Planes

I am the only person I know so far who has had this notion as a child: all airplanes are simply toys that really strong people throw, and people who use them to travel have been shrunk using magical tunnels to fit inside and are simply thrown from place to place. You can probably only imagine what was going through my mind when I saw them in the sky, perceptively as small as toys, moving slowly as if magic had slown them down and was keeping them in the air somehow. I always wanted to know what the experience was really like, whether they really were as big as buildings or as loud as explosions, like my parents had always tried to convince me they were.

It was 1:00 AM on the day of my first plane ride. New Dehli International Airport is generally a sea of people doing anything and everything, walking and/or running, selling food, carrying bags, calling out to relatives or rides, the usual. None of this actually registered back then in my relatively uneducated 8-year-old mind, tired and dazed with the faint knowledge that my parents and I would be leaving India, indefinitely. I was half asleep, 1 AM is not a suitable time for a small child to be awake; any concept of time is simply an illusion, everything is surreal almost not happening.

This didn't stop me from staring in awe, mouth ajar, unable to move or compute what my eyes were sending to my brain once we were able to actually get to the terminal. Here was the biggest toy I had ever seen, its nose huge and round, its body as big as a building, its wings as big as... something huge and flat and wing-like! Perhaps the whole terminal was magic, perhaps I was small enough to fit inside now, or perhaps the windows just made the planes look big so that we don't get shocked as the tunnels shrunk us.

Tunnels into which we were soon going; before long we were boarding. I was ready for the magic to shrink me, it was coming, coming, and... nothing happened. This was the point at which I understood that planes were not toys; the tunnels were not magic, no strong person would throw me and my family to America, and everything I saw through the windows was real.

"That's such a big wing," I said to my father as I looked out the window; it was as big as something I could walk on.

"It's the biggest one," he replied, which I would find out later in my life was a false statement, "We'll go in on with even bigger wings later." I couldn't wait, what kind of wings must they have been to be bigger than the biggest wings?

My eyes were glued to that window, I could swear that for the next two hours or so I did not take my eyes off that window. How could I possibly have missed the moving of the wing, the funny noises it made, the loud bang of the engine that hung randomly from the wing as the entire world dropped away from view and my ears popped, the world turning and twisting as clearly the plane was the center of the universe (for at least twelve hours of my life)? It was all so fluid, every event lead to another, which lead to another, and eventually I was a tiny person flying through the air inside a toy, except this time the plane wasn't a toy and I wasn't tiny, it was the world down below with all the small houses and cars and amazing shimmering lights that had turned tiny.

I don't remember when it was exactly that the drone of the engine put me to sleep, or when it was that I decided to wake up. The first thing I saw after my long-awaited nap was that the ground had turned into mush, and that we were moving really slow, and I definitely remember that we accelerated to some insane speed when we took off, so I had to ask.

"Hey Papa [that's what I used to call him], why are we moving so slowly now?" I asked

"We're moving just as fast as we were before, Manish," was his reply. Now I was curious.

"But then why does it look like we're moving so slow?"

"It's because we're so high up, what is fast up here seems to look slow down there," he said, then he added "Those are clouds Manish."

None of it made any sense to me, but the thing that piqued my interest was the fact that those were clouds underneath us. Once again, I had my eyes glued to the window, and this time for the rest of the flight, so I could see us descend into the white abyss of clouds, till the abyss became a ceiling and I could see the ground once again, looking like a giant block city that kept growing bigger and bigger till we finally landed in Amsterdam.

I had rode in a plane, which wasn't a toy; I had been above the clouds; I had escaped India with my parents; and I had seen the world in a way many others would never get to. I was a prince for 12 hours, and my parents were the king and queen. We would soon be going to America to create our empire.