| Username |
Post |
| arnico |
Posted
on 23-Dec-01 12:49 PM
[I wrote this several years ago... the recent wave of fiction on kurakani inspired me to dig it up and post it. I hope it brings back memories to anyone who has spent a monsoon morning at Pokhara airport...especially before the current terminal building was opened]
Slowly the pauses increased between the drops of rainwater falling off the lowest propeller blade. The roaring downpour had slowed to a drizzle, and then stopped completely, leaving just the plip-plop sound of individual drops. The grass growing between the gravel was completely submerged, under a large sheet of water that was beginning to reflect the first light of dawn. Drops falling off the wings, the tail, the nosetip and the fuselage of the airplane made rings that extended increasingly far before the next drop disturbed them.
A flock of birds started chirping on the nearby pipal tree, and from beyond came the sound of a car apparently honking at every puddle on the road. Lal Bahadur woke up from his dream. He was crouching above an aircraft wheel, on a piece of metal that extended out horizontally and then down. He knew it was the lid that swings shut after the aircraft pulls the wheel in when taking off. He had seen these lids swing shut many times while standing guard at the end of the runway watching airplanes soar over his head and disappear into the distance.
In the morning his job was to prevent people, cows and stray dogs from wandering onto the runway. He would start when it was still dark, when not even the tea seller was up, and walk the entire airport perimeter looking for holes in the fence. He was just returning from that round when the rain had begun. At first he had tried to run back to the terminal, but then, realizing that he would arrive drenched, he had taken shelter under the nearest aircraft wing. As the water on the ground had risen above his ankles, he had fled onto that lid above the Dornier's wheel. It was slippery and uncomfortable, but at least there was some dry space. He regretted that after nine years at the airport he still did not know how to open aircraft doors from outside. Otherwise he would now be comfortably asleep on the seat that was inside the little window next to his face, behind the triple sheets of plexiglass. Or perhaps he would have gone to sit on the pilot's seat and pretended for a moment that he was a pilot. At one time he had wanted to become a pilot. It must have been around the time he was in fourth grade, when his friend had told him about pilots. But then his father had died, and their farm had been too small to support the family, so his mother had sent him down to Pokhara to earn some money. Through the connections of an acquaintance from the village he found his first job job scrubbing dishes and floors at a lakeside hotel. After a few years he had been hired as a watchman at another hotel, and then he had gotten this job at the airport.
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| arnico |
Posted
on 23-Dec-01 12:50 PM
[cont]
Lal Bahadur looked at the expanse of water around him, and reluctantly took off his shoes. Wading back towards the terminal, he passed several rows of blue fiberglass seats under the pipal tree. There was a puddle on every seat. Why, he wondered, do passengers call this area the transit hall? Doesn't the word hall refer to a place inside a building or at least under a roof? The foreigners who waited here on sunny days -- the ones traveling from Jomsom to Kathmandu who waited here for their aircraft to be refueled -- they apparently liked the fact that the transit hall was an outdoor area rather than part of a building. "This is the best transit hall in the world" one smiling Amlikan had told him long ago while gazing back and forth between the nearby airplanes and the tree canopy overhead. Now Lal Bahadur stood at the same spot and looked back and forth between the tree overhead the airplane silhouettes reflecting in the water. A big drop hit him in the face.
Outside the fence behind the pipal tree he could hear a car arriving, and then another, and then several voices, both Nepali and foreign. Perhaps the tea seller had arrived. Lal bahadur ducked through a hidden hole in the fence and walked over to the airport parking lot. Two taxis had stopped in front of the terminal door, surrounded by a dozen people who were obviously arguing. From afar he could count three foreigners, based on the flashiness of their jackets. Coming closer, he saw that the taxi drivers were trying to unload the bags onto the ground while an elderly foreign couple was frantically putting them back in the trunks. A young foreign man was translating between English and broken Nepali explaining that the elderly woman meant what she said: that no bag of hers will be put in the puddle, that the bags will stay right there in the car trunk until they can be put somewhere dry. The taxi drivers had already been paid; they wanted to leave.
