My window seat

‘Will you exchange your window seat with my aisle one?’

I had settled down in my allocated seat in what-would-be a long flight from Bombay and had almost gone to sleep at 3am. Suddenly this curt request woke me up and I saw in front of me a young ‘Bandra-girl’ in an outlandish outfit.

Sorry, I thought to myself. I didn’t check-in my seat online two days ago to miss the thrill of descending onto Paris early in the morning, that too for a girl who carries a Sydney Sheldon paperback and has silly mehendi painted all over her arms. [If she was reading Borges or even Dostoevsky instead, it would have been a different matter.]
I decided to be rude and decline her request. She settled down in the seat beside me with a perceptibly mutual sense of antipathy bordering on repulsion.

Every time in a long-distance flight, I somehow presume that the empty seat beside me would be occupied by someone – preferably a woman - who would make the journey memorable (though that has happened only twice in my life). Now, I feel utterly betrayed. By way of diffusing the sense of mutual aversion, she initiates the inevitable conversation. I don’t even attempt to remember her name but her life-situation is interesting. This young woman is actually travelling to Milan through Paris to meet her Indian boyfriend who runs a taxi-service in Stockholm and he is driving down to Milan to pick her up. All these people travelling in a plane must be carrying with them so many unique stories. [As Alan de Botton says, every person is worthy of a biography.]

She asks me if I have been to Sweden and if I know anything about that world that she will be stepping into, as an immigrant. I refrain from talking but I wish I could tell her that though I have never been to Sweden, it is a country that is firmly ensconced in my imagination through its cinema, particularly by the great(est) master of the cinema – Ingmar Bergman – who has created such a deep mystique around Swedish women that much of my notion of feminine beauty and grace has been moulded by those images.

When she hears that I have something to do with films, she asks me if I am related to Mithun Chakravarty. Nobody till date has had the audacity to ask me this weird question. ‘I hate Bollywood’, she tells me, indirectly expressing her contempt for what she thinks is, my world.
‘It’s all trash!’
And then she browses the list of films available on the screen in front of her and wonders which to click. I strongly recommend her to watch Woody Allen’s Match Point as she wanted to steer clear of anything Bollywoodish. Instead, she clicks on Oye Lucky Lucky Oye and the film starts. She keeps on giggling and as I stand up in the aisle, I notice something fascinating. ALL the Indians are watching ‘Bollywood’ films and ALL the non-Indians are watching Hollywood flicks. With no exception. This is the extent to which our choices are determined by habit and what merely surrounds us.

The late dinner arrives and I realise that the standard of Air France has gone down dramatically. Just as Air India epitomises the messiness of India, Air France symbolises the decline of a nation once seen as the epitome of elegance. I have my dinner with the clumsy vegetarian stranger beside me who asks me about the Eiffel Tower and wonders if she can see it in the 12 hour transit she has in Paris. By now, I know the Charles de Gaulle airport like the back of my hand and so I give her elaborate instructions about how to get to the Eiffel Tower from the airport but she is not the adventurous kind apart from belonging to the hideous variety of kitschy Indian tourists who think that seeing Paris is all about seeing the Eiffel Tower and London is all about Madame Tussaud’s silly wax museum where you can pose with Bollywood stars. However, even that cannot do violence to the fact that the Eiffel Tower is incorruptible in its intricately complex geometrical beauty.

As the plane descends on to Paris early in the morning, she tells me that this is her first trip outside India. I feel terribly guilty for not giving away my window seat to her.