1 Oct 2025
For hours now we’d been flying over the sea, it felt like. Just beautiful, clear skies and a deep blue below. I was in a daze, having been out of home for over 12 hours and lost sense of date or time. I was watching Pachinko, unable to fully sleep or stay awake. We were about an hour away from landing in Taipei, when I saw it.
A strip of land, green, shining in the blue sea. It was stunning, so much so I thought for a second that I’d imagined it. But sure enough, within seconds, the strip became longer. I quickly switched to the map view on the airplane screen. Yes! It was land! It was the southern most edge of the island that I’d just seen!
It was magnificent. Oh, I wish I could explain the thrill of it! I felt awe wash all over me, to have been able to see from high above the first sight of Taiwan from the South China Sea end. Perhaps this is what seafarers and cartographers felt back in the day. I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed it; I wanted to share live the excitement of my precious discovery. Most were asleep or lost in their screens. Never mind; I tried to drink in as much detail as I could. For a precious few seconds, I tried to trace the little curves and squiggles that made up the land, as it gradually grew out to occupy more of my plane window. In a few minutes, windmills appeared, planted in the sea.
1 Oct 2025
It was 6-something am Singapore time, but the city was cloaked in darkness, since its clocks are set an hour ahead of the time that better suits its location (GMT + 7, not 8).
My heart was already heavy, as I was flying Singapore Airlines and pretty much everything reminded me of my former home – the accents, the care, the attention to detail. As if for my benefit – and to enthuse the tourists visiting the country from India in droves – the plane flew over the Central Business District. The Marina Bay Sands and the Singapore flyer stood out in their glittering glory.
I pushed back a tear, because all I wanted to do when the plane landed was to leave the airport, tap my passport and have it say ‘Welcome home’, take a cab or the MRT, go to Boon Lay or Sengkang or Ang Mo Kio and walk through the university hostels or the HDB blocks or stroll into a food court and get a tau sar pao or a kaya toast and a teh-c. In those few seconds, as we flew past the eastern end of the city-state towards the airport, I imagined two dozen different places to be. The plane landed and as I got out, I realised this was my first time ever transiting through Singapore. It had always been a destination. It had been home.
17 July 2004
“Rain is falling,” said my co-passenger, a native Hindi speaker going on her honeymoon. I scribbled this sentence down somewhere as I made notes of this and that on my first ever time going abroad, that too by myself. I was bursting at the seams in excitement, so much so that I’d forgotten to be scared. My mind registered this sentence because I’d never heard this usage before: to me, it was always “it’s raining,” compared to “rain is falling,” and I wondered if she was translating the sentence from Hindi. Out of politeness, I nodded, and we both watched the raindrops glaze the plane window.
In an hour or so, we were landing in Singapore, and she and I were equally excited to see the land pulling into our view. My first glimpse of the island city was of a million yellow lights in a dark, large patch of land. I was awestruck. I scribbled: “From the sky, Singapore looks like a giant Christmas tree.”