06 — Departure & Arrival — A flash fiction story
Welcome to the sixth week of the Flash Fiction Challenge, where I take the challenge to write a piece of flash fiction in under 60 minutes!
I chose a prompt from the book ‘The Very Short Story Starter’ by John Gillard.
This week’s prompt was: ‘Write a story set on a plane during an international flight. Choose a city of departure and arrival and find out the travel time in hours and write a sentence for each hour.’
The first hour:
When the beautiful flight attendant walks down the aisle, asking everyone to fasten their seat belts and switch their mobile phones off, that’s when the passenger beside me unlocks his phone and taps a number from his contacts, and after the government mandated message against Covid-19 is cut off by a voice that I assume to be old, my seat partner says in what is, for sure, an undignified tone, “Plane’s about to fly. I’ll call you after I get off”, which makes me wonder whether I should call my mother too and chide her because I was leaving her behind and alone, but then I remember she has taken my sim card to give it to the girl she has brought in as the new house help, and with it has severed most of the attachment to my country.
The second hour:
A hand taps on my left shoulder, a voice warbles in my ears as though I am under water, and I turn to see my seat partner gesturing me to make way, which I do by first ejecting the flight-provided headphones out of my ears, stashing them in the pouch in front of me and squeezing my legs closer to my body and pushing my body up against the hard and straight seat so much so that it pinches my back, which my seat partner seems to understand as enough space and he passes me, bringing his ass dangerously close to my face, making me turn inadvertently to the right side where my other seat partner has smartly cleared the way by standing up and he looks at me, standing, as I stop to breathe completely — the moment the man’s body was in front of me seemed to go on for minutes, when in fact I know it was for a mere second — and only when he passes do I release any air and start counting the moment when he would come back, which when he does, I make it a point to stand up to clear the way.
The third hour:
The entire plane smells of stale chicken, but I don’t care, given how hungry I am, the evidence to which was seen, or rather, heard by the passenger on my right when my stomach gurgled the same moment the same beautiful flight attendant pulled the food trolley from the place behind the curtains, which I imagine is where the first class people stayed and whom I imagine are munching their food quietly and sipping on champagne, and not gobbling the food as I was, or like my seat partners who had also ordered a can of beer which they had both finished before the first bite and were burping it out mid-meal as I sipped on my orange juice and looked at the rice and chicken curry which did taste stale and unappetizing, and suddenly I felt the taste of my mother’s homemade chicken on the tip of my tongue, the cilantro on top that was always an inviting addition, and the smell of which for the life of me I can’t gather now in this stuffed vessel, and I sigh already reminiscing the food and the life I had down below.
The fourth hour:
The movie I am watching is called “Homecoming”, which is about a man who comes home after 20 years, and upon his return he tries to grapple with the reality of a changed country while trying to excavate pieces of nostalgia, and I wonder what it feels not being able to grow old with your country when I know for a fact that my country was not growing old with me, but in fact, de-aging decades with the recent revocation of secularism and of gender quotas in civil service positions, and the, more harrowing, public lynching of a Dalit that happened mid-day in the capital and was viral in social media watched by millions; it was as though the country was giving no choice to its youth but to leave and never come back, never call this country their home, in fact, make them feel ashamed of having to call the country their home, and making them feel as though the future is hopeless and we were too, which my mother didn’t particularly agree with, so she told me I was going abroad and that is the end of discussion, not that I started one or had intended to, I just wanted to ask, “You want me to leave?” to which I later gave an answer to myself, “Of course she does, she doesn’t love you.”
The fifth hour:
The captain announces we will be landing in Hamad International Airport shortly, and I pause the second movie I was watching — this time about superheroes — and look outside the oval-shaped window nearest to me as though if I look closely I can see Nepal on the farthest horizon, slowly obliterating away and if I focus at the vista exactly below, I can see the new city appearing, full of new dreams, hopes and magic tricks, not like rubbing a bottle for the genie, but something produced from a slight of hand, with enough lessons, practice and hard work, something that my seat partners have been discussing among each other since the past hour, keeping myself as a transparent wall from which they could ask questions and volley information about themselves; and when all the topics seem to have been covered and a flight attendant appeared — not the beautiful one, although he was also gorgeous — asking us to clear our trays and upright our seats, that’s when one of my seat partners (I don’t remember which one) turned and asked, “Baini, where are you off to?”, to which I must have replied, “America” because he then scrunched his nose and turned away, “It is fun for you then”, to which I had no reply but to say, “Yes” and then turn away myself to look straight ahead at the dark screen, and hold on to my seat as the plane started to careen down to touch the runway.