Such A Long Wait

                                                                 Such A Long Wait

No one called them by their real names, only by their nicknames – Junior and Senior.
	Born minutes apart in the tiny city of Kottayam, Junior, who, surprisingly popped out first, and Senior, who, always in the shadows of his brother, demanded the authority conferred to him by his name, the twins, Junior and Senior grew up like two peas in a pod. Their father was the owner of a large rubber estate, and would have qualified, strictly looks-wise, as a lumberjack in the frigid Alaskan tundra – long dark beard, stone-cut jaw line, and a steely stare, that look people had when they stood at the Kottayam railway station every Wednesday evening, waiting for the Madras Mail to chuk-chuk to a steamy halt. Junior and Senior’s father, Asher Kuttapen, was always lost in his own universe that the twins thought must be populated with rubber fairies and gum elves.
	When he returned from a long day of work, supervising the tappers, checking the accounts, ensuring that the milky white sap was being processed correctly, and making sure that the final rubber sheets were loaded and shipped out on time, when Asher Senior returned to the quiet bungalow blanketed by croaking frogs and chirping crickets, he collapsed in the teak rocking chair of his porch, the one that would become the throne of a lonely king in due time. With his searching eyes locked on the horizon, he held out his right arm not even making effort to shoo away the funnel of buzzing mosquitoes that crowned him.
	Junior and Senior, dropped whatever they were doing in an instant, and scrambled into their kitchen, fighting over who had the honor of serving him fresh toddy. Their mother, Baby Kutty, a wood nymph in her own right, with her pale complexion, and curvy kohl-blackened eyes, double-dimpled smile, sandalwooded and rose-perfumed curvy body, would laugh and pour out two cups, and hand one each to Junior and Senior. It was inevitable that a running race would break out, and the victor, scratched and mauled, would lay panting at his father’s feet, gently inserting the toddy in the cup-shaped void of his father’s right hand.
	Junior, the elder of the two, the one who had a few extra minutes at Baby Kutty’s left breast, the one who had consumed that much more oxygen, and whose muscles and bones had grown ever so slightly faster and stronger than Senior's, inevitably won the race. In consolation, he would take Junior out, put his arm around his shoulder and say, “Tomorrow, okay? Tomorrow, you can go first to appachi.” And as surely as the pressure cooker that would whistle each night, Junior forgot his promise, and raced his brother again the next evening while behind them, their father rocked slowly, sipping the toddy, his evening eyes searching for a train that never came.

Inasmuch as there was sibling rivalry – oh there was some intense rivalry – the twins behaved themselves in public. When guests visited, they washed their faces, donned fresh pair of knickers, combed and parted their heads to the same side, powdered their faces, and wore socks and shoes. They sat together in the giant wicker chairs next to the stuffed leopard and bear, holding hands, wearing cherubic smiles on their faces.
	“Such cute boys,” the bearded old men would say.
	“So cute,” their ancient wives would agree, twins of their husbands themselves after eons of living together. “So well-behaved.” They turned to Baby Kutty, drew cupped the air around her forehead, and cracked their knuckles on their own. “May all the bad omens leave this house.”
	But the moment they left, Junior and Senior, as if shot from a gun, would bullet out of the house, skipping and singing, and disappear into their own worlds.

