Bon Voyage | Lopa Banerjee

(1)

Early in March, in the beginning of a very unusual rainy day, a new bride had departed the city of her childhood as she hurried to the boarding and luggage check-in area at the international terminal of the airport. The grey, old cab sneaked its way past the frenzy of the buses, trucks and auto-rickshaws in the maze of the wet, winding city roads with bumps and bolts all along the way.
It was customary for the new bride to be surrounded by her own people—her parents, in-laws, cousins, and neighbors in her journey. She watched them wrap their sugar-coated words and conviction of a ‘happily ever after’ marriage all around her.
She watched her mother uttering mantras in hushed tone and handing her a tiny brown packet of dried flowers and basil leaves as she packed her bags with her belongings. In every nook and corner of her cobalt blue V.I.P. suitcase, there were spices and incense sticks and vermillion boxes, carefully folded with rough brown paper. She took the shining frames that adorned Goddess Kali, Goddess Durga, the holy prophets Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita from the trembling hands of her father, hands that had once rebuked and opposed her moves in life, hands which were now weary and powerless, devoid of retribution.  
On the way to the airport, she thought of the last morsels of rice and her favorite fried fish she had gulped down hurriedly without relishing in its goodness and aroma. She thought of the spoonful of yoghurt she had to swallow in the belief of an auspicious journey overseas.  
Seated at the window, she looked at the posters and hoardings of films and popular products fleeing fast her eyes in the morning mist and haze. The bumpy lanes of her childhood were mingling with the busy highways, pitch-dark and dusty. She was drawing a diagram of the city in the busy recesses of her mind, with the half-closed shutters of the small stationery stops, the din and clatter of the street vendors selling fresh seasonal produce, the stacks of hay that had hung over the roofs of the lorries roaring with loud, gawky horns.
Her memories in the city were like a dance strained beyond the steps she could recall. On her way, she was bidding adieu to the constant feedbacks of her past. She was trying the stance of a passive stranger, bidding adieu to the sites of her childhood and youth where she had thrown herself into the flames of sound, music and celebration.
Her cell phone popped from her anxious ears and off into the wet, slippery ground as her right hand was grabbing hold of her passport and visa documents. She had paid her last visit to the small, dingy ISD telephone booth in her neighborhood today as she had recharged the phone for her mother. A gap of 24 hours in between, and she will receive calls in a new number, a new destination, a new continent. She was hastily lifting her bags that passed through the mystic stillness of the metal detectors. She was bidding adieu to the waving hands outside the barricade of the international lounge, to the untimely rain and mist, to the crispy morning rays of the sun and their early, unsettling heat that filled the canvas of her city again.

 (2)

