Discontinuous City

IN THEIR MIDDLE AGE, SOME MEN GET QUITE desperate for being known to have a sense of humour. In most cases—and there are very few pitiable situations like this—they don’t possess it. They are aware of their shortcoming, but still hope that something will work by fluke on the woman they hope they will meet sitting on the adjacent seat on a long flight. It is there that they want to practice all their sophistication—a set of traits that does not come naturally to them, things like being polite to a waiter. They are usually the ones who suddenly have disposable income and this has led the bank’s otherwise elusive relationship manager to offer them a premium credit card or two. If they had their way, they would put it on their tees, the way some flaunt a Stanford or UCLA sign on their sweatshirts. The best way they have found to show off this is by bring­ing up the fact that they have priority access to airport departure lounges.

For some time, this may have meant something. But now, there are too many people who have these cards and they often have to stand outside the lounge in queues that are sometimes longer than the check-in queues the less technology-savvy passengers stand in. With the commonness of their mag­num following them like a nebula, they enter the airport thinking of other ways to display that they are a sum total of much more than a brief chance of tranquillity on a massage chair. It is at the airports more than anywhere else that they feel at home, even if it means that some colour in them has faded.

Middle-aged or not, lounge lizard or not, the sheer act of entering into an airport is like becoming the temporary citizen of a sovereign nation. The philosopher Pe­ter Sloterdijk refers to such travellers as the “kinetic elite”, who more than a place to go to are, to put it in Hegelian terms, looking for the “possibility of a Place.” But for that, one has to first go through certain rituals in a series of movements mandated by the code of the nation. In the old days, when the technology had not taken so much over our lives, this involved a series of conversations (or negotiations) with people (airline staff)—from requesting for a seat in the smoking area to getting baggage tags. Once you were sorted, your luggage taken care of, and had been issued your boarding pass, you enjoyed the benefits of citizenship. But now, one can negotiate one’s way through it without any human contact right till the end. The barcode scanners understand us mostly without difficulty and then usher us in and we suddenly feel relieved. But this requires one to orient oneself that Kant likens to “finding the sunrise.” Walking past the flickering flight numbers, the passenger walks into an area past the bottles of perfumes and leather bags, brows­ing through the display shelves of bookshop where on the face of it one feels as if the bestsellers have not changed in years. The passenger now has some time if his orientation has served him well. Even as he chooses to have a terrible, overpriced coffee, he is very much a part of what JG Ballard called “the discontinuous city”, in which he is “entirely transient, purposeful, and for the most part happy.”

But even with the daily rising of the sun and our directional proficien­cy, traversing through modern airports, with all the security concerns of the post-9/11 world, can be quite daunting. During rush hours, the scene outside an airport looks apocalyptic as if some war has broken out and people are fleeing to a neutral zone that only an airport can offer. In the queues outside, with the watches ticking, we turn into our own versions of Walter Benjamin trying to flee the Nazis with our luggage pieces that in our per­sonal universes carry things that must be protected at any cost. For us not to meet Benjamin’s fate in Portbou, we must maintain mobility of both limbs and mind. As David Bissell and Gillian Fuller write in Stillness in a Mobile World, to be mo­bile is to have familiarity with “protocol machines that operate through the gate-logistics of measurement, calibration and sequencing.”

The real intimidation, though, starts at the security check. No matter how homogenised we think the rulebook is, there is always some­thing that comes down to the uniformed of­ficer responsible for allowing us into the cen­tre of the airport that is the only place that holds a modicum of stillness. Waiting for a chance to grab the drab plastic trays, we feel like prisoners who must be searched in case they have forged a shiv from a spoon or the bone of a dead dog. With our beating hearts, we take out our belts and wallets and chargers and watch them go through the tunnel while we dare not cross the yellow line, across which we see the man be­fore us with his arms raised like Christ at the mercy of a small hand-held device. As the critic Alistair Gordon reminds us, the extra security measures to prevent (or thwart) terrorist attacks, means that the airport is “an electronically controlled environment ri­valed only by the maximum security prison.” He further reminds us that the architects of some such “fortified terminals” have also been responsible for designing penitentiaries.