The  Kuttapen Estate was huge. Uncountable acres. Required more than ten fingers and toes. More than twenty acres. When Junior and Senior, suddenly cleverer with algebra in their heads, decided to count it, they first had a quarrel about where to start counting from. Once it was decided that it would be from the erstwhile elephant stable, they started walking, one foot a time. “One,” Junior said, and put his left foot forward. “Two,” Senior said, putting his right. “Three…” And so on it went until the bungalow disappeared from the confines of the teak trees, and they themselves were swallowed by the redolent forest.
	At around five hundred, they realized two things: one, Junior’s count was five hundred, while Senior claimed they were still at sixty. And two, they couldn’t see their home anymore, and neither did they know in which direction to begin walking towards. Senior, the younger twin by a few minutes, and thus the one with the least experience in the world in that teak forest began to cry. Not the way little boys did in the movies, rubbing their eyes as if they were motorcycle accelerators, but like a little girl – he collapsed on the soft forest floor and bawled. Junior put his arms around Senior and hugged him. “Sssh...” he said in a soothing voice. “I’ll get us out of here.”
	Junior hiccupped, cried, and spoke at the same time. “Ho-ho-howu?”
	Senior pursed his lips and squinted his eyes. “I know how.”
	In that moment, Junior looked like a print of Asher Kuttapen, their father with train-searching eyes, and Senior closed his eyes, and hugged him tight. “If we get home, you can give appachi his drink,” Senior said, offering a reward for getting them out of the mess.
	Junior’s plan was simple – wait for the sun to set, and for ammachi to light the oil lamps. He would navigate, not with the stars in the sky, but the ones in his house. In an hour, the forest wore the night sky with the first of the twinkling stars like a magician's hat, and he spotted the first flicker of an oil lamp, He got up, and brushed the twigs off his shorts. “Come, Senior,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
	That evening as Baby Kutty prepared fresh river fish, she heard her husband enter the bungalow, throw his briefcase and collapse in his rocking chair. She poured out two cups of toddy, and waited for her little brats to come dashing in. Instead, they walked in slowly, hand in hand. Senior took the two cups, placed them on a silver plate, and gave them both to Junior. “Come,” he said. “Let’s go. Appachi must be thirsty.”
	And Baby Kutty tucked the little tail of her white sari into her petticoat, and wondered if her boys, barely nine each, had begun to grow into little men already.

When they were eighteen, Junior and Senior inherited the rubber estate. Their father, tired of waiting for his train, decided to fly instead, and shot himself in the head with the gun that he kept locked in his bedroom. Bereaved and unable to swallow the pain, Baby Kutty retreated into a sad place within her head. She refused food and drink for days, and finally excused herself from the twins’ lives forever, leaving them as adults with responsibilities and fuzz on their upper lips.
	Junior, with his wild adventuring streak, took the loss hard, and left home with a few hundred rupees in his pocket. Senior, the younger of the two, assumed all the responsibilities of running the estate, and aged in a day. Over the months, his hair began to gray, thin, and fall away. His face got chiseled with worry lines and he adopted Asher Kuttapen’s daily drinking-and-rocking habit. The servants would say that his sight began to wander into the teak forest and stay there for hours at an end, searching, perhaps, for lost wood nymphs.
	He didn’t hear from Junior for many months. On the days that he felt moderately enthused, and when the toddy had worked its way into his system, and bent his stomach this way, his liver that way, and his brain in every which Ayurvedic massage way possible, he felt a calm take seed inside him. In these rare moments, he took out his canvas and painted. What he saw around him was suffering, and so he painted happiness – lazy cows eating grass on meadows, the moon dappled on the backwaters of Allepey, the Chinese fishing nets of Cochin, a priest with a beatific smile outside St. Mary's church, etc. His paintings were filled with life, and with a certain strain of melancholy that only existed in Rumi’s poetry. He painted in secrecy, too shy to show them to the world outside. When they were finished, he climbed up the wooden steps, past pictures of Asher Kuttapen and Baby Kutty, past pictures of their fathers, and their fathers, until he reached the highest layer of existence possible in the bungalow. There, in the corner, was a room padlocked with the largest Godrej lock possible, an enormous bronze guard, sworn to protect the contents of the room. Senior lugubriously opened the door, carefully wrapped his painting in a muslin cloth, and placed it gently on the floor. Forgotten slices of paradise banished from a sad world, making the world only gloomier.
	Later, much later, when Junior and Senior’s photo would sit underneath Asher and Baby’s, when a bastard of Junior’s would legally inherit everything, and when she would fly down from New York to Cochin, hail a cab, speed along the highway to Kottayam, hop into an autorickshaw and put-put to the estate, drinking in the coconut trees and the Gulf-enriched ugly flats, when she would be given the keys to the bungalow, and a night to spend in the musty ancient house, when she would slowly climb up step by step, inspecting the details of her inheritance, and when she would reach the final layer of existence and find a locked door with the largest padlock she had ever seen in her life, and when she would, on a impulse, reach for the keychain given to her by the lawyer, and try all the keys until one clicked open, when she would throw the door open and allow light to enter after countless years, when she would see an army of seated painted mummies, and unsheathe one of them, she would gasp and drop the keychain on her delicate painted toenails, bruising it for days. Each painting would later sell for a million dollars, and each stamp on the pile of letters that she would find would sell for many thousands of dollars. She would sometimes cry at nights thinking about that moment.

