Fly, Hasina, Fly

By Anees Salim

Meet Hasina Mansoor, vending machine attendant at the Airport Departure Lounge. From her vantage point, Hasina watches the planes take off outside the glass doors and secretly dreams of being on (even piloting) one of them. While selling overpriced tea isn't getting her any closer to that, Hasina keeps her spirits up by making friends (and enemies) among the other airport staff, including the treacherous Cookie Lady, the know-it-all Coupon Man, the beautiful Natasha Singh and her tasbih-wielding boss, Haji Osman. Home is no less mine-filled, with a twin-sister who demands money constantly, a little brother who doesn't look like he's going to pass his fourth class and parents who are more concerned with the ongoing feud with the upstairs neighbours, Laila auntie's family. Hasina's secret love affair with her cousin, Eza, is a spark of joy in this homestead of constant worry and absurdity, but can she trust him completely? A darkly humorous, touching story, Fly, Hasina, Fly (previously published as Tales from a Vending Machine) will stay with readers long after their flight has landed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Dec 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9789353576691

Anees Salim

Anees Salim is rather proud of being a dropout. He joined advertising in the late 1990s, and has been working on a variety of brands for the past fourteen years. He currently heads the creative department of Draft FCB Ulka, Kochi, where he started his career as a trainee copywriter. He loves being invisible, and shares his time between home and office.

Book preview

Terminal One

Once upon a time, my world had glass walls. Thick, transparent partitions, set with five pairs of sliding doors. To step through them, I needed what I could wield only in a dream: a boarding pass.

I had the best view of the runway and I witnessed departures all day long; people disappearing into planes and planes disappearing into the sky. Having spent close to two years at the vending machine, all I needed was a glance to tell a first-timer from a frequent flier. I laughed at the ones who tried to pretend they were not new to flying. The worst were those at the domestic terminal. They usually turned up in heavily ironed clothes and occupied the row of chairs nearest to the glass walls, pretending to read a book but never turning a page, their glances drifting frequently to the activities on the tarmac. They would sit confident and cross-legged until the flights were announced. Then they would panic, rush to a gate, join the queue, only to be waved back to their seats by the airline staff at the boarding gate. Your flight is not boarding yet. Please wait. They would then return to their chairs, their air of false confidence seriously dented.

The first-timers at the international terminal were bad actors in comparison. Most of them were stunted by the bright lights and gleaming floors, by the incessant announcements and long paperwork at the emigration counters, already looking nostalgic about the places they had left behind. The unfortunate ones would stroll up to the vending machine and ask for tea, watching me push buttons and place paper cups under the taps. How shocked they looked when I told them tea cost forty rupees! I felt guilty when they opened their threadbare wallets and fished out the last of their Indian currency, but I was not supposed to warn them about the price beforehand.

Every time I confronted such a poor soul, I felt a strong urge to shoo him away. This is not your roadside tea stall. This is a vending machine. Don’t be misled by its looks. It is horrible inside. When the after-sales people come and open it every month, I see nice little cockroaches nesting there. A cup of tea will cost you forty rupees, coffee even more, because this vending machine is operated by Fresh & Hot Beverages, owned by the greedy Haji Osman, who is Abba’s distant cousin’s distant relative. But I always swallowed the words and silently pushed the buttons.

Though I was not supposed to alert the travellers, I broke the rule once and learned the hard way that it was better to be quiet and unsympathetic at airport lounges. A white-haired man dressed in a long kurta (which looked as though it had been sewn out of an old curtain) had walked up to the vending machine one morning and asked for a cup of tea. He looked so sad and uprooted and – you won’t believe me – was barefoot. He was an obvious misfit amongst the other people at the airport who were dressed to the nines. His beard, which was also snow-white, looked like cotton candy. People were watching him with curious eyes: how often do you bump into a barefoot man in an airport lounge?

