Mid-air nirvana, Jimmy choooo style

*Dhooom*

*Dhadam*

*Phisshhhhhh*

The sounds sneaked up on me with a decadent sense of regularity. From my left, the well-oiled sardar-ji, from up ahead an aunty-ji who strikingly resembled a bean bag and from far behind a cool dude whose baseball cap refused to budge from his memory-chip shaped face.

Though they disturbed my mental equilibrium with the knack of a sharp shooter, the sounds were something I was willing to live with. It was the smells that made me contemplate suicide every 4.3 seconds.

Each time the concoction of stale cabbage, chicken poop and old-used-socks-just-discovered-in-the-attic hit me, I felt like I was sent diving into a putrid valley of gigantic proportions. At the intense whiff of a refrigerator locked for three months, I would turn around to look at the impish devil who sat across me. His mother periodically stroked his head calling him ‘chubbu’ but from the smell I felt that he had much more than one chubbu inside him. At the severe scent of decomposed potato bhaji hitting my nostrils, I would peek backwards at the erudite gentlemen perhaps just aboard after delivering a massive lecture to a class of Einstein’s offsprings. The moment I thought the worst was behind me, a wicked one would bang against all my senses and leave them paralyzed

I won’t even ask you to guess where I am sitting because from the sounds you’d most likely guess it to be Bunty-Babli video game parlor and from the smells you’d guess it to be Hoon-Cha fish bazaar. But alas, it was neither. It was, my dear friends, an early morning Delhi-Mumbai flight. An early morning flight which is so appallingly early that before you slept, it was time to wake up else the airport-cab guy would honk the entire continent into wakefulness. An early morning flight which doesn’t leave you enough time to brush your chattering teeth, leave aside a cup of coffee. An early morning flight where you spend the entire distance to the airport horrifically agonizing that either you have left the ticket at home, or the passport, or the ID card, or your luggage, or if this is the right day, or it just could not be the right time, or was there a reschedule SMS that you missed. And if you’re a girl like me then why is the cab guy looking at you from the rear-view mirror every 3 minutes and if he has friends hiding under the seat who will jump out any instant like overweight apparitions from a 70s Hindi horror flick.

So in such an early morning flight I found myself in the recent past. I managed to check-in without making a fool of myself which was quite a feat given the fact that my IQ levels average way below sea-level every day before 6 AM. I managed to safeguard my luggage despite the daze that hazed my eyes. And then I managed to not miss the boarding call that was softer than my voice on the day I had laryngitis and basically could not speak. After all that, I managed to not cry when brutally stuffed with a copious mob in the shuttle bus.  

Once on the flight, I realized that there was still quite a while before take-off. I had exactly five minutes before the aforementioned sounds and smells started bombarding my existence. What smells and sounds, you ask? Well, I think this was something crucial I missed when I introduced the ‘earliness’ of my flight. But before I tell you, I request you to jiggle your memory harder than how you jiggled your pre-school piggy bank for that one rupee coin. Now try and remember what is that one thing which refuses to obey your commands each time you have to take a flight before 5 AM?

Yep, you got it. So this was an ‘early’ morning flight. An early morning flight where you spend ten precious minutes coaxing and cajoling your bowels but then you leave the pot as unblemished as when you first found it. An early morning flight where every face in the check-in queue belies that unease which only comes with a belly full of left-overs, where every pleasant smile could be hiding a pressure, where every stoic head-shake could be an exercise in utmost restraint. So in such a flight it is obvious that even with around 100 people onboard, at least 70 have severely cramped intestines, at least 70 are trying to hold in emissions of what’s perilously packaged inside them.

But how long can they? So after five minutes of playing politically correct on every early morning flight, people let go of all decorum and then let lose. Now now. No matter how much you are awaiting gory gastronomical details of the next approximately two hours, I shall restrain myself. You all have probably gone through enough of it anyway for me to make it any more graphic (no, not pornographic).

Of course another reason why I just can’t go on that trajectory any more is because I have completely gone off track already! I started writing this post about an entirely different objective. It was about what actually happened after those firecrackers.

