Let's fly.....

Sitting alone on a table at the resto bar of an airport hotel in Hong kong, I couldn’t help but estimate the expenses and worry about my shifting to a smaller place next month back home at the base. The pub is buzzing with conversations. I take a look around and only see white skin, barring mine and of the staff of course. I involuntarily pick up the words floating in the air like passenger, domestic flights, paging et cetra in various accents. Brits to my immediate left and american to my far right. All of them are cabin crew members including me and excluding just a couple dressed in rather formal clothing enjoying their meal. the rest are only drinking. The place has a very american feeling to it with sports screens laid around, random Carlsberg signs flashing and an unattended piano right next to my table. Last time I was here, I enjoyed some amazing international music by absolute local performers with my good friend J.P. I see the singer arrive no sooner then I finish writing this n realize my arrival here has been a bit too early to call it an evening. She greets everyone without being greeted back and finishes her first song and finds everyone to be too busy in chatting to applause or even acknowledge. Not getting disappointed she immediately starts another song without a moment’s delay. That’s when I notice every table has people with vast difference of age. It didn’t matter though. They were colleagues having fun, enjoying a leisurely evening conversing, exploring, making the best of their layover at an unknown exotic land. Then why cant we Indians behave similarly? Why we grew old so early? Why a commitment stopped us from loving life? Why a marriage tied us down? Why cant we freely tell our parents how many drinks we had? Why could I approach strangers? Why my young colleagues talked about buying groceries? But I guess this is where I identified more with the world than just Indians. I was younger at heart and deep down I never want to ‘settle down’ in Indian sense of the phrase. As much as I am scared of behaving old and thus settling down and thus getting married. I am 96% sure that my behaviour would be as immature and as naïve as now. With an eagerness to flirt with a new life everyday and to shop only for myself!
As the evening progresses, I take a small tour of the prayer like silent n cold restrooms with stilettos and hiking boots marked on two different doors to bifurcate. Smaller groups now merge into bigger ones, an attendant offers me a magazine and a newspaper which I politely wave off. Finally a chinkie couple enters followed by another frequent visitors, mr. and mrs. Smith. A beautiful birthday song is cooed for captain Brandon. I move in to have my dinner at a near by café alfianco and notice a brazillian trio dressed rather obscenely and gulab jamuns being called rasogullas. The evening ended rather abruptly with meal…… though at the end I have two questions. Why the two good looking brits looked like gays to me and why…. Why exactly were people staring at me when I entered the bar?