I guessed he was one of those who had drunk only five-rupee teas all his life and now this unsuspecting chap was waiting for me to hand over the most expensive beverage of his life. Overwhelmed by pity, I could not bring myself to start fiddling with the machine. Why invite the curse of a poor man who was leaving his family behind in search of a better life, who was most likely to end up herding Arabian sheep or doing masonry in the desert?

‘Look,’ I told him in a polite and low voice, because my nice little heart bled at the sight of people whose faces were so evidently marked by the scars of penury. ‘Tea is forty rupees here. Inside the plane, it is free.’

Out of the forty watts that glimmered in his medium-sized eyes, twenty watts went off immediately. I expected him to turn around and vanish, but he stayed put, beginning to part his lips.

‘You know who I am?’ he asked, as if he had had a loss of memory and was not really sure of what he was doing in an airport lounge sans footwear. His voice was hoarse, similar to that of a robot I had once seen on TV. ‘I am a painter.’

So my guess was close. (Of late, there had been a steady parade of people like him to Dubai, where they were building the tallest structure in the world.) How sad! At an age when he should have been lazing in an armchair and happily breaking wind, this poor uncle was crossing borders to toil. I had a vision of him standing on a rope ladder draped over a huge building, clutching a rung with one hand, running a paintbrush over the wall with the other, while a cruel wind tried its best to send him flying to the ground. I felt so sorry for this uncle that I thought of breaking the rules some more, and serving him tea but declining the money. With forty rupees, his children could have a refill pack of Boost, if the price was same as it had been three years ago when we had bought a pack for Ali soon after he had come down with chickenpox.

‘Tea is free inside the plane, uncle,’ I told him again, pointing a finger at a nice little plane parked in a corner of the tarmac. ‘Here it is forty rupees.’

It was then that he started to shout and people turned around to consider the vending machine with looks of shock and suspicion.

‘Who do you think you are talking to?’ he barked in his robotic voice, trembling with anger. And, silly me, I still thought he had lost his temper because he had left home after a fight with his wife, who had hidden his footwear in a spot he could not trace. ‘Do I look too poor to afford a cup of tea?’

The answer was yes, but I was too shocked to utter a word. A ring of onlookers had gathered around the vending machine, and one of the security uncles peeped over the crowd to check whether we were trying to kidnap a plane and poke it into so and so building in so and so country. He saw me and the painter standing face to face and moved on without pulling out his gun and shooting.

‘I just said a cup of tea costs forty rupees,’ I said innocently, talking more to the crowd than to this raging painter, expecting somebody to come forward and take my side. ‘Fixed price, sir.’

‘And you asked me to go and beg for it.’ This painter was a liar. Had I already poured a cup of tea, I would have thrown it in his face. ‘Who owns this outlet?’ He shook two fingers in the air. Hideous fingers, all shrivelled up. ‘I want to talk to the owner of this shop.’

That meant nothing but trouble.

‘Look, uncle...’ I started, but before I could lie to him that this vending machine was a family business, tears rushed to my eyes. The thought of this man talking to Haji Osman and getting me out of this job and the airport forever was too much to bear.

‘Hussain sahib, please come,’ the airport manager, another misfit in this nice little place, called out as he picked his busy way through the crowd. I did not know that they were friends!

The painter shot my headscarf a look of disgust and turned on his heels; the crowd parted, a few people pressed their palms together to greet him (they were finally making fun of him for having left his footwear at home) and he followed the manager down the passage to the VIP room that usually opened its doors only to big people, not to painters, masons and carpenters.

Haji Osman came to know about the incident in the late afternoon when he came on his rounds, a tasbih dangling from his hand. Either the cookie store lady or the man who dealt in mobile phone recharge coupons had told him a blown-up version of what had happened in the morning.

‘You can go home,’ Haji Osman said. That was his stock threat, which he employed at the slightest provocation, but he always relented at the last moment, daunted by the false tears that tumbled effortlessly from my eyes. I cried whenever cornered; that was my way of waving a red towel in front of the wild bull that he was. But this time he looked irreparably angry – who knew what nonsense the cookie bitch or the coupon bastard had uttered in his hairy ears? ‘Come to my office tomorrow and collect your salary. I have had enough.’