The entire expanse of the Calcutta skyline, the lands and the lakes, the rivers and the rooftops, the buildings and the concrete structures merged and dissolved into dotted lines as the new bride flew with her co-passengers amid the dusky, silken clouds. The flight filled her stomach with butterflies as she clung to her seat and watched from her window seat the morning melt into the light-webbed darkness of the night.
Back in her old ancestral home, she remembered the long, vertical arrangement of extended family lunches of her childhood where everybody sat on thin pieces of cloth over the hard cement floors. A full course lunch was a ritual she could never perform with both legs folded and crisscrossed against each other with the perfection of a gentlemanly demeanor. She would gobble up the fish pieces and fried eggplants and lick up the sweet syrup of home-made sweets as her knees would struggle and free themselves from the folding ritual. She would always finish her meal with one or the other leg stretched outwards, stretched in defiance and discomfort of her ancestral Bengali traditions. Her aunts had always taunted her that her legs had the flight of a foreign land.
Beneath the clumsy, beige-colored economy seat, her feet were struggling to remain calm, composed and warm within the narrow confines of the space she had booked for herself. An elderly air hostess of Air India helped her fix the makeshift dinner table in the vacuum between her stomach and the backseat of a co-passenger traveling with fussy infants. She chewed on dry bread and absorbed the juicy sweetness of strawberry jam, feeling the cold, moisture-less air that was choking her with stillness and the ghostly fuzz of unknown faces.  
At the tiny, suffocating toilet, she threw up a little of her food and phlegm. She let the tiny particles of waste dissolve slowly into the wash basin as she embraced her twisted fairytale. The rest was a journey of antacids and saltine crackers, as she tried to close her eyes amid the frenzy of Hindi movies and kids’ video games, amid the noisy loitering’s of air hostesses in the narrow passages of the aircraft, asking for iced drinks and snacks.
At Heathrow International Airport, her eyes had sparked for fleeting moments with a crimson flame of glory as she stood there in the European soil. For that tiny, unceremonious moment, the young bride was the bewildered girl in her teens who had touched the texture of the soil and the dried, brass colored leaves of the tree as an express train entered the rough terrains of Mugalsaraai, Bihar. Being that young girl in ponytails and pleats all over again, she laughed remembering how in that trifling moment of discovery, the sheer beauty of an escapade outside her Bengali territories had taken her breath away. She laughed at the thought of filling her school essays with honey-dreams and lies of exotic Indian vacations, where she had danced with the waves of the sandy beaches in Goa, with the gypsies and the moonlit sand of the desert dunes of Rajasthan. She had touched the stars and the sky of all these destinations of her dreams as she came to an end of the geographical boundaries of her country.
As she watched the sea of passengers trudging past the loud, gigantic lounge and the lure of the food court, she yet again reached her moment of suspension. The land of Thames river, the Queen’s castle, the land of Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespearean sonnets glittered in the pearls of her eyes with the glory of gold. In her mind, she wandered the green pastures, the azure skies that adorned the castles and edifices she had always thought of as pilgrimages. In her body, she raced the uncertain miles of the endless labyrinth of concourses, searching her next flight number in the announcement boards, while she mingled with a crowd of mixed races, identities and colors—a naïve, unassuming new bride from the land of snakes, the Sun God, wantonness and fortune tellers.
She was flying the sky of the American continent, at last. She was seen with the emigrations and customs clearance documents in her lap, her legs crisscrossed beneath an aisle seat which was now a mischievous toddler’s hiding den. Every now and then, she was picking the tyrant up from the vacuum between her legs which was messed up with torn pages of magazines, empty, broken plastic cups and trampled pillows and blankets.
Beneath the vacuum of her feet, beneath its metallic stillness and thin, wispy air, she could hear the Atlantic roar in gushing waves. There were waves sending irresistible current to domains inside her own body. Everywhere inside, she could feel strangely distant elements and sounds, vocal and non-vocal compositions conversing with each other, as she watched her own words fly too far off the track. She was a wonder-wounded traveler with restlessness and chill running down her spine, as she looked up at the glaring blue screen that was recording minute details of the local time, the distance from the destination, the local time at the destination.
The flight would land at the John F. Kennedy International airport in a minute’s time, and her husband would be waiting to receive her at the baggage claim area of the international lounge. The young bride from Calcutta stood up and collected her handbag, her file of documents from the upper bunk of the aircraft. In a slow, poised gesture, she approached the gates that opened up the blinding, busy streets of an unknown city, gates where her unforeseen destiny waved at her in charm, stupor and surrendering.

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Lopa Banerjee has completed a Masters’ program in Creative Nonfiction Writing at The University of Nebraska at Omaha. She has written a book-length memoir and also a poetry collection. She is a regular contributor to ‘Cafe Dissensus’ and B’Khush.com. Her poetry, essays, stories and book reviews have also appeared at ‘Fine Lines’, ‘About Place’ journal, ‘Prairie Fire’, ‘Northeast Review’, ‘Indian Review’, ‘River Poets Journal’,’13th Floor Magazine’, ‘The Mind Creative’ and ‘Incredible Women of India’.