Patna airport. Angry passenger, a tonsured man, shouts at a kind staff who offered to put their luggage on the conveyor belt. Aapse koi bola madad karne, he yells. Did anyone ask you to help me? Silence falls. Only mosquitoes buzz. Space crunch, even at 6 am. Chairs, old & rickety. CRPF staff wishing muffled good mornings to each other, not used to speaking in English. Women in saree, women in hijab, women in salwar, women in jeans. Kids, too energetic despite no morning coffee. Lots of Bengaluru-bound IT engineers in bermudas and flip-flops immersed in their phones.
There’s no hurry among the passengers to leave this city. They have gotten used to its slow pace. I arrived at 5.30 am for a 9 am flight, skipped going to grandma’s in Kankarbagh. I didn’t want the hurry as I left this city, a city that moves back in time for me than forward. A city of family & fundamentalists, a city of boredom & banter, a city of the old & the forgotten. A city that wishes its children that have escaped its fate to return but doesn’t have the words to engage them in a meaningful conversation, to make them stay in this leftover of a city. It’s a city that has escaped death only to become irrelevant.
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