words sounding different when he says it, like a song.

  ‘Aaaahhh! Phhark Lane, okhhay?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okhhay, okhhay. I thakhe you Hoowwthel Phhark Lane. Okhhay, okhhay,’ he says.

  He has already said ‘okay’ about a dozen times, as if trying to reassure me and himself that we understand each other. I ask him how much time it would take and he says about an hour. I get used to the accent pretty quickly; you just have to keep an ear out for the intonation of the vowels and guess the rest.

  We leave the airport, and almost immediately I spot the city neon lights, endless rows of them. The city is like a forest, only that it has buildings, hundreds of them, in all shapes, sizes and colours.

  More glowing buildings appear, the large ones now dwarfed by even larger ones, like evolution; glowing signage of corporations stick out from the top these buildings in red, blue and green. These buildings kiss the sky and light up everything around me. We cross a harbour where huge contraptions are floating on the water, probably made to lift and shift containers; the area is bathed in golden lights and the water around the harbour is a pale yellow. It’s 10 p.m. and the city is a Christmas tree in a pond, water splashing right where the buildings end. It’s sensational.

  I pass some road signs.

  Tsim Sha Tsui. Wan Chai. Kowloon. Tsuen Wan. Tsing Yi. Sheung Wan. Tai O. Lantau.

  I read these names, and then read them together as fast as I can, and it feels like I am speaking their language. I smile, but the cab driver isn’t pleased.

  ‘Tall buildings!’ I exclaim to distract him.

  ‘Yes, yes. Very tall buildings. Okhhay. We build very tall buildings in Hong Kong, okhhay,’ he says.

  The Park Lane is in Causeway Bay and as the bell boy informs me later, I am lucky to be staying bang in the middle of an insane shopping street. I nod (No money, I want to add). As we enter the roads leading to Causeway Bay, even at this time in the night, I can spot outlets of at least a dozen luxury brands lit in brilliant golden lights; from Prada to Max Mara, from Louis Vuitton to Ermenegildo Zegna, all of them vying for my attention, and I make a mental note to come back here when I’m older and I have, like, a job. My nose is permanently pressed against the window of the taxi, amazed at the unabashed opulence. The city looks like it’s Photoshopped.

  My room is on the thirty-third floor, that’s the highest I have ever been on foot, not otherwise. Because you know, I am a frequent flier; I just took two flights.

  The room is luxurious, the little child inside me is excited and I start looking through the guides to Hong Kong, the food menu which is extensive and long, the little bottles of shampoo and moisturizer, and the bathtub, which I will have to double over to fit inside. I don’t think it will be comfortable for me to lie in a bubble bath with candles lit around me, my hairless bony legs sticking out.

  I call the front desk nervously, not sure if
they would understand me, and because I am not good with new people.

  ‘I’m calling from room number 332. Can I make a call to India? How much will it be?’ I ask.

  ‘Your company will pay for it,’ he says, his voice irritatingly polite, and then explains how to make a call, and I thank him. He says ‘okay’ about five times during the conversation. It’s like Hong Kong’s national word!

  I call on my father’s cell phone.

  ‘Deep! Deep!’ my mom shouts. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Yes, I just checked in,’ I answer. ‘It’s a beautiful hotel. I like it. It’s like Uncle Akro’s house in Mumbai. It’s so clean and big! There are no tubelights though. It’s all yellow in here.’

  ‘Did you eat something on the way?’ she asks. ‘Did you meet anyone from the office?’

  ‘I ate a sandwich. And I think I will meet them tomorrow,’ I say. I am not sure if Mom’s crying or really, really happy because she sounds the same in both these cases. I start feeling homesick. She hands over the phone to Dad. He asks if I will be available on this number and I say yes. We disconnect the call.

  It’s already eleven. After a hot shower, I change into my night clothes and slip inside the cosy covers. The mattress is soft and promptly swallows me up. The curtains are drawn apart and at a distance, I see a brown building I remember from the pictures, the Hong Kong Central Library. Standing in the midst of soaring structures of steel and glass, all of which are taller than anything I have ever seen in my life, the library looks enchanting, almost magical, like Hogwarts, like a place where wizards realize their true potential.

  I am woken up at nine next morning by the incessant ringing of the landline. It’s Sameer from ATS, Hong Kong. He tells me that he is leaving for the US for a week and I should mail him if I need anything, and that he expects me follow the mail I received from them in India. He disconnects the call when the woman in the background makes an announcement to switch off all mobile devices. Mobile devices interfere with the aircrafts’ communication systems. Yes, I know that because I am a frequent flier.