Prof Swaraj’s engaging narrative, for Different Truths, blends the exhaustion of modern air travel with philosophical wit, capturing a “comedy of errors” stopover in London.
If your plane lands at Heathrow at around 12.30 pm GMT after more than a ten-hour flight from San Francisco, your watches – and your bodies – tend to go haywire. While smart watches know how to self-correct once connected to the internet, no such tech fixes are available for your internal clocks. With your sleep cycle thrown off, you are left out of sync with the day-night time cycle, a phenomenon euphemistically called ‘jet lag’. And once you are jet-lagged, you realise that zombies are not to be found in films only; the zombie spirit can possess the jet-lagged too.
This is exactly what happened on October 31 last year. In order to avoid a sixteen-hour direct flight from San Francisco to New Delhi, we decided to have a one-night stopover in London. Well, nobody can ever predict how some outlier event may play the spoilsport to unsettle all your plans, just as our carefully organised stopover turned out to be so weirdly distressing as it did.
We boarded the plane at San Francisco airport on 30th September. The plane took off at 6.45 pm Pacific Daylight Time. The entire ten-and-a-half-hour flight took place with the internal clock set for the night. But sleep eluded me for several reasons. The three most apparent ones being a cup of black coffee, frequent announcements of air turbulence and the vegetarian food we had opted for, which tasted neither English nor Indian. Well, the fact is that my travel history was also not in my favour. All my past experiences of nighttime flights had proved wrong the Urdu poet Khamosh Ghazipuri’s claims of our willing surrender to sleep when it overpowers us, irrespective of wherever and in whatever circumstances we may be. According to Ghazipuri:
नींद तो दर्द के बिस्तर पे भी आ सकती है
उन की आग़ोश में सर हो ये ज़रूरी तो नहीं
(Sleep can conquer even on a bed of thorns / it isn’t necessary to be resting in the beloved’s lap.)
Uncharted Horizons
How I wish that on long flights, sleep conquers me and I can snatch a few moments of rest! It is during such moments that the unconscious, freed from the shackles of the will, embarks upon flights to hitherto uncharted horizons, much higher than the altitude at which the planes fly! Alas, the sleep’s treachery is a living nightmare that I am forced to suffer whenever I undertake a long flight! Nothing helps, neither melatonin, a sleep therapist once recommended, nor the sleep masks and the earplugs that come at considerable cost at the airports!
Finally, after a long sleepless night, came the announcement at around 11.45 AM British Summer Time that the landing process had begun. The plane touched the tarmac at 12.20 pm. We waited for the announcement to deboard. After waiting fifteen minutes for the signal to deboard, a period that seemed like an eternity, another announcement was made that the airbridge door was stuck and a service engineer was working to fix it. There was no mention of how long it would take to overcome the willful door’s defiance. But yes, there were apologies galore for the unexpected delay. With nothing to do, not that there was something to do during the flight, too, I sank again into my cramped economy seat.
Stuck for fifteen minutes waiting for the airbridge door to open, I realised that the time spent waiting to disembark a plane is the longest period in a person’s life. Though dulled by the rigours of the journey, the mind was still restless and willing to wander in all directions. I did allow it all the freedom to rove from pain in an unexpected, uncomplaining quarter – the tailbone or the coccyx in the medical parlance, to the broader human condition. The intermittent pain pulses from the vestige of a tail lost long ago in evolving from primates to humans reminded me not only that I had treated it badly, but also that we may never shed our animal past despite many trappings of civilisation.
Our Animal Past
The painful intimations of our animal past from the coccyx – a word with roots in the Greek word Kokkyx that proclaims the bone’s resemblance to a Cuckoo’s beak – illuminates our inherently aggressive, competitive and territorial nature. The Cuckoo may have been glamorised as a singing virtuoso by many a poet, yet it is a bird notorious for being a heartless brood parasite. And let us remember that all birds, from the most tuneful songsters to the most beautiful, are the modern, miniature versions of dinosaurs. We, too, carry within us remnants of our own animal past that link us to dinosaurs. The scramble for outpacing each other on the narrow aisle when deboarding began was stark proof of our instinctual, competitive one-upmanship.
Finally, we stepped out of the plane and stood in a long queue for the final rigmarole – the immigration check. So much for the world being a global village! Then to the baggage carousel and lastly, after walking unending corridors and on moving walkways, we came out of the Heathrow airport. By 3 PM, we were in our hotel room on the Bath Road. Tired and feeling sleepy, we decided against taking a nap. The only way to combat the exhaustion of the flight and the jet lag is to stay awake during the time of daylight and rest in the darkness. After a refreshing cup of Earl Grey tea with some snacks, we waited for a restful night. A light dinner at the Indian Restaurant Zayani near our hotel made the stomach chime and sent sleep signals to the brain. We retired to bed at 9.30 PM. The phone wake-up alarm was set for 3.30 AM. Our onward flight to New Delhi the next morning, being at 8.45 AM, we had to reach the airport at 5.45 AM.
