Airborne at birth

Mukul Sharma


A friend says a funny thing happened to him around middle-age: he became increasingly scared of travelling by plane and soon stopped flying altogether. It was not always like this because he used to fly regularly. In fact, once as a teenager, an engine of the plane he was on caught fire just after takeoff from Beirut and he had simply sat there looking at the sparks with no fear at all till they landed back safely.

Naturally, his irrational phobia had become the butt of many jokes among friends and family alike. They would often jibe if he had misinterpreted Erica Jong completely and he would counter say how even the great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who so routinely described interplanetary spaceflight, was terrified of air travel himself.

One night at a party a couple of years ago, a friend's wife asked him point black what exactly he was scared of and he replied that if the plane crashed he would die. So, she asked him how old he was and when he said he was 60, she told him that given the life span of people in India, he already had one foot in the grave. He should take it out or put the other one in too, she said. Either way would cure it.

He flies now. But not because of some little homily delivered offhand. Instead, he says he's realised why he had not been scared on that flight from Beirut so many years ago. He figures he's been born on a plane which can never re-land safely and, therefore, has to ultimately crash some day when its fuel finishes. He's always had two feet in the grave anyway.