He certainly never mentioned his worst suspicions; that it might have had something to do with telling her he was giving up being a doctor for a new life selling mobile phones. Of course a combination of the two things might have done it, giving Nani the bends as she plunged from extreme delight to the depths of disappointment, thereby causing the valves of her heart to clamp tight forever. It could be a stubborn thing; a grandmother's heart.
"Why would you do a crazy thing like this? What would your father say if he was alive? How will I look my neighbours in the eye when they find out?"
"But Nani, I will make much more money in the phone business and I will be helping India to catch up with the rest of the world. This is progress."
"No Ramesh, a doctor in the family, that is progress, this is just commercial selling. Just like your Uncle Ishaq; always everything out of a suitcase, selling things to poor Indians who don't even need them."
"Nani, Uncle Ishaq sold encyclopaedias."
"Same difference."
On and on she had grumbled, between spooning plastic forkfuls of Chicken Chasseur into her mouth. He had expected her to take the Indian meal but she had surprised him and chosen the western menu.
"I want to assimilate before we get there." She had said, tucking the folds of her sari around her thin legs, reaching up to fiddle with the air conditioner and the reading light. Even before the plane had taken off she had turned to her neighbour in the window seat and asked.
"Are you married? How many children? Sons or daughters? Business or pleasure?" She had got that last bit from watching soaps on the television.
"Nani," he had hissed, "Leave the man alone. Can't you see he is reading?" But Nani had brushed his restraining hand away and would not stop.
"This is my grandson Ramesh, twenty-six years old and not even married. We are travelling to a village called Surrey to stay with his sister who has three children, two boys and a girl. Her husband's family are in the dry-cleaning business." And then the photos had come out of the handbag, the handbag she had made him bring down from the overhead locker, just after he had settled himself and put his seat belt on. It was the first time on an aeroplane for either of them but Ramesh had been determined to show his cool. At least when the plane took off she was finally quiet, gripping his wrist on the arm rest with both her hands.
"Oh Ramesh." She muttered faintly under her breath, but it was not to him that she was speaking, but his grandfather; Ramesh Senior who had died of throat cancer ten years before. Soon after that the air hostesses had wheeled a silver trolley down the aisle and placed foil-covered trays on each of their folding tables.
"Enjoy your meal." One said to him with a smile, and Ramesh had thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, who wasn't twelve feet tall on a movie screen. On the lapel of her uniform was a silver badge that said 'Sonia', and her shiny hair was pulled back into a pony tail that flicked from side to side like a cow lash when she marched up and down the aisle. Real sophistication, he thought, not overdone like the English girl with the blue make-up and the spiky yellow hair who pushed the trolley as Sonia took out the trays. He had blushed when Sonia spoke to him, said 'thank you' in English, then glanced nervously at Nani, who was too preoccupied with the plastic cutlery wrapped in cellophane and the miniature cup of orange juice to notice. He had thought then it would be a good time to tell her his news, but he had got that all wrong. Not even the luxury chocolate mint in its silver and green wrapper had helped to lessen the blow, though she had eaten it all the same, and his too when he said he had no appetite for it now.
"Wasteful, that's what you are." she had said tearfully, biting into the mint.
"Nani, the mint is free, it comes with the ticket." he had replied miserably, but she had shaken her head and chewed it with her mouth open. She wouldn't speak to him after that, and had pressed the attention button to make the stewardess come back.
"Can you show me please how it works?" she had said in her polite voice, tapping the tiny screen in the seat in front of her. Sonia had leaned right over him to demonstrate the controls to Nani, and all the while he had sat there stiffly, trying to read his book but acutely aware of the closeness of Sonia's blouse to the end of his nose. After that he had placed the eye mask over his face and pretended to sleep, his ears still alert to the sounds of Nani as she clucked and sighed along to whatever it was she was watching. Then he must have actually fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew the roar of the aircraft's engines seemed suddenly louder and there was a stale taste in his mouth. He removed the eye mask to find the plane's main lights dimmed and the people in the seats around him asleep. The meal trays had vanished and Nani's lifeless body had slumped sideways towards the shoulder of her neighbour, who was, thank God, asleep too.
He guessed straight away that she was dead - he was a doctor after all- but he had to make sure. Slowly, as if he was trying not to startle a wild bird, he moved his hand out from under the blanket that someone (could it have been Sonia?) had tucked around his knees. He felt for Nani's wrist. There was no pulse. He tried moving her fingers, curling them into a ball with his own, but they were unresponsive and stiff. Then he felt his own blood start to race and the beginning of strange upheavals in his stomach. Horrified that he might be about to throw-up, or worse, lose control of his bowels, he clenched himself together in his seat.
He had woken up into a horrible sick joke. Why me? Why does this sort of thing always happen to me? His mouth was so dry he wasn't sure he'd be able to speak, and he needed to be able to speak because he was going to have to tell someone. He waited for a few minutes until the blood had stopped beating in his brain, and he could be almost sure he wasn't going to shame himself by soiling his trousers or being sick into a paper bag. Then he pressed the button on the overhead console.
