Somewhere in the midst of all this commotion, I realized that my husband who had gone for a bathroom break had not come back. It seemed like 20 minutes had gone by. I turned and looked towards the toilets and noticed a line at both. I waited expectantly for the doors to open and Giresh to come out. The doors stayed shut and I turned back to the entertainment console.
Another 10 minutes later and with no sign of Giresh, I decided to wander towards the toilets and wait for the doors to open, the people waiting seemed to be the same from 10 minutes before. Nothing! I wondered if Giresh was in one of the two toilets and wondered what he was doing in there for so long. One opened, and it wasn’t Giresh, the other stayed resolutely shut. I went back to my seat and looked back a few minutes later, and apparently whoever it was had come out but it wasn’t my husband. I was perplexed and wondered where Giresh was.
I checked with the cabin crew sitting in the rear to see if they had seen a tall man with a moustache and a receding hairline. At that point, they were in no mood to help anyone from the Indian sub-continent and so they responded with a "no." One facetiously noted, that Giresh had to be in the plane since he couldn’t go anywhere else and then snickered. I went up and down the aisle and checked faces of all passengers, no Giresh. Most were fast asleep, a few watching shows and paying no interest to my pacing the aisle, except for Shyama whose keen sense of drama picked up on my tension. As I walked by, she reached over and prodded my hand and asked "evvede poyi (where did he go)?" I said, "I wasn’t sure," and dodged any further questions by moving up to the midsection of the cabin to check a toilet there. It remained close, I waited a bit, then decided to knock, no answer, so I knocked repeatedly and still no answer.
My mind began playing tricks and I wondered if Giresh had fallen in the bathroom, had some heart related issues happen and all of this made me feel sick and I wondered if I was going to have a heart-attack mid-air. Suddenly, I saw the emergency light go off in the bathroom and I could feel all my fears coming to fruition. One of the cabin crew that had been sitting in the back moved forward swiftly towards the bathroom. She saw me, frowned, and asked if I had not yet seen Giresh and I said, "no". I indicated that I was worried that he was in the bathroom and not well. Her face softened and she reassured me that we would find him. She realized that 45 minutes was a long time for a bathroom break. She knocked on the bathroom door and began asking the individual inside if they needed help. No answer. I thought my jaw was going to crack with tension and I asked if they had a way of opening a closed bathroom door and she nodded in the affirmative and continued knocking.
All of a sudden the door opened and a large Sikh posed in the doorway and looked at the two of us staring at him. The stewardess turned and looked at me hopefully, and I said, "No, not Giresh". So, she turned to the Sikh and asked him if he was ok, and he said he was, so she asked why he had the emergency light on and he replied that someone had been knocking on his door repeatedly and he was letting that person know he was inside. I said nothing, looking down quickly. He left for his seat, and the stewardess asked me to look on the other side of the aisle at the toilet there.
I made my way gingerly through extended limbs, all the while aware Shyama’s eyes were tracking my movements. As I got to the other side, I saw, in the dark, the shadow of what looked like a person lying on the floor. I inched closer to peer at the object on the floor, while trying not to disturb the person looking at his phone next to said object. Said object seemed to be the shape of a man and it looked like he had a receding hairline. I began to wonder if it was Giresh sprawled on the floor. As I looked around for help, the stewardess who had decided to assist approached and I whispered that there was someone lying on the floor. She looked aghast and asked, "where?" I pointed in the direction and she peered closer and realized there was a being on the floor, so she reached for the wall light and illuminated that area.
Sure enough, there was a man of Indian descent, with a receding hairline, contentedly sleeping on the floor, much like Indians are prone to do on railway platforms. While I was still feeling anxious for Giresh, my Indian sensibilities understood why the man was sleeping on the floor, he was doing what any good Indian does, changing the environment to suit his needs. However, not so the stewardess, who was affronted. She reached over and shook the man and said repeatedly, "sir, wake up, wake up!"
Sir woke up, stared at her for a minute and gave a weak smile. She asked him to get off the floor and get into his seat. He continued to stare at her and asked, "why?"
For a minute, I could feel her composure slipping, but true to airline standards, she took a deep breath and is if talking to an idiot said, "it’s not safe sir!"
By this time, the other members of the cabin crew had gathered and one helped the man into his seat, while the others turned towards me. My friend, the stewardess with the kind face, said, she still can’t find her husband who had now been missing for over an hour. All of them who had been cavalier earlier began to doubt veracity. We all huddled in a group wondered if it was possible for a tall man with a thick moustache and a receding hairline to simply vanish into thin air in the close confines of an airline 36,000 feet in the air.
At that moment, it seemed very possible.