IT’S ONLY AFTER one has come to the centre of stillness, where one has noth­ing to do except wait for boarding that we can be with ourselves. Sitting on a melamine chair, we watch others and try and imagine their lives: a lone man with a small laptop bag perhaps on his way to some outstation meeting; a young woman with a fairly big suitcase going to her hometown; a couple trying their best not to get hassled by their kid and by each other; the big family that carries homemade food and where women ultimately break off from men to one side and bitch about members of the extended family. Someone still working on a laptop, someone charging a phone, someone biting nails, someone messaging furiously, someone who constantly gets up to check if the board­ing has begun, someone choosing to just stand near the boarding gate even if there is no sign of airline staff, someone making multiple rounds to the bathroom, someone standing at the big glass window watching activity on the tarmac, someone hoping to initiate a conversation with a foreigner, someone just staring at a woman with tattoos and matted hair, most likely on the way to an ashram.

But let us go to the moment when you first entered the airport. Not as a minor accompa­nied by guardians, but for the first time when you entered the airport all by yourself. It indi­cated mobility at so many levels, especially in a country like India. It meant that now you were on the cusp of something important, chaper­oned by nothing but a strength that only you could fathom. Air travel in India has increased manifold, but it still means a small percentage of a large population that travels frequently. We are in queues, holding tightly to our ticket printouts, clicking selfies inside the airport and again inside the plane, promising to ourselves that next time we’d do better. For the younger demographic, from small towns and villages, it means a big degree of freedom being one with a stream of travellers on their way to a giant tube that will launch them in the sky against the gravity but also against the prophecy of that neigh­bour or uncle who thought they’d not make it. Next time, or the time after that, they will be comfortable in becoming what the operator of Frankfurt Airport City (according to International Relations scholar Mark Slater) termed as the homo aeroportis globalis—shedding his past, and instead carrying his suitcase and sneakers and AirPods and neck cushion.

AND THEN WE enter the plane. We look for our seat and then lower ourselves into it. From there, we watch others enter, walking up the aisle with their little ticks and varying degrees of confidence, and we hope that the passenger next to us either leaves us alone or, better still, offers us something therapeutic, which necessarily doesn’t have to be love. The middle-aged man we met before hopes that he will meet Alex Goran to their ready avatar of Ryan Bingham from Up in the Air. He has this thirst to show who he really is (having being misunderstood by everyone, including father and wife and children and colleagues, he thinks) and it’d be great to open up to a complete stranger, and then at some drunken New Year’s party, confide to a male friend in a balcony while others remain oblivious to his internality. But this happens very rarely. There are far greater chances that he will be disappointed with his co-passenger and it will be the person he has seen from a little far in the aisle hoping that he is not the one sitting next to him. Once his belief in miracle (and love) is dimmed like the lights in the plane before take-off, he goes back to his true self, making phone calls even after stewards have done their demonstra­tion that no one pays heed to, except secretly, a few nervous passengers who are always looking at other people’s faces when the plane faces turbulence. Even the mystique of the pilot with his radio-static English and the stewardess with her bob cut does not lift him up. At that time, he could be the man in the Michael Earl Craig poem who says: “I’m sorry, Mom/ I am a grown man on a plane/ writing about another person’s foot/ My seat will not tip back.”

We quickly overcome even this feeling; at some point in our journey, when we are half-way through, we begin thinking of the place where we will land— another airport, to begin with. It makes us think of a chance of a new slate, a new beginning. We may end up being a transformed people on the other side, even as we behave pretty much like others, switching on our phones and getting up and opening up the overhead bins as if staying civilly on our seats will deprive us of this transformation. As the artist Ross Harley writes in his essay ‘Airportals’, “The airline’s phantasmagorical projections of itself as guarantor and enabler of mass mobilities coincides uncomfortably with the passenger’s own wish-fulfilment of escape and freedom.”

The plane lands, we respond to half-hearted greetings of the crew member, who is already caressing her engagement ring in anticipation of a meeting with her fiancée, and we are already anxious about carousels and cabs. Somewhere towards the exit, we get this sudden urge to record this moment with a selfie. Its staged joy, as Michael Marder says in the Philosophy for Passengers, may be construed as “a token of genuine emotion” by those who may get to see it later on their feed.

But does it reveal anything about the man or his story? No. And it is simply because, as Schaberg’s luminous aphorisms go, “no one can tell the whole story of airports.”

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