Scaachi Koul - One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays

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FOR MY PARENTS, WHO WILL OUTLIVE US ALL, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER .

Only idiots arent afraid of flying. Planes are inherently unnatural; your body isnt supposed to be launched into the sky, and few people comprehend the science that keeps them from tumbling into the ocean. Do you know how many planes crash every year? Neither do I, but I know the answer is more than one, WHICH IS ENOUGH.

My boyfriend finds my fear of flying hilarious at best and deeply frustrating at worst. For my twenty-fourth birthday, he booked us a trip to Southeast Asia for two weeks, the farthest Ive been from home in more than a decade. Plenty of people take a gap year between high school and university to travel, or spend a summer back-packing through Europe to find themselves. (A bullshit statement if ever there was one. Where do you think youll be? No one finds anything in France except bread and pretension, and frankly, both of those are in my lap right now. ) I never did this. I talked about wanting to, sure, listing all the places I would go one day, hoping to have my photo taken next to a crumbling edifice in Brazil or with a charming street merchant in Laos. When I was thirteen, my mom asked me where Id get the money to travel and I said, From you, of course. She laughed me straight out of her kitchen nook. Travelling tells the world that youre educated, that youre willing to take risks, that you have earned your condescension. But do you know what my apartment has that no other place does? All my stuff. All the things that let me dull out the reminders of my human existence, that let me forget that the world is full of dark, impenetrable crags. I have, I think, a healthy fear of dying, and marching forward into the uncharted is almost asking for it. But it was my birthday, and my beautiful idiot boyfriend was offering to take me someplace exciting. He suggested Thailand and Vietnam, because he likes the sun and I like peanut sauces. I agreed, my haunches already breaking out in a very familiar rash.

As we made our way from Toronto to Chicago, then Chicago to Tokyo, then Tokyo to Bangkok, he was a paragon of serenity. (Hes older than me by more than a decade, and acts it whenever we do something new, largely because, comparatively, almost everything is new to me and nothing is new to him.) He was a latchkey kid, permitted to wander his small town in the 80s and 90s in a way that feels nostalgic to him and like the beginning of a documentary about child abduction to me. He smoked and drank and cried and laughed and was freer at twelve than I have ever been. While our plane started to taxi, I squeezed his meaty forearm as if I was tenderizing a ham hockrubbing his white skin red and twisting his blond arm hair into little knotsand he just gazed dreamily out the window. When we took off, my throat started to close and I wanted to be home, stay home, never leave home.

I wasnt raised with a fear of flying. My parents were afraid of plenty of things that would likely never affect usmurderers lurking in our backyard, listeria in our sandwich meat, vegans but dying on a plane was all too mundane for them. We used to take plenty of trips together and separately, and lengthy air travel played an unavoidable role in their origin story. They emigrated from India in the late 1970s and flew back for visits every few years. For vacations or my dads business trips, they flew to St. Thomas and Greece and Montreal and New York. Mom didnt like bugs and Papa didnt like small dogs, but I dont remember either of them being particularly fearful.

I wasnt always afraid of flying either. When I travelled with my parents as a kid, air travel was exciting. I got to buy new notebooks and travel games, and flight attendants packed cookies and chips and mini cans of ginger ale in airsickness bags and handed them out to the kids mid-flight. 9/11 hadnt happened, so our family wasnt yet deemed suspicious at Calgarys airport. I once loudly asked my brother while standing in a security queue how, exactly, people made bombs out of batteries while waving around a pack of thirty AAs intended for a video game. My parents let me eat a whole Toblerone bar and then I threw up in a translucent gift bag while we waited in line to board. I was alive!

Flying became a necessity by the time I was seventeen, the only way to stay connected with my family rather than a conduit for mile-high vomiting. When I graduated from high school, instead of doing what so many of my classmates dida month in Italy here, three months in Austria thereI moved across the country almost immediately to start university. If I wanted to see my parents (and I did, as my homesickness burst wide open the second my parents dropped me off at my residence), I would have to fly. Three, sometimes four times a year, Id take a four-hour flight to see people who I knew were at least legally obligated to love me.

But by my early twenties, years into this routine, something shifted and made room for fear to set in. Turbulence wasnt fun anymore; it didnt feel like a ride, it felt like the beginning of my early death. Id start crying during take-off, sure that the plane would plummet. Flight attendants assumed I was travelling for a funeral and would offer extra orange juice or cranberry cookies to keep me from opening the emergency exit. Before I take off now, I text or email or call anyone I think would be sad about my death and tell them I love them and that the code for my debit card is 3264 and please help yourself to the $6.75 that may or may not still be in there, depending on if I purchased a pre-flight chewy pizza-pretzel, the Worlds Saddest Final Meal. My stomach churns and my palms sweat and I think about all the things I should have said and done before this plane nosedives and the army finds parts of my body scattered across the Prairies. My legs in Fort McMurray, my arms in Regina, my anus somewhere in Edmonton.

* * *

When youre a kid, your parents are the bravest people in the world, but my parents provenance still feels impossibly brave to me. My father didnt exactly tell my mother he wanted to emigrate from India before they got together. Thats the way she remembers it, that it was only after they got engaged that she found out he had paperwork ready to apply for permanent residency on the other side of the planet. My dad first saw her at his cousins housemy mom was her friendand was flustered by her beauty. Ask my dad and hell wax poetic about my mothers cheekbones, her rich eyes, her long hair, how he needed to get to know her. My mom didnt even know he was there. Years ago, when I asked her about her first impression upon actually seeing my dad, she merely pursed her lips and continued folding towels, saying, I thought he was okay. This, the great love affair that spawned me, a woman who would one day get both of her hands stuck in two different salsa jars at the same time.

My dad asked her father for her hand (and the rest of her, presumably) when she was just eighteen, about to head off to university away from their small town in Kashmir. My grandfather said no, but to try again when she was older. He was a police sergeant, but a gentle guy who rarely raised his voice or grew upset. My mom did not inherit his calmnesshe yelled at her once when she was twelve and she felt so wronged that she launched a hunger strike, one that lasted entire hours. He apologized by placing his hat at her feet, begging her to please just eat something. (I did the same at eleven, but my parents just shrugged and said there were bagels in the fridge when I was readybrown people dont know what to do with bread.) When Mom was twenty-two, my dad was approved, and they were engaged and married within a year. Another year and some later, they had my brother. Soon after that, my dad moved to Southern Ontario; his family waited months before joining him.