Is World Better For The Ones With Travel Privileges? Shahnaz Habib Reflects

For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, this insightful debut parses who gets to travel, and who gets to write about the experience. All the while, Habib threads the historic but ever-evolving dynamics of travel into her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom round trips are an annual fact of life.

Airplane Mode is a witty personal and cultural history of travel from the perspective of a Third World–raised woman of colour as she asks: What does it mean to be a joyous traveller when we live in the ruins of colonialism, capitalism and climate change? 

Here's an excerpt from Shahnaz Habib's Airplane Mode: A Passive-Aggressive History of Travel

If my father hated travel, my mother could not get enough of it. She enjoys new places, new people, new things to do. It is entirely possible that my parents were only slightly different from each other in their travel preferences when they began their marriage as impressionable twentysomethings. But marriages have a way of exacerbating polarities, with the two selves constructing themselves against each other. And so whether it was my mother resisting my father’s crustiness or whether it was my father scaling back against my mother’s enthusiasm, their polarities shaped my own childhood.

It was my mother who took our family travelling. Most of her meagre salary went towards rent and school fees. But one of the benefits of my mother’s job in a government bank was that her employer paid for employees to visit their hometowns. Local employees, like my mother, used this benefit for touristic travel. So every few years, our family, armed with canisters of drinking water and pickles and podis to add zest to railway meals, boarded a train at Ernakulam Railway Station. We visited Delhi, Agra, Bangalore, Madras, Bombay, sleeping overnight in trains, making friends out of fellow passengers, eating fabulous unrepeatable meals I can only dream of now as multiple families shared their tiffin boxes and passed around pickle jars.

We made friends on the train easily, thanks to my mother. As soon as she got settled in her seat, my mother would turn to the stranger next to her and smile warmly. “So. Where to?” she would begin, while the introverts in our family averted our eyes painfully. Luckily, her curiosity is matched by her charm. Everyone in the world is waiting to tell my mother their life story. I would pretend to read, but secretly I was always listening. The new parents on a pilgrimage to thank a Sufi saint and the Virgin Mother for blessing them after five miscarriages. A policewoman who married a man she arrested. A nun who survived a warzone.

I listened as these strangers told their stories, but really, I was listening to the stranger that my mother became on the train. Who was this funny, delightful, relaxed woman? At home, she was strict and practical, helpfully informing us that time wasted cannot ever be regained. For most of our childhood, my mother’s income as a bank clerk kept our family afloat. I could always hear her making mental to-do lists. But on the train, her whole body became soft. All the lower middle–class anxieties about paying English-medium school fees and looking respectable at weddings slithered away, leaving a mother who laughed easily, a mother who listened without judgement, a mother who wasted time.

But it’s not a waste of time, my mother will retort after reading this. Conversations with strangers are how my mother figures out the correct taxi fare to pay when she gets to her destination, where to buy tee-shirts at wholesale prices, which companies are hiring engineering graduates in which towns—over the course of a hundred train journeys, she has become the auntie to call when you need information.

“Look, amooomma is making a new best friend,” my daughter will whisper to me nowadays when my mother turns to the unsuspecting stranger next to her with a nuclear disarmament–level smile. It doesn’t always work. If 192 you are the young man on the shuttle train to Kottayam trying to read Love in the Time of Cholera, circa July 2018, please accept my apologies.

I, too, always carry a book, not so much to read but as a totem that wards off unwanted chatter. Unlike my mother, many train conversationalists are talkers, not listeners. My body can sense when I am sitting next to a mansplainer before he opens his mouth. 

My fear of being captured by a transportation conversationalist goes hand-in-hand with my horror of turning into one. What could be more uncool? Giving people their space, maintaining our own bubbles of quiet—that’s what’s cool. And the more travel becomes intertwined with technology, the more individualistic travel fantasies become, the more gauche it is to talk to your fellow travellers. Still, what to do with the humanity that sometimes bubbles up, despite all one’s attempts at being suave and mysterious? And so, sometimes, when I settle into a seat and feel the texture of time itself changing, I will turn to the person sitting next to me. Here we are. Two strangers brought together. Two stories intersecting unexpectedly. We may be stuck here for eternity. I see you, your youness. Tell me everything. Instead of all that, I will say, “So. Where to?”

Excerpted with permission from Airplane Mode: A Passive-Aggressive History of Travel by Shahnaz Habib, published by Context, an imprint of Westland Books