14th July, '06

Charlie: All airlines have crashed at one time or another, that doesn't mean that they are not safe.
Raymond: Qantas.
Charlie: Qantas?
Raymond: Qantas never crashed.
Charlie: Qantas?
Raymond: Never crashed.
Charlie: Well, that's just --
Raymond: Never crashed.

— Conversation between Charlie and Raymond Babitt played by Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in ‘Rain Man’ (1988)

BA Flight 382,
from Bombay to London
is numbered this way
because it is an in-bound
flight*, an aircraft that
departed from Heathrow
as Flight 381, and now,
having flown half-way
around the world,
understands
it is on the return leg
of its journey.

He, on the other
hand, remains suspended
somewhere
between sky and land.
His seat, 4B,
suggests that, like
the plane itself, he is
headed for Home.

On All Nippon Airways, there
would be no 4,
so he would be in row
5, and home would
be in the opposite
direction.

Shi, the Japanese word
for 4.
and also for Death,
the final termination.
4 means you die, 5 keeps you alive.
Do the numbers decide
the destination, or vice versa?

Superstitions thrive
in the rarefied air of the chamber,
and other numbers
routinely disappear.
Like 9, which in Japanese
sounds like the word for torture
and 17, which, when
re-arranged in Roman numerals
spells VIXI.
Veni, Vidi, Vici, Vixi.
I came, I saw, I flew the Concorde.
And I lived, in past tense.

(In the present, he is past tense.
Approaching terror.)

Makes no sense,
and yet, no 17 on Lufthansa,
no 13 either. And so the rows go,
the seats still in place,
only the numbers erased.
Why tempt Fate when you
can attempt to confuse her?

And so,
no gate number 4,
13, or even 44
at Seoul’s Inchon Airport,
while the guard at the door
of the Holiday Inn
in Delhi
informs me,
with alarming sincerity,
that out of respect
to their customers,
there is no thirteenth floor.

*As per convention in commercial aviation, International inbound (return flights) are numbered evenly, while outbound flights depart from their city of origin with odd flight numbers.