Barapani Diary 

My job as an air traffic controller needs me to be posted at small and very small practically non-existent airports for a certain duration of time. In year 2011, one such posting led me to Barapani, an airport around forty kilometres away from Shillong. An entirely different world where from around thousand arrival departures at Delhi airport there was a lone flight to control, that too the flight played truant and missed our airport many days! In the place where my toddler grew up amidst nature, I read, wrote, introspected, reflected, and missed my husband at times!

Check out all episodes of Barapani Diary – https://www.storyberrys.com/category/series/barapani-diary/

Disillusionment (Part 8)

The magic is wearing off, like everything else. This place is losing its exquisiteness.

It is just one of those small villages in our country where newspapers do not reach except for a local one which some days finds its way to the local shops. Khasi language in English script, one of those villages where children walk miles in search of a school where the nearest hospital is some twenty km away, where few Tata Sumos run with people hanging behind as means of public transport, where girls go to the river for washing clothes, where children collect drinking water from roadside taps and huddle containers of water in makeshift carts, where men drink in evening and night, where the concept of street light is redundant, where women give birth to half a dozen babies within the four walls of a home, wherein within the long stretch of unpaved road if any little shop you can find would definitely have ‘kowai’ (local betel nut) if not any trace of other bare necessities of life..

In this land, I stand partly disillusioned partly grounded, partly lonely wondering if I am missing out on life where I spent the last six years but then I never know what I am missing out on, a fiercely competitive manipulative professional life in the city, where relationships even if manage to find a place, longevity gets shorter, nothing survives here, save a hunger for success and family life, where baby, husband maid, parents, friends all strive for a place and I long for space and continue with a super balance act.

And here in this land, one can have all the space one longs for and more. So much space that loneliness creeps into the soul in one form or another. That’s it then- solitude and bliss turning to hard-hitting loneliness from which there is no respite, there I go, sounding frustrated, lonely lending substance to the term ‘tenure’ or ‘unpopular posting’.

The lush green of August has given way to a hazy dusty February where spring is hardly tangible, wrapped in warm sunny days and cool chilly nights. The hills seem too long for rains, pine trees looking high in the sky and to me, the magic of the hills does not work anymore, like the magic of the newfound love giving way to routine indifference, a nonchalance owing to the loneliness bug digging into the soul, the Wanderlust giving way to a longing for ‘home’.

All said and done, if all works well I would be’ home’ after a few months and my ‘airport’ would have all new admirers. All for a year -loving, hating, fleeing, some will be cast in its spell, some will be drawn and disillusioned, some will simply not fall into the trap and I wouldn’t be there to see (in high probability).

I would be ‘home’ and the residue of ‘Wanderlust’ in me in lone lost moments would build by bits and parts, a picture, an image of a bewitching beautiful lonely airport in the laps of rain-kissed August green hills, my tiny tower and the thatched ‘Meera’s Tea Shop’ lurking behind, providing oxygen to one and all, well-ironed uniform clad airliners, kowai chewing red-lipped labourers, lazy without work Sarkari babus, hunger thirst driven passengers searching for a cup of tea in days where flight gets delayed indefinitely…!

Soma Bhattacharjee