*
What he would remember afterwards was that he could not have faulted their professionalism. Three of the stewards, including Sonia had spoken to him at the back of the plane; a short but intense, whispered conversation behind the blue pleated curtain. They had seemed startled at first, but then when he told them he was a doctor, and showed them his identification papers, they had relaxed and said they had procedures for situations like this. There had been training. When he had got up from his seat he had left Nani propped towards his own seat and had tucked the blanket right up to her chin. Now in the dimness she looked like just another sleeping grandmother, but sooner or later, the chief steward warned him, someone would notice. She could not stay where she was. What if the man in the window seat complained?
"In circumstances such as these Dr Narang, it is the policy to move the deceased to an area of the plane where they themselves will not be disturbed and where they will cause least distress to other passengers." whispered the head steward.
"The Captain will radio ahead so that an ambulance will meet the plane and take your grandmother to hospital."
It all seemed so organised and well-oiled, as though this sort of thing happened on planes every day. Ramesh began to feel a little better.
"Would you like us to contact any relatives for you, someone who can meet you off the plane?"
He thought of Preity and her husband Vinod and gave a little shudder. She would blame him for this, he just knew it.
"My sister, you could call my sister. She will be coming to the airport anyway with my brother-in-law. She will not be expecting this." He found he couldn't finish his sentence, he glanced at Sonia, who was looking at him with such pity that he was moved suddenly to tears.
The steward put his hand on Ramesh's arm and said.
"Please try not to worry Sir, we will take the utmost care of your grandmother, if you could come with me now, we will move her straightaway into first class. There are empty seats there where she can rest quite comfortably and you will of course be able to sit with her for the remainder of the flight."
First class, Ramesh thought. He had never travelled first class in his life. A voice floated up from his memory.
"Your father and mother travelled first class to Delhi. Your father saved for two years to buy those tickets." Nani's boast but part of his own family's creation myth. His mother and father on their honeymoon had spent two whole days and nights in their sleeper compartment, not even leaving to visit the restaurant car, and Preity his older sister had been conceived over the train tracks at sixty miles an hour. This was why, Nani always said, she was the one destined to travel, not him. As he watched the two stewards lift Nani out of her chair he thought of what Preity would say when the airline contacted her.
Even a simple thing like transporting a grandmother he cannot be trusted with. She would tell her husband's entire family, My little brother; a walking disaster zone. The one time he gets on an aeroplane and see what happens. She would not want to hear about his mobile telephones or his plans to take the family up in the world.
*
In first class the seats became beds and the blankets were scarlet and made of real wool. Another stewardess, even more beautiful than Sonia, came forward to greet him as he stood nervously just inside the cabin.
"I'm so sorry for your loss Sir," she whispered. He looked balefully at her gold name badge and nodded.
"We have placed your Grandmother at the front of the cabin. I have had to notify the other passengers of course but we are flying at a third of our capacity so there is plenty of room." He glanced around and saw that several pairs of eyes were looking at him. A flood of nerves welled up inside him. He had to let them out.
"I'm so sorry for the trouble, my Grandmother was not ill, she was not even so old. I do not know how this could have happened. I feel so ashamed for the trouble I have caused you." He had tried to whisper but he couldn't suppress the escalating wail in his words. It was as though his distress was a trigger that they had been drilled to respond to. He was hushed, offered a sedative, entreated by their intense looks that spoke volumes more than their actual words. He allowed himself to be guided like a child down the aisle, but the stares of the first class passengers felt like needles in his skin.
They brought him Nani's handbag and the book he'd been trying to read before he fell asleep; Talking to the Whole World: Telecommunications in the Global Village by Everett Singh. It was Mr Singh's plan to sell mobile phones to rural Indian communities.
"Even the rice farmer and the mango seller must keep in touch with their business associates." The introduction said. "The world isn't such a big place anymore, not when the agriculturist in the country can talk to the shop keeper in the city without leaving the rice fields. Think about it. Think about the opportunities for India and for yourself."
And he had thought about it, those gold-plated opportunities. It had taken him five years to train as a doctor, the family money paying his fees. He winced every time he thought about it.
*
They had settled him into a soft leather chair with plenty of leg room and a view out the window. After a while they turned the lights back up and served another meal.
"Would you like champagne with your breakfast Sir?" somebody asked, and he desperately wanted to say yes- he had never had champagne before- but of course he didn't; it would not have looked right. Then, because it would also not have looked right to watch another movie or to try and read, he opened his grandmother's handbag. Immediately he was assailed by the sickly sweet smell of home-made Barfi, and he remembered she had been packing it into bags for the grand children just before they left. He rummaged underneath and found the photographs again; Preity and her in-laws; people he had only talked to over the telephone. He found Nani's purse, with its wads of rupee notes because she did not believe in using credit cards, and a driving licence in her name dated October1959. He hadn't even known she could drive. Hankies, spectacle case, his grandfather's pocket watch- he knew she never left home without that- a brown bottle of pills with a name he didn't recognise, and at the very bottom of the bag a piece of folded paper, fragile and frayed at the edges. He opened it out and saw it was the letter he'd written to her from boarding school the week his grandfather died. He'd been about to sit his entrance exams to medical school, and his parents had not wanted him to take the time out of his studies to make the long journey for the funeral.
Dear Nani, he had written. One day when I am a doctor I hope you will forgive me for missing grandfather's funeral….. He carefully re-folded the letter and put it back into Nani's handbag. Then he looked out of the window at the sun, which had just begun to edge the clouds with pink and gold. How very high up I am now, he thought, and how very far away.
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