But now, Senior sat in his rocking chair, going back and forth in time, ageing like wine, like milk, like Baby Kutty's batter of appam, like cheese, ageing in many good ways and many bad ways, ageing until he was an old man lost in time, and in his own front porch.
A few years ago, the twins had reunited. Junior came home unrecognizable: his hair had grown long, a beard had adopted him (just like papachi’s). He had grown lanky, his Kottayam-fed childhood fat melted away. He walked up to Senior who sat in papachi’s rocking chair, threw down a duffel bag, and said, “Give us a hug, will ya?”
They hugged, tenderly at first, the way lovers do when meeting after a long separation. They took a break and looked at each other, inspecting the lines and creases that had origamied onto their faces, and then they hugged hard, the way lovers do when meeting after a long separation and after having hugged perfunctorily the first time.
“Where have you been?” Senior asked, tears welling up his eyes.
Junior looked away. He reached for his pocket, and retrieved a Gold Flake. He cupped the end and lit it with a Zippo lighter. He took a deep drag and folded his face along his origami face lines in a grimace. “Around the world,” he finally said.
“You left…” Senior began. He swept his arms around. “All this.” And then he added. “Me.”
Junior coughed and spat. “I had to. This place was driving me mad.” He gazed at the teak forest where once he had navigated them out of danger. A distant smile curved his lips, a smile with fraternal legs, and an adventurous heart. He looked at Senior, and hugged him again. “Is there any food?”

Now in their thirties, Junior and Senior lived together in the large bungalow that sat like a lost island amongst teak waves. They recounted each other with stories, one of the world outside, and the other of the world within the green waters. While Junior told Senior about the flamenco dancers of Spain, the tea pickers of Assam, the swimming elephants of Sri Lanka, and the crashing waves of Hawai’i, Senior told Junior stories about the estate, the Nair girl who had caught his eye, the Kathakali performance that he had once thrown in the front yard, the vulcanization process that he had introduced to their rubber estate, and his newfound interest in painting.
	They threw parties where a certain Nair girl was invited, along with her friends, and they smoked pot afterwards, staring at the night sky. They went on picnics to the lagoons where they rented boathouses for the weekend, eating curries made from fresh caught river crabs and tender coconut milk, and drinking tapped palm toddy.

One night as the brothers lay on their backs, a piece of thatch in Senior’s mouth, and a Wills cigarette in Junior’s, they spotted an airplane moving across the sky, like a little bacteria in a petri dish.
	“You must fly in an aeroplane,” Junior said, dreamily. “That will always be my second home.”
	“What do you see in them?” Senior asked, perplexed. As far as he was concerned, they were screeching birds, searching for their mothers at airports. They cried as they cut the air, leaving clouds of tears behind.
	“It’s the anticipation of a new place,” his brother replied. “Sitting by the window, watching the clouds march by, sipping on whiskey, pawing the airhostesses, getting down at your destination, staring at the people waiting for their loved ones, discovering a new city…” He flicked his cigarette into the water. “It’s a thrill.”
	“I can’t,” Senior replied. “I’m scared. What if it crashes?”
	Junior rolled over. “No way. They are safer than driving in a car. They have seatbelts and all.”
	“Still,” Senior replied, unconvinced. “If something should happen, I don’t want to be stuck up there.”
	Junior guffawed. “Silly. If something happens, you won’t be stuck up there.” He pointed to the lagoon. “You’ll be down here where you belong.”
	Senior shuddered, and asked his brother for a cigarette.

If the times were a sandwich, the good times were a slice of cheese between two giant buns of bad times – they barely lasted. In no time, Junior’s feet started growing restless hairs, the repetitive Malayali lifestyle having snuck up and wrestled him to the ground. It was now choking him, and he needed to escape its grip. As suddenly as he had come, he left, leaving a note behind to his brother – “Dear S, gone for a while. I’ll be in touch. Love, J.”
	When he had finished scrawling his languid signature at the bottom of the letter, he must have known that he had also broken his brother’s heart.
	After grieving his re-loss for a few weeks, Senior picked up the shards of his life, put them in a safe and silent place inside him, and moved on. The Nair girl moved in, put a fatherly smile on his face, and sired three stillborn children, before giving up and joining Asher and Baby amongst airplanes in the sky.
	For years, he spent his life in a clockwork fashion – waking up, drinking his coffee, reading his paper, eating his breakfast, bathing, walking to the estate, stopping for lunch, continuing his work, returning to the bungalow after dusk, cleaning up, sitting down in his rocker with a pipe (he detested cigarettes), staring at the night sky that was now surfeit with screeching metal monsters, running home to their mothers, and wondering if his brother was in one of them, looking down at him. He made it a habit to smile and wave at each one, and soon it became a habit.
Later, much later, when his sanity would slowly pack its suitcases, leave a note (Dear S, gone forever. Love, S), and gently slip away in the middle of one night, the servants of the house would watch the old man smile and wave at the planes, and whisper that Senior-achi had lost it. They would circle their ears with a finger if they wanted to be silent.