So. A while after the firecrackers numbed my senses to an extent where I stopped noticing them, I saw her. She just entered the airplane but she looked like she was already somewhere up above stacked atop piles of air. I don’t know if you have heard the statement that ‘in a moment so many thoughts flood your head that you didn’t know you could think so fast’, but basically something like that happened to me in the time she walked from the door to near my seat. This is how my brain worked in that brief history of time:

• Second 1/4: Her top is definitely from either Mango or Zara – only they have such stuff that looks straight out of the fashion magazine I secretly read in between writing esoteric blogs. Gosh, I’m wearing that T-shirt the company gave during last year’s annual day function consisting of two food stalls and one local singer crooning unheard of melodies for 2.5 hours. And that T-shirt has a small rip on the side.
• Second 2/4: Her makeup is from Bangkok or Dubai where she went for the last shopping festival. She has to be one of those who go to other countries to shop because its so passé for them. Damn I forgot to put chap-stick.
• Second ¾: Her sunglasses are definitely Armani and will probably take me a month’s salary to be able to even day dream about them.
• Second 4/4: She is so tall that she can pluck tender coconuts from the tree just by raising her hand. Most probably, she is wearing 6-inch Jimmy Choo stilettos. I need to see them when she passes by closer to my seat. Is it Choo or Choe?

And then there she was. Right next to my seat. I was now supposed to cleverly take a peak at her stilettos but her porcelain face and hour-glass figure made me aware of my own perfections and I strained my neck as much away as physically possible – all to show my utter lack of care in anything non-intellectual and pro-fashion. With my neck totally bent leftwards, I don’t know who sat next to me on the aisle seat but I really hoped it’s somebody who has had a good download in the morning. I stealthily turned around to see.

But of course. It was the ceramic beauty herself. She got up again to put her bag in the overhead cabin. In between somewhere she looked at me and I swear briefly there were holes drilled through my face because she looked right through me. Or wait, in hindsight I think she actually looked at some point between the top of my head and the ceiling, and I just assumed she was checking me out. But, this time when I saw her again, a completely different emotion hit me. After seeing how not a single hair of hers was standing up, how the lipstick sat perfectly poised on top of her pouty lips, how her sunglasses ached to come off but were scared of her temper and how her casual Capri pants were casually ironed at 3AM in the morning as casually evidenced by the casual creases left casually on them. With my super-powers acquired over years of reading Archie, Phantom, Billu, Pinky, chacha chowdhary and Sabu comics, I immediately knew what she was suffering from. She was suffering from a disease called seriousness. In that enigmatic and transcendental moment, I knew iski #CONDITIONSERIOUSHAI.

She was one of those babes (mostly spotted in Delhi, my birth land) who give so much attention to looking perfect that they sleepwalk to salons at midnight. They measure the success of their entire life by how good they look to such an extent that their hands freeze mid-air when semi-automatically extended towards anything with more than 30 calories. They look down upon anything not dressed in Jimmy Chow (Dammit! What’s the right spelling?). They like to fraternize with only those people who possess an expression of being prettily indifferent / vainly lost / daintily catty / snootily plastic – the same expression they have been trying to perfect since they turned 12.5 years of age. They do everything that gives them the look and demeanor of somebody on the cusp of supermodel stardom. They perhaps secretly harbor ambitions of being a Bollywood starlet dancing on Swiss trees but bravely camouflage that by saying ‘Oh Bollywood is so uncool’.

When she sat down I noticed her perfect-as-peaches nails and red-as-candy cheeks. Then I pictured the hours that had gone into looking like this. The effort spent all night painting, scrubbing, polishing, refurbishing, scouring, perfecting and renovating her appearance. 

And then I observed two minutes of silence for her. She really needed a dose of enormous laughter! Or a Cadbury 5 star. Truly, is khubsurat vyakti ki #CONDITION-really-really-really-SERIOUSHAI.

(I don’t think the lady in question would ever get to my blog and the rest of you have absolutely no reason to get offended. So, there. Thanks Cadbury 5 Star for providing this airsickness bag where I could pour it all out. You must watch their hilarious new TVC embedded below!)

The cabin image is from Pixabay. The video and other image is from Cadbury 5 star's Youtube channel.