I look up from my writing and everything is hazy and out of focus - the obvious villagers on the seats opposite, the fair, quite dashing, guy across from me who is seated next to the heavy plain salwar-kameezed woman who is quite certainly his wife.

I've been hammering out the words at high speed in my drunken haze, save for the odd retraction for a typing mistake. In the state I am in, typing mistakes tend to persist through more than one attempt to rectify them - they repeat themselves in subsequent attempts, the hands no longer listening hard to the conscious brain.

I've written all of the above in perhaps two or three minutes. The people behind me still seem to be having the very same conversation in Punjabi that they were having when I began, but I could be wrong - they could have been outside this lounge when I began, waiting in line for a security check, probably feeling very differently from what they are feeling now. There they were still very much in India, waiting in line next to the STD booth and the Nescafe stall, with no air-conditioning. Now they sit in cool black leather chairs waiting for perhaps the first international flight of their lives, the experience of leaving India behind having just begun.

A guy wearing glasses walks past me, still pulling up his fly although he is some thirty meters and three turns from the toilets.

I am going to be sitting next to the window on the flight and hence should make a trip to the washrooms (quite a euphemism, but much less so than "public conveniences") before I embark. We're still a long time from embarking perhaps, but I don't quite trust my judgment right now.

I am on the plane. We're perhaps a half hour into the flight and I've just brought out my laptop. It's been an interesting 30 minutes. 

It all started when I overheard someone say, "Isney to peechey ki seats dey di hain! Sooer ki bachhchi!! Aur keh rahi thi ki flight khaali hai!!".

I could not stop smiling for perhaps 2 minutes.

The time before takeoff... I remember a sensuous female sigh from right behind my seat as we sat perched on the runway... I remember peering into the far upper corner of my window and way beyond to see the unreal reflection of the airhostesses and stewards tending the cabin. I remember one airhostess look sideways at no one in particular while she passed by me, inexplicably swinging her forearm in such a way that her forefinger moved across her nose several times like an inverted rigid pendulum...

The engines looked like porcelain - tea cups came to mind - reflecting deeply the glow from the lights on the craft and the blue pinprick lights of uncertain value that stuck out of the airstrip. And then the craft accelerated, and the engines pushed imperceptibly outwards and upwards from their joins on the wing and vibrated a little less, becoming a little more purposeful as one would have expected them to. Was it my imagination or did the wing change from looking like the bearer of the engines to looking like being borne by the engines? I'm not sure. And within what must have been the shortest takeoff I have experienced, the craft was airborne. 

The bedouin lights of Delhi dropped out of sight in a few seconds... No proud patterns of lights, just scraggly scatterings, disappearing fast... 

And as the air grew thinner, the engines were no longer porcelain but a dull white, with the strips of white metal covering them giving them the look of bandage on a malformed appendage, looking white and elephantine. Then the purposeful climb was over and the plane leveled out. But it seemed the pilot had other plans, and the seatbelts sign remained on for a whole lot longer, while the plane did little that was remarkable.

The signs being turned off set off a chain of thirty-something males (including me, though I am not thirty-something quite yet) heading for the toilets, working their way handhold-by-handhold down the aisles, some quite drunk, slightly embarrassed at having to hold the seats in such a stable transport, and at so obviously needing to go.

One can always tell the frequent flyers from the inexperienced ones. The frequent flyers are the ones who get into their seats and immediately screw shut the air vents above them, who fish out their seat belts from under their bottoms without trouble, who do not press their foreheads against the window plastic (barring some exceptions like me, who still occasionally do so), who do not even glance up to see the safety demonstrations or fumble around in the seat pockets to find the safety cards, who do not need to fiddle around above them to find out just what turns on the light switch, who push back their seats within seconds of take-off. Similarly, they are the ones who know just exactly when the fasten seatbelts sign is turned off and know that this is a signal that they can move about the cabin.

I finally got to see the lady in the seat behind me when I got up to walk to the toilets. She turned out to be a white middle-aged woman with short unkempt hair, quite drowsy and probably asleep already.