One day, a couple of months after Junior left, a letter, an  air-mail no less, found its way onto the teak dining table. Senior’s eyes lit up. He grabbed it, crumpling it in the process. He checked the stamp. Nippon, it said. He hobbled to his study, dusted his globe, and spun it around slowly, searching for Nippon. When he found it, he leaned back in the leather chair and smiled. He put a sticker bindi on the island. Now, if anyone asked, he could tell them where Junior was.
	The letters came with a regular frequency like the Manorama at his doorstep. A new letter, new stamp, new country, a new sticker bindi. This was the petrol for Senior’s mind, the fuel that kept him going – anticipating the next letter, and its contents. When there were no letters for a few months, Senior got worried. He rocked harder in his chair, and waved longer at the aeroplanes. As if appeased by his offerings, he received another letter from Junior. This time the stamp was from Malaysia. The contents were Spartan, like papachi’s affection to the both of them – Coming home.
	No Dear S. No Love, J this time around. Senior grew antsy, a tightly strung invisible umbilical that was never cut at birth, and couldn’t be, tugged. He made up his mind to put his foot down this time around. Even though the younger, Senior decided that when Junior came home to Kottayam this time, he would talk him into settling down. Now in their 40s, it was too late to find him a bride, but maybe if he sent out his feelers, there might be someone suitable, someone with a world traveler-shaped hole in her heart, someone who had always craved half a twin. Maybe they could sell their rubber business, and live elsewhere. Maybe by the ocean. Maybe in the Andamans. The possibilities were endless, and he spent the next few nights, dreaming about them.

The nights that he couldn’t sleep, he slipped on his Bata chappals, and shuffled to his study, carefully opened the drawer so as to not awake the servants, who, unknown to him, now that age had sprung up and ensnared him like a man-eater, were busy getting drunk and fucking each other in the cavernous humid kitchen where, once, Baby Kutty had made steaming hot appams and fish curry, and poured two cups of toddy every evening.
	His favorite letters were those that Junior wrote when he spent a long time in Singapore. Senior’s geographical knowledge of the world was singularly expanded by Junior’s letters, but the Singapore letters were so vivid that when he closed his eyes and rocked in his chair, he imagined the tiny island city with great clarity: the clean roads where one could sit lotus-posed and eat a sadhya on a banana leaf, the air-conditioned buses that made beeping noises when the doors opened, the obedient and silent traffic like bubbles in a doctor's syringe, the skyscrapers that lay neatly arranged, the salt spray that hovered over the city like a benevolent mosquito net, the mishmash of Chinese, Tamils, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, Thai people, and their spicy and sizzling cuisine in tow, Senior dreamt it all. When he waved at airplanes, he imagined that one day he would muster the courage to drive to Cochin, and fly out to Singapore if Junior came along and held his hand during the take-off. When Junior wrote of nighclubs, and Singaporean massage girls, Senior blushed. When Junior wrote about learning karate-do and escrima in great detail (along with stick figure diagrams to demonstrate the moves), Senior stood up and tried to mimic the moves, but his reflexes were not what they used to be, his efforts at painting having made him more mellow and slow, but he tried nevertheless, vicariously experiencing Singapore in his porch through his brother’s letters.