I had had enough too with this old man; he had no sympathy for a poor girl whose paternal ancestors had once been rich, probably richer than him, and tax-paying good souls.

I am not sacked, I told myself, I am just fed up and so I am quitting. My fingers ached to write a resignation letter and thrust it in his ugly face while the cookie lady and the coupon man watched with their tongues hanging out in shock. But I could not find a decent napkin and a pen that worked till my rebellious mood had passed.

‘You can go home, Hasina,’ Haji Osman said again, waving towards the exit.

I slipped behind the vending machine, where I kept my things in a soap carton, but before I could pick up my imitation leather bag, a sob rushed to my lips. Is this the reward for looking after his vending machine all these months without any complaints? Is this what I deserve in return for my nice little loyalty?

When your tears are false, you can stop them the moment you please. If they are real, you have no such luck. Pressing a hand to my mouth, I stood behind the pillar and cried quietly, while Haji Osman attended to customers, making the machine grunt and hiss under his authoritative punches on the poor buttons. Each push of the button turned this filthy rich man even richer and filthier, his cash box filling up quickly with money in multiples of forty.

Let the painter go to hell, I gritted my teeth and prayed through my sobs. He was the one who had started it. I wished him all the ill-luck I could think of at such short notice; a bomb under his seat, a hurricane in the sky, a pinch of potassium permanganate in his free tea on the plane so he would spew out blood and die after the first sip; heart attack, loose motion, every single misfortune.

Haji Osman came around the machine once he was done serving his wretched tea and sized me up with a small smile. ‘Finished with the crying?’ he asked. He had this bad habit of smiling when I was in tears. ‘Never mess with customers again. Next time I won’t consider that you are related to Koya’s cousin’s cousin. I will kick you out.’ He kicked an imaginary ball, the impact of which I felt on my bottom all the same, and dropped the key to the machine into my palm. ‘Get back to the shop.’

‘Thank you, uncle. I am sorry about what happened in the morning,’ I said, drying my cheeks. ‘Do me a favour, uncle. Get me a napkin from the shelf, please. My face is a mess.’

And all this sadist did was stand there and stare, as if we were standing near a rattling machine or something and he could not hear me. Though the storm had blown over and I was safe, I found myself furiously praying: let there be a stampede in Mecca the next time this upstart goes to perform Hajj.

‘I want tea when I am back,’ he said and shuffled away to the prayer room.

I decided right then that I could not wait till the next Hajj season, which was five months away. I wanted revenge that was as instant as the tea and coffee I produced from this bloody machine. I poured a cup of tea and when I was sure the coast was clear (cookie lady was not behind her counter, coupon man was writing something on a pad), I picked up a moth ball from the bottom rack and pounded it to a fine powder using a paperweight. With a spoon, I made the white powder disappear into the brown liquid in the cup. Haji Osman, your tea is ready. Or was it? He had a huge tummy and his bungalow had many lavatories with nice views; so, I crushed another moth ball and stirred it into the tea.

Swinging his hands, Haji Osman returned from the prayer room. He blew into the tea for a long time, as though he were going to feed it to a child and not drink it himself. Then he emptied it in one long swig. ‘Remember what I told you. I won’t consider relations next time,’ he said. He threw the empty cup into the bin and walked away.

‘I won’t repeat it,’ I replied. Happy shitting, uncle.

A few days after my encounter with the painter, I was sitting at the vending machine in the domestic terminal when Miss Sheila walked into the lounge with an old man and a little girl. Miss Sheila had thinned considerably since I had last seen her on my final day in school, which was easily four or five years ago. There was a burst of white on her hair parting, like a flock of birds had defecated on her head when she was standing under a tree. I opened a magazine someone had left on a chair and hid my face behind it, hoping she would board her flight soon. But each time I looked up she was there, reading a magazine like me. But, unlike me, she was reading it for real, with a look of concentration on her face, unmindful of the girl who sat on the old man’s lap, pointing a finger at the runway, asking questions.

