Notes on Space (3): Waiting Lounge, Departure Area, Bandaranaike International Airport

For Rs. 500, at the visitor’s lounge in the departure area of the Bandaranaike International Airport, you can purchase a few more minutes with a loved one about to leave the country. At the security barrier that divides the travellers from the left-behinds, a security guard can be coaxed to let the traveller return to the barrier after they’ve checked in their luggage and borrow time with their loved ones just before they part ways. Every interaction at this barrier is painfully public and is corralled by time. 

We are a motley bunch, the left-behinds. A blue checked handkerchief mops up wet eyes. Prayers are said. There are children, so many children. Lately in Sri Lanka, there are weekly news reports about migration. We are told the number of passports issued daily has increased. That frayed people are moving out in search not of greener pastures but at least less morally and financially bankrupt pastures. That Sri Lanka is more vulnerable to unsafe migration. Every month I count the losses in friends and family circles. I have lost close friends over the years, with more quietly filing paperwork without much fanfare. In the departure lounge, there are tears, stiff upper lips, trembling lower lips, furrowed brows, jokes, advice, banter, irritation, anxiety. Crisp notes and parting advice are exchanged across the barrier between a sister and brother. Items from excess baggage are offloaded in a flurry. Eyes dart at the electronic boards, scanning flights and statuses. In another corner, there is a pause; a husband and wife caress and hold hands across the silver barrier for a long time. Their hands are pressed together, her shawl slips forward veiling her face, their murmurs are low and urgent. They stand there with their hands clasped for half an hour. 

While S checks in, I pace up and down. I have missed the energy of airports. My travel within the country has slowed down. It has been four years since I have travelled overseas. I remember the trip vividly. Bangalore for M’s wedding. I spent a week in Bangalore hesitantly airing the dusty Hindi phrases I picked up during undergrad days in Delhi. The clogged traffic lived up to its fame. Shocks of golden Tabebuia argentea blotted the city. M’s wedding was joyous, filled with some of the best food I have had. I walked and walked, allowing myself to get lost and recede into the folds of the city and spent a week in Ko’s capable hands, welcomed, well-fed and watered and was dispatched home with a warm glow and a book which remains one of my favourite reads to date. 

This was before Easter attacks, before COVID, before economic crises. During the early years of COVID there was a swelling of essays from those who had till then spent every holiday in a new country, about finding joy in their immediate surroundings, their homes, exploring their localities. Travel has become ubiquitous thanks to social media and popular media narratives but many of us do not glide across borders with ease. Visas and borders are arduous, humiliating processes laced with triplicate paperwork, politics and luck. For some, every element of travel has an opportunity cost; finances, work leave and personal responsibilities have to be carefully calibrated and weighed.

My first ever overseas trip was for a school exchange program. I was 18 years old. I remember tracing my finger over the purple ink on the seal on my crisp passport which granted me leave to leave my country and set foot in another. I kept close to my friends who were seasoned travellers, looking for cues for what to do, how to dress and mentally converting everything to Rupees before even the smallest transaction. I inhaled everything, quivering with excitement and radiating quiet exclamation points. My first plane ride!  My first burger at Burger King! Burger King has free drink refills! Free refills! My first mall! It’s bigger than Majestic city! Ok it’s a lot bigger than Majestic City! My first hair cut in a new country! Ok not a great haircut but it’s ok!

I am very happy to be a card-carrying member of the AEAC (Arriving Early to the Airport Club). When travel is a rarity, when flight costs are exorbitant, the idea of missing a flight because of a lack of punctuality feels unthinkable. I am late for everything else in life but I will arrive comically early for a flight. I will come early, check in my bags and then park myself in a corner to people-watch. I like seeing what people wear to airports. What kind of luggage they carry. How groups traverse in airports. How airports are designed. The kind of foods available. I try to discern the seasoned travellers from the new. Once there was an elderly lady who took a long time to get on the escalator. Her family, flustered, had to coax and coach her on it. Instantly, I remembered my grandmother in a mall a while ago and the tightened grip on my hand as she eyed the escalator warily. The same uncertainty imbued with age and a hesitance of technology and of the unfamiliar.  I haven’t travelled enough to endure long transits, delays and wait periods – I suspect this reminiscing would be less rose-hued if it were – but have travelled just enough that I can figure out the flow of a airport without hassle and am more than happy to wait for an hour or two taking in the space, the people. 

If supermarkets are publicprivate spaces, then airports are liminal states which offer a temporal blankness. The in-between nature of the space reveals so much about the people that traverse and inhabit it. You see daily enactments of class, power and kindness. I think often of the Indian official at the Delhi airport who checked in my luggage when I left India after completing my studies. She looked at the giant backpack I was nervously trying to pass off as hand luggage, acutely aware of the price of extra baggage. It was the kind of large backpack that a certain kind of traveller would bundle their lives in and survive with for 6 months while working through an existential crisis. I knew it was more than 7 kgs. I knew she knew it was more than 7kgs. She knew I knew she knew it was more than 7kgs. I mentioned I was a student moving back to Sri Lanka and there was a laden pause in which my quiet scholarship student budget desperation oozed all over us before she met my eye and waved me in without asking me to check the bag in.  

While apps and transport networks have expanded to travel to and from the airport with ease, there is a specific intimacy in someone book-ending a journey with you. When I was younger, when travel was rarer in our family, picking and dropping someone from the airport was an EVENT. A van was hired. The number of people going to pick or drop the travellers were carefully calculated. If it was a pickup, then a stop for milk tea and fish buns was compulsory. As a child, I loved the “abroad smell” that hung in the air when someone arrives from overseas – a mingling of air freshener, anticipation and air conditioner. 

I’m yet to travel overseas post-covid.  A covid inheritance is a new awareness of enclosed spaces and germs. I am armed with the realization that being trapped in an air-conditioned metal container hurtling through the air for a few hours with assorted people with varying hygiene habits who may or may not be masked and may or may not be vaccinated feels like a recipe to contract pretty much all the airborne illnesses that exist. But of late, there is a simmering restlessness that has set in and this is no longer a deterrent but a new reality to contend with. The Colombo claustrophobia that has taken root has to be offset in other ways. For now, I am on the other side of the silver barrier, with the left-behinds waiting on borrowed time that we have purchased for Rs. 500, waiting for our loved ones to leave us.

S checks in and returns to the silver barrier. We do not have a long drawn, emotional parting. There’s a stiff hug, a sad shy smile, a demurring of a bag of manioc chips picked up at the airport’s Rancrisp store, and he is soon swallowed up by the layers of the airport. I do not know when we will see each other again outside of pixelated screens which fit into our palms and lagging internet (hello hello hello I can hear you can you hear me). 

One by one, the other travellers leave the silver barrier. Some turn around and wave at their left-behinds. Some of the left-behinds stay on, watching the electronic signboard for updates, determined to make the most of their Rs. 500, waiting until the plane carrying their loved ones lifts off. The rest of the left-behinds leave. We do not meet one another’s eyes.

Ps: The first essay on space is here. An essay on supermarkets is here. 

Pssspsss: Hi friends, I have been trying to live, laugh, love in an economic and political crisis. Reading lots. Working too much. Writing very little. This was an extension from a writing exercise at a writing workshop organised by the MMCA. Tell me all your airport stories and airport feelings. You know where the comments are. I hope you’re doing ok.