The day before Junior was to arrive, Senior was in his highest spirits. He had a spring in his walk, and he complimented the workers on the great job that they were doing. He waltzed into the kitchen, and ordered biriyani to be cooked that night, telling the cook, "Tomorrow, my brother will be back, and you will cook him a feast."
	After dinner, he sat in his chair by the porch, pipe in hand, and with a smile on his face. He waved at planes for a while, until a ghost of a thought haunted his brain: what if that flight that he had just waved at actually had Junior in it? What if Junior made a mistake, and boarded the wrong flight? He shuddered and immediately exorcized that thought from his head. "He is fine," he told himself, and kept repeating it until he fell asleep.
	The next day, Senior drove himself to Cochin to receive Junior. He dressed in his finest mundu and a simple cotton shirt, slicked what remained of his hair back with coconut oil, dyed his mustache, trimmed his nose and ear hairs, and donned a pair of leather slippers. He spritzed Yardley perfume under his arms, and behind his neck. He stood at the receiving gate, anxious as a mother waiting for her toddler to exit from his first day of school. He bought a paper cone of peanuts, shelled and ate them, tossing one peanut at a time into his mouth, and the shells onto the floor. A couple of hours later, he began to worry. He approached an equally worried man with hairy arms, one of which had trapped a gold watch and was refusing to let it go. “Excuse me,” Senior said decorously. “That Malaysian flight? It’s coming, no?”
The man sighed. “That’s what I don’t know. From when I am waiting here.” He pointed to the Air India ticket counter. “Come, let’s ask there.”
They walked up to the counter. A small crowd had gathered, anxious mothers of missing day-one school children. Over the commotion, Senior fought his way to the counter, bent and stuck his head through the mouse hole that was just large enough to stick one’s arm (with money or a ticket) and yelled at the harassed airport official. “Yenna sarey? Where is the flight? My brother is on it.” He pointed to the sky. “Where is he?”
The man pumped his palms. “No information, sir. Flight took of Kuala Lumpur, but it has not arrived yet.”
“Maybe it had a puncture,” a scrawny little fellow behind him quipped and laughed. The crowd heard it, and did not find it funny. In moments, a stone found the glass pane, and then another split the scrawny man’s lip open. Soon, there was pandemonium, and the fidgety crowd unwound and sprung into the airport. Senior got swept in like silt into the sea.

Senior sat in his chair, and rocked back and forth. It was night now, and an owl hooted in the distance. His eyes were fixed on the moon. A pipe lay smoldering beside him. A plane - there were more of them now - moved across the sky, slicing the moon into two like a poorly cut birthday cake. He took a drag from his pipe, and savored the rush of the tobacco. He slowly exhaled two streams of smoke, and couldn’t help imagine that his nose was a tiny jet plane leaving two parallel contrails, a pair born at the same time, maybe moments apart, a pair that started their lives together, and slowly drifted away, until they were twins no more just some one in the world.
	Just as how a spurned lover suffers the throes of a separation over and over again, feeling a tightness in his stomach until he feels like retching, every moment that Senior's mind returned itself to him (its jaunts were increasingly longer these days), it replayed the events from many years ago: the chaos at the Cochin airport, the beatings pelted upon the hapless Air India official, the agony of the wait that yawned into hours, and slowly into days. Senior called the airport daily if there was any news of the Malaysian flight. They always replied in the negative. He spent hours in front of his globe, pockmarked with sticker bindis, and traced a delicate fingernail from Malaysia to Cochin. He purchased a TTK Atlas and pored over the seas and islands on the way. He mused at how small the countries were on these maps. The bindi on Singapore completely covered it.
Could the plane have landed in the Andaman islands? He called Cochin immediately, despite the fact that it was past midnight, and the airport was padlocked and forgotten by all except the sleeping night watchman in ill-fitting khakis by the gate. The phone rang for an eternity. He tried again, and again, until seven hours later, it was answered by a sleepy voice, which promptly said no, and hung up.
What about Ceylon? Senior wondered what could have gone wrong with the flight. His best guess was that it was low on fuel, and it needed to land immediately. His mind refused to contemplate that it simply dropped from the sky like a stunned bird, Olympic dived into the ocean, and disappeared. It had to have landed in Ceylon. He called Cochin, and was again given the same answer.
Maybe it overshot Cochin and headed towards Lakshadweep? He had that thought in his sleep, and he woke up startled. Of course, he thought, Junior was almost home, but somehow the pilot missed the signs to Cochin and overshot it. The premonition that he had had was true. When he called the airport again, he was met a gruff voice that said that if he ever called again, his number would be traced and reported to the police.
“But my brother is missing, you pattis,” he screamed into the mouthpiece. “How can an entire plane just vanish?” The gruff-voiced man hung up, and went out for a chai.
Like this, Senior spent many years, thinking, arranging facts, guessing, and coming to conclusions. He received a letter from the government and from Air India expressing their deep condolences at the disappearance of the flight (at least they were not calling it a crash), a free ticket to anywhere in the world, and a monetary compensation of ten thousand rupees.

