One
of the big, big things about living in desh (country) is that I am only one
short, direct-flight away from baadi (home). Given the law of averages, this
had to happen after 12 years of hopping trans-continental flights for 36 hours
and going through multiple immigration and security checks. I have visited home
about ten times in less than a year now, and every time, I come back with bags
full of cooked food that lasts me a few weeks. If you ever want to know what
you could and should not bring in an airplane, ask me! But more on that later.
This
time, I came back from a crazy mom slaving in the kitchen for days to cook up a
feast-to-go and running after me to take it all. My Aviation-IQ went up after a
comically dark stint with the mango, and if there is one piece of advice I
could give, it is to NEVER take aam pora’r shorbot concentrate (raw mango
concentrate) in an airplane.
Amid
a crazy morning after momma and grandma painstakingly packed me food for an
army, she looked at me with puppy-eyes to take that raw mango concentrate that
I was resisting, the one she had prepared with a lot of love and spices (pepper
powder, mint, and a gazillion other things). I was arguing that I will not
carry anything in a yellow water bottle with something she made to shield me
from the 45 degree Celsius weather and prevent me from getting heat strokes. I
have extremely low karma ratings as far as being a nice child is concerned, so
I finally gave up.
I
don’t know all the chemistry that went into whatever happened, but that bottle
passed airport security miraculously. That same bottle would have led to a
3-hour long interrogation in a dark room in the US, leading up to them labeling
me a budding terrorist and denying me entry for the rest of my life. But I
digress here.
I
boarded the plane and settled in with a rather steamy novel that I was going to
read in the next few hours. As I was stuffing my backpack in the overhead bin,
something prompted me to take that bottle out, lest it leaks. I imagined
everything that could go wrong, and the worst circumstance that came to my rather
unimaginative mind was a loose lid and spillage. I placed that bottle in
between my feet while the airplane took off.
I
knew there was a pop-sound as soon as we were airborne, but I thought it was
someone goofing around and recklessly popping open a can of soda. Looking back
at life in slow motion, most things often make perfect sense. Within the next 5
minutes, just when Jack was about to kiss Stella after 2 months of abstinence
following a one-night stand, there was a louder pop-sound. This time, I looked
below, and to my horror, the bottle had popped open with enough pressure to
spit raw mango pulp all over my white clothes. An onlooker would have wondered how
scared I was of flying that I could shit all over myself publicly in the middle
of the day, the one of the semi-liquid kind, with telltale signs of the yellow
spillage all over me.
I
rushed to the restroom, the bottle in hand. It broke my heart to throw it in
the trashcan, but I could not have salvaged it. I spent the next 20 minutes
wiping the yellow goo off my clothes and sat through the rest of the plane ride
shivering from wearing wet clothes as well as getting dirty, judgmental looks
from the passengers. The swag with which I had entered the aircraft was all
gone. I sat nervously like a mouse for the rest of the ride, praying that I do
not hear another loud pop-sound from the restroom with some poor soul inside
freaking out with their pants half-on and the pilot rerouting the airplane
because there was yellow goo all over the ceiling.
Looking
back, I can see why it was a bad idea to bring something that releases gas in a
pressurized cabin. Mom does not fly, but I do. The rest of me and my food made
it safe, and in case you are dying to know, it had chicken curry with posto,
jhinge posto, potol posto, uchche bhaja, lau er torkari, lichu, jamrul, ruti,
half-a-dozen gondhoraaj lebu, and even the bhaja jeere moshla for the mango
drink. All this because I have a crazy mom who gets powered up listening to
stories of people carrying things like ghee made out of barir gorur doodh
(unadulterated milk from a cow someone keeps in their home), kilos of maach
bhaja, and dhoka’r dalna, and tries to outshine them!
sunshine
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