An airplane mode for iPhones and I

As someone who’s lived away from home since the age of 17, I’ve spent a significant amount of time traveling to and from home. When I was in college, it used to be 15-hour overnight bus journeys or 20-hour train rides. Then I moved to the US about 8 years ago, and since then it’s been 20-plus hours of air travel each time I want to go home.

I find that whenever I’ve taken these long international flights, I don’t just put my mobile devices into airplane mode – I put myself as well. This is particularly true when I’m flying from India back to the US.

Do you know what I’m talking about? Is this a common first-generation immigrant phenomenon? Picture this: you spend months, if not years on end, thousands of miles away from your family. You get to visit home once a year, if you’re lucky – given the state of the world right now, it’s easily two to three years without seeing home. So when you finally get to make a trip home and get a few precious weeks with your people – before you know it, it’s time to leave, and you are swamped with a ton of powerful emotions. The millions of goodbyes you have to say. The sheer number of love and blessings and good wishes you carry with you. The amount of love is just overwhelming, like a cocoon surrounding you. And you never want to leave. The last few minutes at the departure terminal curb – saying goodbye to your parents, not knowing when you’ll see them next. The double-barreled swords of visa and COVID restrictions you’ll have to navigate to see your family again. Meanwhile, the other parts of your heart are tugging you the other way. Your husband of just over six months, whom you can’t really bear to be separated from. Your friends, who you see even less of, now that you have moved to a different city. Your independence, the life you painstakingly built for yourself from scratch – it all beckons. And so your heart is torn, yearning for all your loved ones to be at the same place, longing to be whole again. But that can only be done if they all collect in one room together. And given everything going on at the moment, it has been impossible to bring everyone together, not even for your wedding. And so the heart has no choice but to remain forever yearning, forever incomplete, forever aching.

And because you cannot afford to fully experience all those feelings when you’ve just reached the airport and have a 30-hour journey ahead – you turn off the signal, you go numb. You go into your airplane mode. You purposely put some distance between yourself and your emotions – and instead focus on the next step. You worry about your luggage being overweight. You sigh at the serpentine security queues. You fumble to take off your shoes and your jacket and your work laptop and your personal laptop and your kindle and your phone, and put them all in a tray without bumping into others or dropping something. You keep all your documents ready for the immigration counter. You glare at the idiots who don’t wear their masks properly; the very sight of exposed nostrils irritates you these days. You worry about reclaiming your baggage at the claim – visions of just standing at the carousel with the merry-go-round turning endlessly, delivering everyone’s bags but yours flood your brain. You hope that a freak storm doesn’t delay your flight – if it did, you’d have to rebook your connecting flights, painfully redo your PCR test, and pray to the universe that you haven’t caught the virus at some point during travel. You focus on getting through your journey with minimum hassle – because that is all that you can deal with at this point. Just trying to keep track of night and day, what time zone you’re in, what country you’re flying above – because you can’t deal with the painful emotions. If you let yourself feel them, you wouldn’t get on the plane in the first place. You’d be bawling your eyes out in the serpentine security queue, making it even harder for the agents to match your face to your already unrecognizable passport photo. You would be so sad, so broken up to be on a long unending flight, each minute taking you a mile further away from home – you couldn’t face it.

And so you activate your airplane mode when you’re flying. It’s not just for devices, you see.