Silly rabbit...

They can’t tell us
They’re just jealous
‘Cos they don’t understand.

The traveling walkway drones intermittently in the background as I struggle to position my buttocks in the tiny seat so that I can lean back comfortably while taking the weight off my aching left leg. After walking with an embarrassing limp all day, I need some relief.
Looking around me, it’s like I’m already back where I started from. The faces, the voices… I almost know them. I may as well have been sitting at a restaurant in the city. I don’t know whether to be disappointed or pleased at the entirely too familiar surroundings.

A young man in a suit takes a seat at a reasonable distance away from me. Of course, I haven’t given him much of a choice in the matter since I’ve extended my arms to occupy slightly more than three seats. Indians most often tend not to understand the concept of personal space and in fact, perhaps even without intending to, do exactly the opposite of respecting it. The stretching is a conscious effort at establishing a boundary.
At closer inspection, it isn’t a very good suit. In fact, it isn’t even a suit at all. The trousers are a couple of shades lighter than the jacket and are missing the pin stripes. The shirt and tie do not match either in contrast or colour. He clearly isn’t very used to dressing up. Either that or he just doesn’t know any better. Why don’t they teach dress sense in schools?

I have more than an hour to spare, so I figure that I may as well rest my eyes for a while. It’s been more than a day already.
Then I have to worry about snoring or worse, letting my jaw fall open like a drooling monstrosity. Between maintaining an acceptable facial expression and having to shift in my seat every few minutes, I’m concentrating more on positioning my body rather than relaxing it. This isn’t working.
I open my eyes again and try to drown out the sights and sounds instead of focusing on them. In doing so, I am forced to watch the uncomfortably pleasant old couple making mundane conversation while sharing home made sandwiches from a Tupperware case, in what is apparently a very early breakfast. Sleep drifts from my mind, replaced by cynicism at their seeming contentedness.

Scratch that… before I’m done being cynical, my eyelids begin drooping of their own accord. A little girl skips back and forth across my field of vision every so often to read out the time on the big digital clock to her nervous mother; her shiny red shoes bouncing off the carpet, prolonging my lingering state of consciousness.
In the days of innocence I knew a girl named Dorothy…


Tomoyasu Hotei – Battle Without Honor or Humanity
Gheorghe Zamfir – The Lonely Shepherd