As time scrambled forward, Senior felt the fire in him grow dimmer. He felt the once strong umbilical that tied him to Junior disappear, and he lay collapsed in the shriveled husk of his body, and watched life go by.
	He watched Kottayam change from a small sleepy town filled with rubber and spice estates into a tourist destination for dollared and pounded foreigners, who were sold on the God’s Own Country moniker (and the God of Small Things advertisement), and wanted to fly down and get their pale bodies massaged, watch abridged versions of kathakali performances, and sleep topless on the sands of Kovalam Beach (much to the joy of local birdwatchers). Senior watched his city, and his country, change ever so slowly at first, and then quicker and quicker, until ugly transmission towers shot out from the ground like toadstools, billboards hawked products on every street, televisions became possessed and spoke in tongues, and cars and motorcycles, along with people, bred like strays and overran the streets.
	Having abdicated his role at the rubber factory, he spent all his time, smoking his pipe, and scouring the newspapers for any information about the missing Malayasian flight from many years ago.

It is said that man approaches a state of childhood towards the end of his life, but for some that is cursed earlier. There came a point in Senior’s life one day when he not only forgot where he kept his glasses or the keys, but forgot his servant’s names, where he lived, and, on certain afternoons during the monsoon when the whole world stood still under umbrellas, he forgot his own name. When appachi's father suffered from this disease, the local doctor termed in Verghese Disease. These days it went by the name of Alzheimer's.
	Senior's doctor advised him to stay at home as if Senior had Junior’s bad habit of running away from home often, and then disappearing forever. Nurses entered his life. They were plenty of them of late, walking in their starched white shirts and skirts and white socks pulled up until their knees, and with white nurse caps perched on their oiled hair like folded paper boats. Three of them were employed to feed him, change him, and assist him in any way possible. His glassy eyes and toothless smile always elicited warmth from the white-clad healers. When he slowly waved at them, they found it sweet and they waved back. Little did they know that all he saw was a small white plane hovering in front of him.
	After a few months, the nurses lost their inhibitions (and their work ethics)  and spoke openly about the bungalow, the estate, the teak and rubber trees, and who will inherit all of this (they swept their arms around the ancient house). They wondered, while changing and feeding him, if they could somehow be written into the will. And when they got bolder, they asked him directly, “Yenna appachan, you’ll give us some of this, no?” Senior would grin and nod slowly.
	After shaving, sponge-bathing, feeding, cleaning, talcum-powdering, and giving him a friendly pat on his cheek, they left him in his rocker, and went to the back of the house to socialize with the cook and the maid. He was given a little bell to ring if he wanted something, but most times, he forgot that he had it with him, and soiled himself when the urge arose.
	So it came as a great surprise one morning when the nurses were let in, and they walked into the bedroom, and found the bed neatly made, a hibiscus flower placed on the table next to an ugly sticker bindi-ridden globe, and Senior missing. When they went outside, they found the rocker slowly moving back and forth on its own as if paying homage to its master. The cook and the maid came out in a panic, screaming that they couldn’t find him.
	The gossip that day at the estate was whether or not the twins were cursed to simply up and disappear from the face of the earth one clear and sunny day. And soon the conversation furiously moved to the inheritance.

With his passport in his pocket along with his ticket, Senior sat in the airport-given wheelchair. His flight was not for another two hours, and the eager man beside the ticket counter had bought him a cup of Nescafe, and a pack of cigarettes. After picking out Senior’s wallet, and counting off three hundred rupee notes as a tip, he had carefully replaced his wallet, and yelled into Senior’s ear that he was going to take a piss.
	Senior sat behind his gummy smile, his empty mind thinking empty thoughts. Happy empty thoughts. The airstrip had been silent and deserted all this time. Now, there was a rumble as a screeching Singapore plane landed, eager to be home with its Indian mother. It taxied slowly and made its way towards Senior. He got up with an effort clutching the armrests of the wheelchair for support. He hobbled to the glass pane, and put his face to it, leaving a wet splotch and finger-smudge with his hands. He drooled and banged on the pane. A mother nearby put a protective arm around her daughter. A man with a cellphone gave an annoyed look. But Senior saw nothing and heard nothing. All he saw was a white airplane. Decades of longing for his brother had seeped from his brain into his muscles, and stayed there forever.
	He lifted his arm and waved.