Poor visibility meant that there was to be no flight that morning but I chose to wait it out at Biratnagar Airport. I had received tika from Anshu Aama, hugged Dai goodbye, shaken umpteen male hands along the way and watched the rain. The Narayan Gopal song, Bisera jaun kasari aaja, had been endlessly played before I left. And there was no way I could go back and do all that again the next day. The arrival of a government minister for the delayed flight speeded things up but I wasn’t impatient. If I could sit on the right hand side I would soon be watching a regular Thursday morning unfold across the Himalayas.
Tarai airports all tend to look the same: entrance lined with trees, well worn airport buildings next to a control tower, odd scattered junk in the round and about, large signs telling you the elevation, always-on fans inside the waiting area and similar-sized luggage trolleys (must rest tipped during the monsoon). Admittedly not every airport had, in a former spot, been part of a plane hijacking plot (allegedly masterminded by a future Prime Minister).
And something was unusual on the day I left too: the passenger crowd looked different. The rotund, older male businessman or NGO worker was still present of course, perhaps accompanied by his wife and children too, but there was also a large and exotic gaggle of Japanese and Europeans, election observers all, heading back to Kathmandu to confer and later pronounce credibility.
The flight would be memorable as I was leaving but I doubted that my fellow passengers would consider it special. For a select few in the world flying is similar to catching a bus and airports are, at best, glorified bus parks, places to pass through and barely tolerate. World-weary travelers, bounding from country to country, often end up hating airports—and their wasted time in them—and make sure everyone knows it. In Nepal too the long history of regional flights has made the internal experience mundane and routine for many. In the 1960s travel writer Dervla Murphy was shocked to see how accessible air travel was to visibly poor Nepalis queuing up to use the then RNAC from Pokhara.
But, when writing in praise of airports, journalist A.A. Gill noted something partly true: “For most of the world, airports are the portals of hope and advancement and anticipation and amazing good luck.” Viewing the daily exodus of nervous baseball cap-wearing manpower groups from Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) will confirm hope, advancement and anticipation in spades. Often all the pride and finances of a family has been staked on gaining a good return abroad, though the reality of service, labour and drudgery may disappoint.
The foreign election observers’ loud and multi-lingual chatter in the waiting area also reminded me of the slightly surreal and other-worldly quality of most airports. Gill called airports between places, our modern “caravanserai oases” and they can be portals to other alien worlds, sites of strange or amusing happenings too. In Nepal TIA (number one objective: ‘To ensure safe, efficient and orderly movement of Air Traffic’) has seen in the last few weeks alone a story about the removal of pockets from the trousers of airport staff, then a media scrum to welcome an apparent Belayati Goddess, followed by the scrapping of the tradition of girls from Bal Mandir orphanage waiting for and receiving heads of state as the Panchakanya.
Maybe TIA is particularly vulnerable to the weird and wonderful. I hope people took note of the threat last month from Gautam Sapkota of Makwanpur. He claims to be able to imitate the calls of 175 different kinds of birds, and, unless the government assists him in his quest for Guinness Book of Records recognition, he will “call a large number of birds to the airport and affect the flights by asking the crows to fly over the sky”. Apparently the crow gang is already on his side, having responded to his call in Tundikhel last year. Let us see if an avian drama and ‘bird strike’ is added to the list of airport oddities.
Besides this, anybody passing through at TIA can still witness the daily dramas of human life mainly through great, large and moving family send-offs as someone leaves for study, work or a combination of the two. Here the economic realities of being a labour-exporting nation heavily reliant on remittances hit home and take on personal meaning. Statistics become real and the day it is your turn to fly away can never be just an ordinary, small, forgettable and unemotional bus-like trip. I am usually upset at leaving Nepali friends but I can, relatively easily, come and go. The inequality of air travel denies that freedom to most departing Nepalis, many of whom are considered lucky to go and have only vague or employer-arranged ideas of when they will return.
Hub airports are, it has to be said, even more unreal sites compared to normal international airports. Travellers emerge blinking, typically somewhere in the Gulf, into brightly-lit domes of hyper-expectancy where the global financial priesthood of Arabs, in flowing robes, share elbow and sitting room with tourists and labour migrants from across the world. Caravanserai indeed! In some ways no one really owns airports. They are—to jargonise—transnational spaces: reflecting something of their host country but also adapting to others from everywhere who—temporarily—wait, sleep on seats, share food, chatter and dream.
3 comments:
Interesting article.
Just a minor point, you say that no one owns and airport, well, my friend, if you were brown and migrating to the north, you'd know very well who owns the airports.
thanks for commenting wiaovw! i was talking more about ownership of waiting space in airports (prefaced also by 'in some ways') rather than real ownership of the building. i mentioned the inequality of air travel but there is obviously other things to be written on that - security checks and the entry process in particular.
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