‘Whose infant is this?!’ You hear someone snarl, and you don’t really want to look in the direction of the snarling person, but you sort of have to. Or, at least, have to look at the child as you pull it away while averting your eyes, the snarlee in you seething to retort but unable to because of aforementioned biological culpability.
‘I would slap you for talking like that,’ you growl in your head, ‘if only this kid weren’t mine.’
I can remember how this felt. But I also remember doing some things differently. Sitting at a gate in New Delhi‘s Terminal 3, waiting for my flight to start boarding, I’m staring with no agenda at the carpet which is the colour of what can only be described as stale turd. A small girl, about 3-plus, appears in my vision. A beautiful child, with bright-button eyes signifying high intelligence. Crawling on the carpet. Picking up half a peanut she has dropped and putting it in her mouth.
When she gets up I think, okay, it’s just half a nut, it’s fine. But then the sweetoo gets up and dives under another chair, pulls out two more nuts from the filthy rug fibres and quaffs them. ‘Oh god, don’t do that!’ I want to say. But I look around instead – whose child is this? Surely some parental oversight will kick in about now.
The young mother is sitting looking into the distance. On the other side of her, the father-culprit is rocking his phone. The kid keeps bending down and picking up more nuts, sometimes disappearing under the row of chairs for several seconds before emerging with further booty. Each time she inserts a nut deep into her mouth I feel myself shuddering. Each time I find my mouth also opening, to say something to her, or to the parents, and each time I bite my tongue.
I can see that the mummy-papa are vaguely aware of their child in their peripheral vision. But for a full 10 minutes of this girl’s assiduous peanut harvesting, neither of them actually looks at their ward and clock what she is doing. In the meantime, inside me a hard voice is saying ‘Shut up. If the kid dies, she dies. But you will not release a syllable!’
On the flight, as soon as the plane starts to climb a baby starts to wail. The screams are terrible, like a small animal that’s been caught in a trap or skewered. I can feel the tension spread across our section of the aircraft, the cabin crew strapped in their seats exchanging helpless glances. Once the seatbelt signs go off, I’m sure they’ll do something.
But no. The screams continue till we reach cruising height and level off. All the baby manuals I read in the early 90s stressed that tiny eardrums react badly to the change in pressure as a jet airliner climbs or descends. All of them said that the only way to protect the babies was to put them on the breast or give them something else to suck on. I even remember cabin crews being aware of this basic thing. But nowadays, no one seems to know this, not on domestic flights nor on international ones.
A few hours later, when the plane started to work its way down, sure enough the horrible screams started up again. I opened my mouth to say something to a crew member. But again, no words came out. As we began to exit, my only consolation was seeing the button-eyed bundle from the boarding gate fast asleep on her father’s shoulder, looking none the worse for the wear.
(The writer is author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh)