By Ananya S Guha
Those days traveling by air was in those ‘carrier’ planes with limited seats say, fifty. And traveling by air was considered a luxury as per my family standards. But, Father was a caring husband; he would pack off his family during the winter holidays to Calcutta; where my mother had her relatives. Traveling then was a big event, away from the thralldom of the winters. It also meant playing cricket in the alleys of Dover Lane and an occasional visit to the Zoo, or Blue Fox and Kwality Restaurants. Back home would mean forgetting the city and slowly adapting once again to Shillong’s inexorable charm and supine ways.
The planes were many. In the first batch we had Viscount, Fokker Friendship and a clumsy looking thing called Skymaster and of course how could I forget the Dakota? Once we had a very bumpy flight in the Skymaster but I enjoyed that turbulence. The plane see-sawed its way through dark and morbid skies. My co-passengers, of course did not share my masochistic delight. I remember, one of them praying; obviously heavenwards!
In the next phase came the sleek Caraval crouching its way through the runaway like a gamely animal. Borjhar was a very small airport, the passengers were few, but the airport had a somnolence about it which I quite liked.
The third phase marked the dawn of an era: Boeing 737 and Airbus 300 planes which took us to Calcutta in only 50 minutes. But by that time I had developed a phobia for Air travel to almost pathological proportions.
In the meantime traveling by rail co-existed. The broad gauge line from New Bongaigaon station started, sparing us the misery of having to change trains with a mad rush of humanity and chasing ‘coolies’.
Now in the era of Airbus 320 and 319, my paranoia to ‘fly’ not only continues but also at times is exacerbated. But the worst period perhaps was that of the Vayudoot services in the 1980s where these old discarded Fokker Friendships would be roughed up by malignant weather conditions and steep air pockets, creating an unhappy void in the stomach and a lump in the throat!