When Waiting for Someone..

Spoiler Alert: before I even begin writing I have to tell you this is one of those pieces when I don’t know what I writing about and hoping that by the end of the whole activity I will be able to draw some meaning from it.

So the past two days of my life included a whole lot of waiting.. for something and someone..

Like day before when I was flying from Delhi to Bangalore I was at the airport 1 hour early as a result of my exasperated overly anxious nerves I ended waiting on the airport lounge.

So this one hour that I was waiting I didn’t want to hear music scared that I might miss the announcement and I didn’t want to read thinking that I’d get too engrossed and lose trace of time (I did mention before that I was overly nervous as I was travelling absolutely alone for the very time).. so even though it seemed rude I started ogling the people sitting on the bench in front of me.. very discreetly.

First there was an old couple sitting in front of me, the lady was constantly doing something with her hands, like soothing her saree, checking her pursing, cross-checking her boarding card and her husband was looking at her intently as if everything she did held a meaning, after a while he got up and went somewhere… her eyes kept searching for him through the thick crowd of people…

After a say about 10 minutes he reappeared holding two cups of steaming something in his hands (my best guess is coffee).. a big smile engulfed the old lady’s face for a minute I really thought that by this simple gesture that her husband had done she grew a year younger, blushing and looking at him with sheer love..

“Yeh lo.. thodi kum thandi lagegi” the old man simply handed her the cup but in that small gesture I could see that he really knew his wife..

After their drink of coffee the woman sat there content without fidgeting even once.. I was soo surprised.. that the man actually did understand right that his wife was feeling cold due to which she was restless..

Well their flight got announced and they went.. after them came a guy.. OH.MY.GOD.

He really was that punctuated.. I mean ok he wasn’t very tom cruise’ish’ but if he tried a bit he wasn’t all that bad.. what made him really punctuated were his extreme low waist jeans that gave a clear view of this jockeys .. (Ugh.. nothing I’d like to observe there!) and his constant head banging..

I thought he must be listening to some Metallica rhythm to which sometime you really can’t help yourself.. but you can tell what is real and what is make believe.. whenever a girl crossed him he would bend a bit more and start swishing his head harder, though no one gave him a second look but I dread what would have happened if he had gotten any attention.

He was just trying so hard I almost felt bad for the guy but I think he actually thought that he was the coolest guy around.. I mean he definitely needed a reality check.. and just when I was forming an opinion about him he did something I didn’t expect him to.

A few kids were playing around him and one crashed on him sending his extremely expensive iPhone flying in some direction, he immediately got up but the phone had already landed on the floor opened in 2.. for a minute there I thought he would hang the kid but he simply got up picked his phone put it together and switched it on.

The kid who was the other vehicle in this accident was standing where he had crashed very still as if expecting to be slapped this instant, but instead of scolding the kid, the just told him very gently to be careful next time and even offered him his phone to play games so that he doesn’t crash into anything else.

I was almost about to list the guy as a jerk, but he changed my opinion in less than a minute..

So maybe what I’m trying to say is that in one hour of just sitting and looking around I got a chance to share a little part of 4 people’s lives which made me think that we are too quick to pass judgements like, she was restless, he is very careless or that kid is very naughty..

But if you just wait and look there will always be a second part of the story.. a different vantage point waiting for you to look from.. So maybe waiting for the flight wasn’t how I wanted to spend my morning but I did get something out of this.. I got to know (even if from a far) 3 different people I wouldn’t have noticed if I had buried myself in a book, it makes me feel very different, I don’t know if there is a word to describe this feeling. There are so many things I don’t know in the world, so many people I know nothing about… but maybe next time I would reach a different place a little before time just to see how someone else leads his/ her life, to know a little bit about them, to share even though very brief but a moment of their life.