Found in a Notebook, ca. 2013-15?, Mumbai.

Lucy

The train station perpetually swarms with people. We take an auto there most days, emerging bright-eyed into the street, past the guards who sit in moulded plastic chairs at the door of the building, through the black iron gate. Sometimes we have to wander towards the main road, eyeing each passing rickshaw for shadowed faces and bright clothes in the black back seat. At the large intersections people approach the autos — women, sometimes in saris, hold out their hands, touch my head in blessing, move their hands to their mouths. Men step up with punnets of strawberries, with toys, postcards and posters. Bicycles sidle past, trays of brown and white eggs tied to their backs. As we approach the station, the mood of the streets seem to change. Shops line the paths. Muslim men in white caps, white kurtas, and long beards, and the women encased in black cloth.

Dated September, 2013.

Lucy

The plane, despite its —— per hour, seemed to creep through the air, orange lights slowly edging along the ground below, growing only infinitesimally closer.

When the plane landed with a rough thud the girls in the seats behind her gasped and giggled. She felt nothing, and contemplated the nothing feeling; evidently it was not the plane ride that could explain the afternoon’s growing anxiety. Really the argument never had made much sense — she was not afraid of flying.

The plane drew slowly towards the terminal. The captain was speaking again; she tuned in to hear him say, ‘…the local time is a quarter to eight…’ A quarter to? They had been due at eight. The plane’s early arrival seemed impertinent, and fifteen minutes of immobility, strapped into the narrow seat, seemed an unbearable proposition. She was hungry, which heightened the sense of discomfort in her core.

Though she usually felt a kind of amused disdain for the passengers who leapt to from their seats the moment the seatbelt lights were extinguished, on this occasion she was quickly on her feet.

As she power-walked up the —— she was glad of her comfortable blue espadrilles.