Turbulence is a phenomenon all too familiar to anyone who’s ever boarded a plane. Those little vibrations that wake you up from your sleep and heighten your cortisol release while you’re cruising above the planet at about 900 kmph in an aluminium tube…they could be very nasty, even though years of engineering have established very effective ways of tackling them and making plane travel statistically quite safe. But oh, well, numbers don’t necessarily change feelings, do they? Vibrations, speed, altitude - put them together and nothing can convince you that you’re safe enough - least of all while in a metallic fuselage.

Oh, well. Now, coming back to the point in a way that should’ve been a smooth segue. Along the lines of turbulence in planes, I went through some of my own turbulence about decisions related to planes. I was to visit home in India and spend a couple of months there before returning to the Netherlands for future stuff. All I had to do was to book a place in an aluminium tube that’d fly me back to Bombay.

And so I did.

And so did a new strain of this mysterious virus at the most opportune time.

All it needed was rotten luck to have me flying via the UK. And had I that luck. But it’s all right, as this guy says.

My flight naturally got cancelled, as a lot of countries, India being one, decided to ban flights originating from or transiting through the UK for a few days. Fair enough, Reason would say. Better try to nip new problems in the bud when there are problems enough plaguing governments already.

(Quite coincidentally, back in March 2020 I was supposed to fly from Amsterdam to Boston on this very day that similar flight bans were announced. But it’s all right, it’s just statistics; there are more important problems out there).

Then my mind flipped to booking a different flight, via any route not involving the letters U and K in it. A quick search on the internet, and voila, Emirates it was!

But then, as luck would have it, the government of Maharashtra (the state of India which houses Mumbai, where my family resides) imposed a mandatory 14-day institutional quarantine for passengers from Europe, in light of reports that the new coronavirus strain had spread to countries in Europe too. Fair enough, Reason would say again. Let people come in but keep them isolated to ensure they’re free from any complications.

But that also meant I had to think again about my journey. After some internal mumbling, I decided that maybe I should postpone my journey for a post-pandemic utopian day sometime, hopefully in 2021. And so I made up my mind to spend these empty months in Delft, thinking of ways to distract myself from this strange emptiness.

But things aren’t so easy. There are reasons people would want to travel in general, but sometimes there are really compelling reasons why people would want to travel, especially in a pandemic-infested world when there’s a new threat looming and flight journeys just make it all the more risky. But as the week would unfold, I was hit with information that warranted a reason compelling enough for me to visit home immediately - information too personal and complicated to disclose on the internet. The bottom line was that I just had to be home somehow.

And thus flipped my mind again. I booked an Emirates flight right away and just hoped it wouldn’t get cancelled. In the meantime, an unlikely source of respite was the fact that the local Maharashtra government decided to impose a 7-day mandatory quarantine instead of a 14-day one with a PCR test on the 5th day to check that the passengers weren’t carrying the virus around. Nevertheless, there were so many variables floating around in my head that I’d just irrationally assumed something would go wrong and I wouldn’t make it to Mumbai. I was mentally prepared to languish and sulk in Delft.

Emptiness unlike I've ever come across at Schiphol


But thankfully, all said and done, I ended up spending my Christmas flying over the Persian Gulf, snugly seated with a face mask on and watching the blissful movie Blade Runner 2049. Not a better time to enjoy some cyberpunkery and find comfort in the fact that the current world is not that dystopian, I guess.

Blade Runner 2049-themed sunrise colours


As of writing this post, I’m staying in a hotel in Mumbai - another strange first for me. In 16-odd years of growing up in this city, I’d never stayed at a hotel here - and I don’t think I ever would, even otherwise. Maybe this is just my attempt at finding optimism in anything that comes along (or more bluntly, fooling myself), but it does make this seem like a unique experience (perhaps even the once-in-a-lifetime kind).

I’m not worried about boredom. I have my laptop, I have an internet connection, I have a couple of books - so there are enough interesting ways to keep myself occupied - among them also being meta-things like writing posts like this one. As long as I don’t have the virus in my body after all that travel, and I test negative for it after a few more days, I should be out of this strange quarantine. And that’s what I’m hoping for right now.

So tired


It’s just been a very exhausting period, with all these mental twists and turns - and I’ve really felt while at it that emotions are very, very powerful in how they manifest. We’re all going through unique struggles and strange problems fully understandable only to our individual selves, and as This is Water puts it, all we need is a little empathy and acceptance of the fact that we’re not alone in our struggles - it’s just that our struggles are not the same as everybody else’s.

One small step at a time. It will all blow over someday. Just like good old turbulence.