Excerpt from the chapter Lay Down Life in Lusail
The flight from Doha to Kochi was packed. The passengers on the airplane were mainly expatriate workers from Kerala working in Qatar who had been going home for one or two months of annual vacation. Their families were in Kerala, and they were eager to get home and start spending their hard-earned vacation time with family and friends, and that anxiousness created a little bit of chaos in the airplane. Some of them brought luggage that did not fit in the overhead compartments, and they were not listening to the gentle admonitions of the cabin crew to settle down, nor were they receptive to the cabin crew’s offer to help put things away in the right place. Thomas Manjila was still looking with some hope for Edathil Abbas to emerge from that chaos, looking for him, and to discover him sitting there.
The unruly passengers finally settled down and started tapping on their phones or making some last calls; the airplane moved and then lifted off from a sunny and probably very hot runway. Thomas Manjila sat there with a heavy heart until an air hostess asked if he cared to drink something, and that was when he realized, on that flight which was beginning its three-and-a-half-hour journey to Kochi, that something terrible might have happened to Abbas, which would explain his complete silence and lack of any attempt to reach out.
He didn’t want to drink anything, and the young man sitting next to him seemed to have sensed it. “If you don’t like to drink, can you get me a Jack Daniel’s and Coke?” he asked in Malayalam, and the air hostess seemed not to notice or care.
Thomas Manjila didn’t respond to his request, but he ordered that nevertheless. When his turn came, the young man ordered the same. Thomas Manjila placed his drink on the young man’s tray without saying anything. He smiled gratefully and gulped down both drinks in quick succession, wiped his lips, and immediately asked, “Where are you from in Kerala?”
“I’m from Aluva, specifically from Chowara, the Chowara on the other side of the river from the airport.” It’s hard to pinpoint a place when both sides of the river have the same name.
“I’m from Kodungallur, but I know about Chowara. My colleague Abbas always talked about his native place, Chowara, which is situated nicely on the riverbank. I have never been there, but it has to be a beautiful and serene place. A place from which a serene man like him, who never turns angry, comes must be serene too.”
He continued talking without interruption and with no lack of beautiful words in Malayalam to express himself, words that Thomas Manjila hadn’t heard in a while, and listening to them plunged him into an instant bout of nostalgia. From the poetic description of Abbas by the young man, Thomas Manjila was certain that it was his friend the fellow passenger was talking about, and so he didn’t even care to confirm it by asking any additional questions, though he was a little concerned that the young man’s voice grew sadder as he spoke, as if he were preparing to deliver some terrible news at the end of his long, flowery narration.