The Other Side of the Wall
I was twenty-three when I first stood outside an airport and wanted in.
It was Jaipur. I had brought some teenagers with me — young, curious, full of energy — and I thought, why not show them something they had never seen up close. A plane. A real one, landing or taking off, the noise and the size of it. I went to the security personnel with the most reasonable request I could think of. The kids just want to watch, I told him. Just for a few minutes.
He said no.
I looked at the kids. They looked at me. And then someone spotted a tree near the boundary wall and without much discussion, that became our plan.
We climbed it. A group of people with nowhere else to go, pulling themselves up branch by branch outside an airport in Jaipur, squinting over a wall that had been built too high for anyone to see over from the ground. We could see one plane on the ground, just barely. It was far away, half hidden, not taking off or landing, just sitting there. Not quite the magic I had promised.
We climbed down. Nobody said much. The wall had won.
Ten years passed the way ten years do. Life moved, filled up, kept going. But somewhere quietly in the back of my mind, that wall stayed.
I was thirty-three when I went to Amritsar airport. This time I was alone. This time I had a ticket.
But here is the thing about holding a dream for ten years — when it finally arrives, some part of you cannot fully believe it is real.
I stood outside the airport and thought, I am actually going inside. I kept thinking it. I am actually going inside. It did not feel real. It felt like the opening scene of a film — because for ten years, airports had only existed for me in films. I had watched them on screen, those wide bright spaces with people moving purposefully in every direction, and I had thought, that is another world. And now I was standing at the entrance of that world and I did not even know where the door was.
I had to ask someone. He pointed me in the right direction, kindly, probably not knowing what a significant question that was for me. I found the entrance. I walked through.
Then came the checking, the queues, the small procedures of air travel that frequent flyers find routine and that I found quietly thrilling. And then I was through, and I was in the waiting area, and my flight still had time, and I sat down and watched everything around me — the departures board, the announcements, the people with their bags and their destination — and I thought, I am here. I am actually here.
Time moves strangely when you are living inside a moment you have imagined for a decade. I had expected the wait to feel long. It disappeared.
Then they called us and we walked out and boarded a shuttle bus that drove us across the tarmac and when the bus stopped and the doors opened I stepped out and there it was.
A plane. Right in front of me. Not on a screen, not glimpsed from a tree over a high wall, not a shape disappearing into the sky above Jaipur. A real plane, enormous and close, standing on the ground waiting.
I could not believe my eyes.
I had waited ten years for this and no preparation I could have done would have been enough for the feeling of standing in front of it. We boarded. I found my seat. I buckled in. And when the engines began and the plane started to move and then to accelerate and then to lift — when the ground fell away and the world outside the window began to tilt and shrink — something shifted inside me that I do not have a precise word for.
I pressed my face close to the window and watched the earth drop below us. The city becoming small. The roads becoming lines. The whole world rearranging itself into something seen from above.
And in that moment, in the light coming through that window, I saw them.
Not really. Not literally. But I saw them.
Those kids from Jaipur, and my own younger self standing among them, all of them looking up, all of them smiling, all of them waving. And they were saying what they had waited ten years to say — you waited for this. You kept it with you all this time. And now look. Now look where you are.
I smiled back at them. At myself. At all that waiting.
Enjoy it, they said.
I did.
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