The man moved on with his set of cleaning tools and started cleaning another windowpane. From where I was sitting, I could clearly see the dust particles that the wind had carried from the desert outside. I had no idea where the desert was, for where I lived, it was glass and concrete all around. But it seemed as if all of the land outside was desert. The windowpanes were the only barrier that separated you in your air-conditioned room from the hot desert air. I still remember the first time I got hit by the heat waves and how welcoming the rooms with their rubber plants and all too unnatural tiles seemed. It gave me a mild shiver. It wasn’t a shiver you get when the winter creeps in making you disillusioned about the love you thought you had for winter. Rather, it was a shiver that follows a hot shower on a mid-July afternoon, as the condensed water droplets over your body suddenly prick your hot skin. It was the first time I had come across those windowpanes separating the desert winds and air-conditioned halls that were somehow akin to the hot shower and sudden pricks.

Like that first time, I wondered about the absurdity of those windowpanes. For someone like me coming from the lush green of the rolling hills and dripping sounds of monsoon, the windowpanes offered a bleak view.

The wide runways never really appealed to me. The aircraft, which have come a long way in terms of design and use from what the Wright brothers had imagined, never got my attention. My brother, he had a knack for telling the names of the aircraft by looking at the logos on their tail even when they were up in the sky. The space beyond the windowpanes would entice him, providing him with the close-up views of his favourite logos and wind-shafts and nozzles, provided the glass panes were crystal-clear.

Most of the time, they are. The windows aren’t pocked by the grit from the roads as they are in developing countries, roads that keep getting widened, the bits of dust, mud and gravel that make patterns not much different from those logos on the planes.

The windowpanes are thoroughly cleaned, I’ve noticed, more than once a day. The cleaning man comes early in the morning, and in less than a few hours, another one follows the same ritual, as passengers stranded behind those windowpanes drool, stroll along and take pictures of some jumbos with huge logos.

The cleaning man, he must be accustomed to all the logos and the big corporations that own them, I thought. Maybe, I thought, he would look at them and wonder about the invisible paths up in the air that would take him to the lush green, to the valleys where he walked up and down all the time. He would think about the windowpanes of the wooden windows of his tiny home, which he never bothered to clean, the patterns on which changed distinctly seasonally. He would then decide to make the windowpanes spotless. And unlike the barren, bleak lands of the deserts, the view would then drench him in the myriad colours and lights that play peek-a-boo with the canopy.

“Your feet, please,” a voice interrupted my train of thoughts.

The same cleaning man was now carrying a broom and cleaning the carpeted floor. Unlike the windowpanes, the floor needed constant cleaning, I had noticed. Bread crumbs, torn paper and plastic adorned the blue carpet. He cleaned the tiny space beneath my feet and the metal chairs. It wasn’t as clean as the windowpanes, though, I observed. I could still see tiny bread crumbs, much like the leftover rice grains rejected by the grey-feathered birds in the chaityas of courtyards. These rice

grains are always swept away somehow, either by one forceful swipe

or zigzags of the broom amidst

tiny feet, and then shouts and

little curses. Sometimes, it’s one gust of wind that carries the leftovers to another chaitya, another courtyard, another carpet. Maybe the leftover bread crumbs too will be carried away by shoe-soles, the kind that attracts anything with some shape—gravel, marbles, bread crumbs.

The sudden announcement disrupted my train of thoughts again. The call was for me and other passengers like me who were homebound. I saw people hurrying for their next journey with their suitcases that smelled of chocolates, bread and sweat. I looked at my bag. “It looks bulky,” a middle-aged man had commented before, to which I had only smiled. That’s what happens when you’re homebound, I had told myself. Add to that the memories you take, all the years gone by, which you keep in your pockets, the longing

you hold in your eyes, you’ll

then exceed all the baggage

limits. I looked at my bag again. The wheels had something that looked like bread-crumbs. It is bulky, I told myself for the

umpteenth time. Maybe the inside of my bag had bread-crumbs it

had accumulated over time, I thought, bread crumbs and torn pieces of paper.

I dragged my bulky bag and started to leave. Instead of taking the escalator, I first went to the washroom. Hours of sitting and drooling can do things to your face. I couldn’t head home with a sulking face and bulging eyes. I imagined the horror it would cause on my mother’s face. I smiled as I opened the door as the pungent smell got inside my tiny nostrils. The first thing I noticed were the doors swinging and a woman wiping the floor clean with a mop. The woman stood in a corner while I washed my face, counting the number of times I had been to the washroom.

“Everyone uses this bathroom,” she interrupted her counting. “It’s very clean, unlike the one downstairs,” she continued as I looked at her. “That’s why everyone uses this one.” Her voice had a streak of pride as she said that.

I have seen many proud people—proud because they earned a degree, because they had a job, or they bought a TV. But the pride she had came from her job—it was clean. I wondered about the cleaning man. Did he too feel proud that he cleaned all the windowpanes and the floor? Or was he tired of the mundane chore? Before my thoughts could wander again, I quickly wiped my hands clean and walked past the woman. I mustered a simple thank you as she prepared to clean the water I had hastily spilled over the floor.

The final call was made as I stood in line with familiar faces and bulky bags that were homebound. The line moved slowly, as all the lines do when you’re impatient and in a hurry. I could clearly see the logos from where I was standing—the fine lines, the elegant curves. As I gazed out at the harsh sunlight, I remembered the shadows offered by the courtyards and narrow lanes I ran through when I was a kid. As soon as the doors opened, letting in the heat strokes belittling the air-conditioned waves and cool tiles, I tried to hold on to my memory of those courtyards and alleys with playful shadows, serpentine winds and leftover rice grains.

My thoughts wandered one last time to the whereabouts of the cleaning man. I knew that as soon as I would step out of the vertical barrier and leave the refuge that had so well protected me from the crudeness of the sun, I would forget all about the cleaning man. I watched with concern as one cleaning man took his turn in dusting off the fine layers of sand accumulated over the metal chairs. I averted my eyes and stepped forward, engulfing myself in the merry laughs and chatter of my fellow passengers. And I knew at once that my journey to the spilled-over rice grains would be just fine.