The Airport

By Prakriti Bandhan

It is funny that I knew the title of this story before I had even begun it. I knew that my characters would meet at the airport, in this place where there is a momentary suspension of life, the spot which physically and symbolically marks the continuation of a journey or even the beginning of a new one and sometimes the end.

I don’t know why but it is important to me that the two characters know each other. It shouldn’t be that they were meeting each other for the first time. The two are supposed to be long lost, perhaps even estranged. But I don’t really know how to begin this story. I don’t even know what the story is, all I know is that there is supposed to be one. A story meant to take place at the airport.

The image has haunted me for a long time and has made me wonder if it is a glimpse of my past life or a premonition of the future. I have always wondered if in case it is a premonition, who would be the other person for me at the airport. I have often looked at the people around me and have been compulsively forced to imagine an arc of experiences with them that would make them that persona at the airport for me.

Some people felt to be a good fit to be the persona of my imagination, but for each person I imagined a new context, and a new feeling would colour the moment. The top contenders for that character, slowly with time disappeared from my memory altogether. Or with time, became entirely unsuitable for that moment. It became so special — this glimpse, this image — that now I think that maybe this is not a premonition but a calling for my work. That perhaps it will be the centrepiece of a story I am destined to write. But how do you write a story that you are destined to write? There is just too much riding on that. I don’t even know if it is a story about love or loss. 

I think I will suddenly bump into him. When our eyes meet, in a matter of seconds, years of questions will be answered. I will look at him, realising that I have come far. I will be introduced to his wife. Now that I see her by his side, I know I didn’t belong there at all, that all the moments I questioned whether it could have been me, would finally be resolved, because she — she makes sense. At that moment my children would run to me, a set of twins — I have always imagined — and say hello to him. That looking at them he would smile, because I always talked about how I didn’t want children and was afraid that because I resist them so much, I would end up having two in one go. This moment wouldn’t be one of those moments where we would run into our old friends and would be just happy to see each other. This moment would feel like the universe allowed us a glimpse of the forbidden.

It is intriguing to me that I always saw my children, but in this vision, my husband is in the background, I cannot see him clearly. I cannot imagine, for the life of me, what my partner looks like. Is he brown or white, tall or somewhere closer to my height? Isn’t it strange that in this alleged premonition/vision of the future, I have more clarity about the man I am supposed to meet for five minutes and not the man standing next to me, supposedly for life?

But what is the story? Is it that this man and I were close, lovers maybe, and had to go our separate ways? Or were we friends who never could fall in love? I have definitely thought of being by his side. Perhaps, he is the person who remained an entity without a background. We silently must have seen each other in the periphery of our visions, too afraid to look straight. Maybe, the clarity with which we might see each other would be too much for us to handle in this life. So maybe the next? He would leave and so would I. I hope that once again somewhere, when our flights land, we can see each other. No, only in our next lives.

But I still don’t know what this story would be about, I still don’t know if I already have lived this story, I still don’t know if this is the story.

Prakriti Bandhan writes stories with a difference.

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