My first drink, a rum and Coke

It’s quiet and dark in the aircraft, everyone is sleeping. Eighteen hours, direct flight, Delhi to Chicago. The little plane icon on the screen in front of me shows we’re somewhere over the Atlantic. The black outside the window is a deep chasm. I’m lucky to have a window seat. I have the pillow positioned against my cheek and the cool of the glass. Sleep evades me. I refuse to pull down the blind, I want to catch the sunrise at its edge. 

I think about the fiasco at the airport a few hours earlier. I had forgotten my OCI card and it had taken a phone call from my dad with security to let me get on the plane anyway. So much for all that planning and the stress of the last week, with the maps of the airports and the written instructions to get through international claims correctly. The OCI card, Overseas Citizen of India, was used to get in and out of the country. The card was supposed to be tucked in between the pages of my US passport, like a bookmark. The two looked remarkably similar, and to this day I have no idea where the thing went. 

I’m watching a TV show on the little screen in front of me. My backpack is tucked between my legs. I’m terrified I will lose that also. 

I had never flown on a plane by myself before, let alone an international flight to the other side of the world. The fright and malaise of the OCI card was still fresh in my brain. As an unaccompanied minor, I had a letter folded up in my pocket, signed by my mother, approving the trip. I’m sixteen years old, never even having taken a taxi by myself. The air hostesses were very kind, making jokes, giving me extra cups of soda and blankets.

The young man next to me is also Bengali, on his way to Chicago after a brief family visit in Delhi. He’s an engineer at some pharma company. How cool, I’d thought when he told me. He’s asleep, like almost everyone else. It’s nearly three in the morning, in the Indian Standard Timezone. It feels like a lifetime till Chicago. 

I’m eight episodes deep into Mad Men and I’m fascinated by it. It was a world so completely different than the one I lived in, and I was astounded and pined for it. Generally being so shut away from  television, everytime I watched a new piece of media, it consumed me. 

Particularly, the alcohol. The characters in the show were downing whiskey sours and cosmopolitans like it was a bodily function. Alcohol was this relaxer, this ticket to a good time, a way to get your brain to quiet down. 

I suddenly decided I needed it. Needed it badly.