Vienna International Airport is interestingly small. I knew the ‘small’ part of it beforehand. The whole airport, though being divided into five terminals and displaying a confident sort of busyness, has the standard set of Duty Free stores to offer. However, the ‘interesting’ bit is something I think will remain so only for a few people. When I took off from Stockholm’s Arlanda, I did not know that my connecting flight to Dubai had been canceled, and that I had been rebooked into the 23.15 – a flaw that left me looking at a stale 10-hours of waiting and watching the clock tick slowly away. An SAS employee at a help desk informed me about all this later on – but what made the difference was that she really seemed sorry that Austrian Airlines hadn’t informed me earlier on, and of course, the free food coupons! Anyway, I landed at Vienna with nothing to do at all and, for the first time in 20 years, realised how important spending time usefully actually was. In those ten hours, I must have spent at least five walking up and down the longer span of the airport. The other five, I spent looking out a window. And that’s what made it interesting.
The window looked out into an area where the planes seemed to be docked. The runway was a little way ahead, and that particular afternoon, it was very foggy and wet. If I looked beneath, I could see the engineers bustling around with all their equipments and waiting for aircraft engines to go faulty or the wings freeze up. This window was exactly opposite a shop whose banner read ‘Travel & Care’, and they played good music. When I came across the window, Annie Lennox’s ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down‘ was going on, and my calf muscles were beginning to ache. I decided to lean against the railing set adjacent to the wall, and when I saw a couple photographing something out the window, I turned around for a abstractly beautiful view. The metal birds were dozing while the brains ran around them in their trucks and what-nots. There was a group of crows in the distance, dancing with the wind. A parking lot below was full of cars except for one empty slot, into which was revving a black car. The vipers on its windshield were on full swing, and its indicators flashed into the blockade brightly. A gentle drizzle began just then, and if you had been there and put face against the window, you could each raindrop crash and slide against the perspex. It was like watching through a prison cell: as each drop landed, it was like watching a battle just a few inches away from your eyes. So much torment and turbulence at the other end, and you stood here admiring a beauty that only you could see. It was beautiful.
The song changed to Green Day’s ‘Wake Me Up‘. Just then, on the runway, an Emirates jet was building momentum for its ascent. Its end fin cut through the fog as though it wasn’t there, and the dense cold clouds formed a smooth streamlined tail at the end. After the plane took off, all that remained was a streak of water suspended limply in the air, along with billows of dew that had been whipped off the ground. September ended there, and when I looked up, there was a lonely crow flying around in circles.
“Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last…“
It’s amazing how music can deliver new perspectives every time it’s played, and it’s more amazing how each of these perspectives is different. The battle of the rain drops to crash and break through the window to the inner warmth of the lounge had me wanting me to elbow and bleed my way to the cold torment outside. The sense of freedom, for me, never had anything to with being comfortable, but always had to do with doing what I liked to do. The satsifaction it imparted, the gratification it rewarded, was and will always be overwhelming. And as I’ve before too, nature has a way of showing us these things so subtly, while we sardonic ‘intelligent beings’ mostly mistake them for coincidence or ill-concealed naivety and ignore them. Sometimes, in our need to seem mature and sane, we look beyond the obvious and land ourselves in more chaos. But I guess that’s a necessary evil.
When the Emirates jet ascended, the only remaining signs of its presence were the water clouds hanging a few feet above the runway, and probably some log sheets in the control tower. If I had had a love song with me then and there, one that I had composed and sung to, the picture in front of me would have been the music video for it. The crows flying around the place as though not knowing what to do or what to make of the great white bird sitting beneath which didn’t respond to their bird calls, the black car revving itself into the empty parking slot nonchalantly and as, at the same time, it had nothing to with the bustle around it and its driver being the key to setting everything right in that area, the rain drops and their ceaseless pounding wanting me to belong to a seemingly worse world. Music and nature are some enigmas, and will remain so for quite some time to come.
Vienna International Airport was a ghost town that evening, and I was happy to be an ethereal part of it – if only to myself and to those unconcerned crows.
Clathration Therapy 