Back from Bomb!

            I’m writing about Bombay weeks after it happened and I regret that and the fact that it means that so much of the wonder and experience has gotten lost. Hopefully one day I’ll come back to it and really rack my brains for the sensory details and be able to express properly how truly felt, not just what it looked like. One part of the trip that I can still really feel is our journey home. And that’s because it scared the crap out of me.

            Due to our separate bookings, none of us were sitting together on the flight home. I prayed ahead of time that I would not be seated next to someone unusually large, smelly, invasive or creepy, and that prayer paid off quite well. I was seated in between two small women, one older and one probably around my age. As soon as the wheels had the left the run way the younger woman in the window seat took out her ipod and turned her face to the wall. At first I though her shaking was due to the almost constant and slight turbulence, but after discrete and thorough observation I realized she was simply and quietly sobbing. I started collecting clues. She had beautiful henna on her hands and was really well dressed with one of close hand bags that you look at in windows but never buy or even breathe on because they cost a college tuition. She was wearing a huge rock on her left ring finger. She was listening to a playlist on her iphone 5 and just crying. Not in an attention seeking way, not in an angry way, just quietly and steadily. And as I tried to just let her cry I realized that her crying made me feel sad in a certain way, like the floor falling out from underneath you. Sad in an inevitable way, like it’s no ones fault and it doesn’t need to be fixed, it just is. Sad like I felt on the plane to Hawaii. She was heartbroken. I’m almost positive. And she cried quietly and I sat fighting the urge to just kinda sitting down hug her. And the plane started to shake. At first it was turbulence like I’m used to, a little shake and shift and then it’s done. But it didn’t stop. The plane started to rock, and take falls down in the air, like sudden drops so that if you weren’t buckled in you might fly up out of your seat and hit your head. The main lights went off and the dim lights were on. In my head I imagined a tiny toy plane being shook back and forth by a giant hand. The woman next to me stopped crying and just stared ahead, knuckles white as she grasped the seat arms. I’ve never been near to catholic but I crossed myself just for good measure. The plane shook and the woman in front of me started saying her prayers. It wasn’t a little passenger number either, it was full sized jet, being thrown around like a toy. I was close to the back and I watched the heads in front me being snapped forward and backward in the shaking. The sky outside was grey and cloudy and you couldn’t see the end of wing. I put on some music I thought might be most appropriate to die to and thought about how much I loved my family and how I hoped they knew that. My crying companion had dry eyes, but just had a steely look on her face and didn’t show a trace of panic. I was panicking and listening to Wagon Wheel and just trying not to shit myself.  After the longest ten minutes ever and multiple prayers from an agnostic to all religions ever and the potential loss of five years to my life from stress, the plane gave a final shudder and stopped thrashing about. We landed shortly after and I booked it up the arrivals tunnel to find Anita and Emily standing at the top looking as shaken as I was. We walked out of the airport and found that the entire airport was drowning in a localized thunder storm, with lightening flashing every few seconds, water pouring down from places it shouldn’t and thunder that you can feel in your toes. I instantly forgave the pilot. We waded our way to a taxi and found that, only a few miles out, the ground was completely dry and dust blew like it always did. And it just wasn’t even unusual. Because if you’re going to know one thing before you come to India, know that anything and everything is liable to happen whenever. And you can be prepared for some things but you always have to be prepared to just deal with the rest. We almost died in a localized thunder storm and just a few days before Emily went out to get some food, got up to wash her hands and the entire roof, including lights, pipes and a man, fell in behind her, a piece of concrete hitting her hip and had she been a foot back from the sink, her entire body would have been buried. Mitch, the med student from Manchester, was walking and looked up for a second and found himself waste deep in the sewer due to a missing slat in the pavement. Every time I cross the street, the auto drivers speed up to try and run me over. My second day in Bangalore, I was stuck in traffic with Suneeta for three hours because a water tanker had pulled a spontaneous U-turn and crashed headlong into a bus. Things like that. All the time. You can’t be ready for it, but you can just learn to deal with it and to not live in fear. Because it wouldn’t be worth your time, the danger is always there but the fear is what uses energy and whether you’re afraid or not, it will still happen. So you gotta just live and hope that each day provides you with the opportunity to keep on living.