Chapter Forty-Five
NASH
“Welcome aboard Flight 102 to New Delhi, India. Please turn your attention to your flight attendants as they demonstrate the safety procedures…”
Nash listened as the attendants described what to do in an emergency landing, paying attention to the lilt of the Hindi translation and remembering how Kiran sounded when she spoke it.
And after the longest flight he’d ever been on, over 48 hours after speaking with Kiran and realizing she loved him too, he landed in her motherland.
He had hardly slept, with an older gentleman snoring next to him through the entire flight. Nash had stayed alert, watching movies on the screen in front of him and reading journal articles he’d saved to his laptop.
As they descended on India, Nash could only see an expanse of twinkling lights reaching the horizon. He’d followed the journey on the tracking map on the screen, and from the moment they had crossed the border into India, the lights had become visible below.
Kiran had always mentioned that India was packed to the brim, but Nash never completely understood what that meant until he saw veined patterns of highways and villages and towns from above. No land had been spared from human touch.
The flight culminated in the longest taxi of his life before they finally pulled up to the gate. Then he stepped off the plane into the strongest combination of smells he had ever witnessed.
Weed, dust, and incense, Kiran had once mentioned to him, and he had chuckled at the odd description. But now, he understood.
The heat was stifling, even at night. Humidity turned the air into a thick wall of moist air, and Nash could swear he was wading through it as he wheeled his carry-on through the airport.
The customs line took an outrageous amount of time. Only a few booths were open, odd considering the sheer number of people who had descended from their aircraft into the marble lobby.
One by one, each person was called forward, interrogated about their intentions, and sent through to the duty-free stores on the other side. Nash noticed the stares of some of the people around him and felt conscious of his white skin. While others were mostly shades of gold and oil, he stuck out like a sore thumb.
Was this how Kiran and her friends felt every day?
The customs officer glared at him with some suspicion as he passed through the line, but when Nash pulled himself up to full height, the officer let him through without much fuss.
Immediately upon exiting the building, he was ambushed by taxi drivers.
“Sir! Sir! Taxi? Follow me!” A number of drivers accosted him, attempting to buy out his business in their luxury cars.
Taxi stands every hundred feet were swarmed with more people who were trying to rent official cabs. Judging by the yellow upper half and black lower half, Nash guessed these were the equivalent of the Yellow Cabs in New York.
Payal had put a hotel room on her credit card for Nash, using her Marriott points. While Nash had tried to fight her on it, she said it was for love and that she expected a thank-you at their wedding someday, arguing until Nash gave in. She’d also told him to look out for a cab driver with his name on a card.
Payal had thought of everything.
As Nash got swept away in the crowd of people pouring out of the terminal and into the waiting crowd, he spotted a sign held by a neatly dressed man.
N. HAWTHORNE.
“How was your flight, sir?” asked the driver.
“It was good,” Nash said. “It’s definitely different here.”
The driver, named Mohammad, gave him a polite smile and nodded.
Small talk wasn’t much of a thing here, apparently.
Mohammad led him to a neat Honda and drove him a short distance away from the airport to the JW Marriott hotel. When Nash entered, the enormous lobby reminded him of the places he’d stayed in the United States, and immediately he felt less like a stranger and more like a vacationer.
Maybe that was what Kiran meant…that he’d centered himself as an American in his view of the world and associated it with good things, rather than recognizing the beauty in other traditions.
It was already 11:00 p.m., and Nash couldn’t wait to hit the bed before he found Kiran in the morning.