Dark Secrets
Now, that the nights can be full of dark secrets, we all know. It is time for restful sleep, dreams and nightmares, for creatures of the night such as owls and vampires, ghosts and spirits – at least in Shakespeare’s works – to come out, time for robberies, and romantic escapades of desperate lovers. And time, we realised in hindsight, for an uncanny strobe-sounder to go off when we were slumbering away in a London hotel after a coccyx-irritating, thousands of miles long nighttime flight from one time zone to another. This is how the night unfolded at 11 PM when we were rudely jolted out of sleep by a high-pitched, ear-piercing strobe-sounder radiating from behind the bedstead. High-decibel, pre-recorded messages too were warning of a fire in the hotel.
Still groggy from sleep, I was trying to figure out what was happening when, rubbing her eyes, my wife thundered, “Hadn’t you set the alarm at 3.30? Look at the time! It’s 11. When will you learn to handle intelligent devices intelligently?”
“This isn’t the wake-up alarm. It’s something else.”
She looked at me in utter disbelief.
“No, it isn’t the alarm I had set.” By this time, I had come to my senses. “This is a fire siren. We’re being evacuated.”
“But why and where to?”
“It’s an emergency. The hotel is on fire, and we’ll be burnt alive if we don’t evacuate! Let’s go! We’ve to take the first exit.”
In a Daze
She looked at me, as if in a daze. But the commotion in the corridor suggested that the trouble was real. Dragging ourselves out of our beds, we stumbled barefoot to open the door and went into the corridor. Announcements for immediate evacuation, much louder in the corridor, conveyed desperate urgency. All panic-stricken guests, out in their gowns and nighty outfits, were lumbering like zombies towards the first exit, wherever the first exit was. Surprisingly, there was no smoke anywhere, no sign of anyone choking. I asked an English-speaking old woman who was telling someone to hurry up, “Is it a false alarm, or is the hotel really on fire?” She looked at me from head to toe with a puzzled expression as if seeing an apparition from another world. “I dunno not know,’ she said nonchalantly, and moved on. This was not the right time to linger on her quirky lingo in this land of the Queen’s English. Her puzzling look, nevertheless, made me conscious of my own appearance.
Now imagine a barefoot, bareheaded Sikh guy in his late sixties dressed in pyjamas standing in the corridor! A loosely tied topknot, flowing hoary beard, long moustaches – one curled upwards like that of the Air India mascot Maharaja’s, and the other one drooping downwards like a small cascade! What a wonderful sight I must have been! To look more like an inhabitant of this world, I made a dash to our room, put on a cap, slipped my feet into bathroom slippers, slung my camera backpack on my shoulder – my most precious possession, and joined the zombie parade making its way towards the first exit. In those two or three minutes that took us to the coveted first exit, my focus shifted sharply to our mortality. All the horrifying TV visuals of the hotels turned into infernos that I had seen, and of people jumping from the windows to save themselves from being charred alive, blazed across my mind. No, I couldn’t jump. I would rather wait to be rescued till my last breath. How life becomes intense when we confront the only irrefutably certain destiny of ours! I was already counting the number of mourners! I looked at my wife and found her calm and composed, as she usually is, except when awakened abruptly from deep sleep.
A Cry Wolf Moment
When we reached the nearest exit, the siren and announcements stopped. It turned out to be a false alarm, a sort of cry wolf moment. Heaving not one sigh, but many sighs, we trudged back to our rooms. But by then, the sleep had deserted us. The rest of the night was a living, mad dream. Tossing and turning in the bed, I kept thinking about what would have happened if the zombie parade hadn’t turned out to be a mock drill. Since we were not able to sleep, I switched off the wake-up alarm. At 5.30 in the morning, too early for a regular breakfast, we left the hotel. We were handed some packaged food by way of an apology for breakfast. A parting gift from the hotel.
Exhausted and sleep-deprived, we were once again on a plane at 8.15. It was an Air India plane this time, for a nine-hour flight aided by tailwind. The incommodious economy seat was again as merciless to my coccyx as the previous one in the British Airliner. Our seats near the wings offered some comfort against the air turbulence. But the cost in terms of the engine noise was disproportionately high. Virtually no sleep again. Just sensations of drifting into sleep, only to be jerked back into zombie wakefulness by hypnagogic pulsations. When the plane landed in Delhi, we had crossed another time zone. It was 12.30 AM, IST.
Then a six-hour cab ride from there to home. Sleep came in short snatches in the cab like hallucinations. Tottering like zombies into our home in the morning, we found ourselves falling asleep in our chairs throughout the day. But couldn’t sleep at night. The jet lag induced temporal disharmony at its worst. And the culprit, a tiny organ in the brain, is named the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus – SCN for short. It had got irritated for reasons best known to it. Now that air travel is so common, one wonders why the SCN hasn’t shrunk and become vestigial like the coccyx! The mysterious ways of evolution, huh? The zombie spirit persisted for a week. Only when it left us did we rediscover the art of sleeping soundly at night.
Picture design by Anumita Roy
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