Finally as the clanging of dishes became louder and the sweet smell of tea wafted through the group, the drivers relented and turned off the engines. Everyone drifted over to the tea stall at the corner of the parking lot -- to the little shack built from flattened tin cans nailed onto a wooden frame. "Vegetable oil" one can proudly proclaimed upside down, while another one said "Nebico Biscuits" in faded letters, unintentionally advertising something actually sold inside. A man in his thirties sat on a mat on the raised floor of the stall, in front of shelves displaying biscuits, chocolates, and chewing gum. In front of him roared a kerosene stove, under a big pot of tea. "Did you finish washing them?" he shouted, and a timid little boy snuck around the corner from behind the shack, carrying ten dripping glasses pinched together with one finger inside each.
Soon everyone was happily sipping tea . The elderly foreign woman looked at her watch, and asked the younger foreign man, "Tom, can you ask what is going on? Didn't you say that the latest check-in time is 5:30 a.m.? Now it is already 5:43!" Tom looked at the luggage sitting in the open cab trunks and at the padlocked door of the terminal building. Interrupting a lively conversation between the tea seller and the cab drivers, he asked where the check-in counter staff was.
"Are you Japanese or Isreali?" they replied.
"Neither."
Tom repeated his original question. The tea seller stretched, stepped out of the stall and looked up at the low clouds. "In bed" he replied. "Can't you see that no plane will fly in this weather?"
"Lal Bahadur? Lal Bahadur, bring the key," a voice shouted from across the parking lot. Lal Bahadur gulped down his last sip of tea, fished for a key in his pocket, and ran towards an approaching man who was wearing a white shirt and a tie. Several more passengers had arrived in the meantime, and to go unlock the terminal entrance Lal Bahadur had to climb over the luggage that they had piled onto the two steps in front of the door.
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| arnico |
Posted
on 23-Dec-01 12:51 PM
An hour later all Jomsom bound passengers sat crowded together in the tiny departure hall of Pokhara Airport, frequently glancing back and forth between their watches and the two turboprop aircraft outside the window. Although the puddles around the planes had shrunk considerably, dark menacing clouds still hung low over the valley, obscuring the tops of nearby hills -- the same hills above which the snowcapped peaks of Annapurna towered on the postcards. No one bought the postcards displayed in the little shop at the back of the departure hall. Passengers just looked at them while asking the vendor when the flights would leave. Not for several hours, he would tell them, pointing at the clouds outside of the window and hoping to do brisk business selling tea for three times the price at which he bought it at the stall outside.
Passengers were allowed to go in and out of the domestic departure hall, but few knew. Most assumed that the curtained entrance where policemen and policewomen rummaged through their handbags and frisked their bodies from ear to ankle represented a one-way path. So they remained squeezed together on the little benches, even as the flight delay entered its second hour. Sixty eight eyes intently watched the activity around the two airplanes outside for signs of imminent departure. A man came, opened the door of the Mustang Air plane, and left again. A black and a brown male dog pursued a little brown female dog past the door, underneath one aircraft and on beyond. A man with a walkie talkie walked once around the Royal Airlines plane, and left again. The two male dogs got into a fight on the other side of the runway. A fuel truck drove up and stopped between the planes. A third male dog appeared, urinated onto the Mustang Air plane's front wheel, and ran to join the fight.
[to be continued some day... comments welcome]
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| Paschim |
Posted
on 24-Dec-01 12:02 PM
Arnico, very well written and promising. An elegantly simple theme woven around carefully observed and beautifully recorded details. Do continue.
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| Biswo |
Posted
on 26-Dec-01 12:44 PM
Arnicoji:
I enjoyed reading your story. I don't think I am the right person to evaluate the
story, but , hey, I enjoyed your partial story a lot.
Waiting for another part.
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