I turned a page and there he was, the barefoot painter sitting cross-legged at the centre of a page, surrounded by paintings I could not make head or tail of: women without proper faces, trees without proper branches and a man with hands long enough to pluck fruits from a tree without climbing a ladder. Oh, so he was that kind of painter, and not the type who did whitewashing, enamelling and distempering. I wanted to drop dead with shame, but I still hated him for the way he had looked at my headscarf before marching off to the VIP room. His name was M.F. Hussain and his paintings went for, if it was not a printing error, a million rupees or so apiece.

A million rupees or more for a picture that would just hang on a wall and gather dust? That was too much. The last time Abba put up the ‘For Sale’ sign outside Mustafa Stores, the highest price offered was just five-and-a-half lakh rupees. Too low a price considering that it was a 350 square-feet shop, and he was ready to forego everything it housed: the teak counters, several bolts of silk and cotton, cartons of hosiery, the furniture, the locker, two sewing machines plus the goodwill. The man who offered the highest price – he had a thick gold chain around his short neck, which gave him the look of a dog on a leash – said he did not want anything but the shop space. He reasoned that the counters, though they were teak, did not fit well with the readymade shop he was planning to open, the stock was long out of fashion, the furniture too heavy and the sewing machines too old and noisy.

Abba’s nose turned red with anger; he was deeply hurt by what the man had said about the goodwill. ‘What goodwill?’ the leash-man had asked. ‘Mustafa Stores has no goodwill. If it had any, you would not be selling it. Five-and-a-half lakh. Take it or leave it.’ Abba, after several minutes of considering the deal, decided to leave it.

And here was this painter, selling his paintings for millions. This is a cruel world with disproportionate price tags.

‘Aren’t you Hasina Mansoor?’ a voice asked uncertainly.

Even before I peeked over the magazine I knew it was Miss Sheila. Her voice had not changed one bit, it remained as tearful as ever; if you heard her from another room, you would think she was deeply grieved and on the brink of tears, and when you saw her you would be surprised to find her smiling or somber, but definitely not crying.

I put the magazine down and stood, and for a long moment I could not decide whether I should recognize her without an effort or pretend to be surprised by the changes that had come over her.

‘Aren’t you Hasina Mansoor?’ she asked again.

‘Miss Sheila!’ I shrieked and clasped my hands.

‘What are you doing here?’ She grimaced and four wrinkles appeared on her broad forehead. Three wrinkles meant she was mildly pissed off. Four, the maximum she could manage, implied deep distress.

I patted the vending machine lovingly, as if I enjoyed punching its buttons and placing paper cups under the taps all day long. ‘I am a sales girl here, Miss.’

She shook her head lightly, and her bun waggled at the nape. Then she sighed, and introduced the old man as her husband and the little girl as her granddaughter. She said they were going to Mumbai, taking the girl, who had come to spend the summer vacation with them, back to her parents.

‘Sweetie, you want tea?’ I asked the girl. Haji Osman would not miss a few cups of free tea.

‘No, no,’ Miss Sheila said hurriedly, answering for the girl. ‘When did you start wearing the scarf?’

‘A couple of years back.’

Soon after we finished school, Abba had insisted that my twin sister Shamla and I wear purdah whenever we went out. Shamla wore purdah to college, but Haji Osman said he would not have a veiled sales girl at the vending machine; yes, he supported purdah, it was the most fitting accessory for Muslim womenfolk anywhere in the world, but not at his vending machine. Take it or leave it, he said, like the man who had placed the highest bid on Mustafa Stores. Abba, after tapping his skull with a finger for a minute, decided to take it. He took me to Mustafa Stores that evening and gave me five headscarves that were gathering dust on the racks, but numbers