Air Hostess or Air Host?

The postmark was smudged over Mahatma Gandhi's portrait printed on the top right hand corner of the Inland Letter Card. However, I could tell by the handwriting on the address field that this was another epistle from Mari Marcel. The year was 1976 and it cost two rupees and fifty paise to buy and mail one of these ubiquitous self seal blank letters. One had to be extremely careful when opening these: one careless slip while slitting open the gummed sides which held the whole thing together and you might inadvertently delete some key sentence or phrase and the whole meaning and intention of the letter might suddenly appear in a different light, and not always to the sender's advantage!

"Dear Alokianathan," she began. I have never been able to fathom why she ever called me that; my genes are as far removed from South India as that of any Gupta, Singh, or Malhotra. Mari had joined Air India a couple of years earlier and would occasionally write about her exotic travels as an air hostess with the airline. Her college friends in Calcutta, among whom I was counted, would read these letters and imagine a world far removed from the one we lived in. Our world revolved around scanning the newspapers for advertisements which offered job prospects. Yes, I had joined the ranks of what was then called the "educated unemployed", another drop in the vast ocean of graduates with an uncertain future.

After cycling through the "apply, apply, NO REPLY" syndrome, I began to think that I was not really "educated unemployed", but "educated and Unemployable". The frustration had begun to build up. I toyed with the idea of going off to Bhutan to teach, but dear old Professor Kapadia - my favourite teacher in college bar none - dissuaded me over a beer (he paid for it, I was penniless) in a cafe on Park Street. He told me that the salary was a fraction of what he had been offered about ten years earlier by the Bhutanese government when he had graduated; they had thrown in a paid annual overseas vacation as well! So you can see that the global trend by employers to get the same work (preferably more!) done for a lesser price has its origins way back! I had earlier rejected an opportunity to work with the Statesman newspaper as a trainee sub editor for the same economic reason: low salary. Those were the days before the magazine boom which catapulted journalists into the big league, especially if you were in the glamour reporting business. Shobha De and Stardust had not yet hit the big time. Scribes and reporters were typically overworked and underpaid. Instead I went to work briefly for the Voice of America Bengali services as a freelance radio stringer. It was more or less propaganda work for the Americans and it paid comparatively well. The bottom fell out of this short romance when Jimmy Carter became president. The overseas budget for the radio station was slashed and there was no more work.

I had graduated with English Literature as my main subject and perhaps this was the problem. Poetry might fill my soul, but it certainly wasn't going to fill my belly. Mari's letter arrived at the perfect time. "Why don't you join Air India as a Purser and see the world?" she wrote. I decided to investigate.

I was aware that there were young and pretty girls who were called "Air Hostesses". In the emancipated west (or so I thought then!) they were referred to as stewardesses. I knew there were some males in those flying metal tubes: they were called Pilots! But male flight attendants? Did such a beast really exist?My only knowledge of the life of cabin crew had been gleaned from the runaway 1967 bestseller "Coffee, Tea, or Me?" by Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones. As anyone who has ever read this book will agree, it offers a pretty skewed perspective of the life of flight attendants. I had absolutely no idea that males could also work in the cabin: this, sadly, was the level of my ignorance, growing up in the backwaters of Calcutta. Needless to say, I had never set foot inside an aircraft.

I was still young, though certainly not pretty! I decided that I had nothing to lose but my misconceptions. I began to read the classified section of the newspapers more carefully and one fine day the much anticipated ad appeared. I dashed off the application and waited. A couple of months later I wrote the test in a hall at the Great Eastern Hotel near Dalhousie Square. At the interview which followed immediately, Mr.Ramachandra quizzed me about the aircraft that Air India flew and my geographical knowledge was also put to the test. He seemed pleased that I did not confuse Burkina Faso with Burundi! I was happy at the outcome of the interview: at least the questions had been relevant, unlike the one put to the hapless protagonist of one of Mrinal Sen's classic films about unemployment where the hero is asked : "What is the circumference of the moon?". The job the young man had applied for had nothing to do with the Appollo project.

And then apparently Air India forgot about me completely. Months went by with no word from Bombay; yeah, it was still called Bombay then. Now it was my turn to spend two rupees and fifty paise for a Inland Letter Card. No, I did not write to Mari. I composed an anguished enquiry regarding the status of my application and mailed it to Air India. Another couple of weeks went by and I had almost resigned myself to perhaps spending the rest of my life as a bank clerk - provided I got that job - when, lo and behold, out of the blue, courtesy of the Indian Postal Service, I received a letter asking me to report to Air India at their Kalina office in Santa Cruz, Bombay.

There was jubilation amongst my friends. We went to our favourite Chinese eatery near the college and had a celebratory meal, constantly monitoring the budget to ensure that we did not end up embarrassing our slim wallets.

Not everyone was happy, though. One of my aunts shook her head and said, "So, you are going to be a waiter in the sky?" I could see that she was already feeling embarrassed. By this time, almost two years since graduating from university and still with no prospects in sight, I had had enough. I looked her directly in the eye and said, rather curtly,"Do you have a better idea, auntie?" She flinched at the intensity of my reaction and looked away. As I packed the few clothes that I would be travelling with, I thought of the whole lopsided attitude that I had unconsciously become a part of : those were the days when the middle class in that part of the country could somehow not bring itself to see the service industry, apart from Hotel Management, as a legitimate career choice. If you served people, you were a servant, and therefore some kind of a lower being. Was this the "bhadralok" syndrome which would rather have you work as a babu in some dingy government office tying red ribbons around musty old files all day, then discussing the burning political issues of the day over endless cups of tea; rather than putting your hands to work at whatever came your way. This same mindset viewed stewardesses as Glorified Ayahs. Obviously this attitude was nurtured by the class and caste stratification which is still the bane of Indian society, though slowly and thankfully becoming a thing of the past now.

I was itching to get away, away from a world where the only options presented to you was, in the following order of preference :

1. IAS officer
2. Engineer
3. Doctor
4. Management Trainee in a multinational corporation
5. Probationary Officer in a nationalised bank

Some people asked me,"Why don't you pursue Higher Studies?"  In my defence and in order to preempt any further discussion, I told them this true story: when my mark sheet from Calcutta University for the B.A. Part I Exam was not received by my college, Professor Kapadia and I went to investigate. What followed on College Street was straight out of the pages of a Kafka novel.  After negotiating a series of interminable desks with seemingly clueless clerks behind them, we were led into a dimly lit room with cobwebs dangling from the high ceiling, catching the faint light in gossamer threads. There were mark sheets lying scattered on the floor. Kapadia and I went down on our knees and began to carefully sift through pages and pages of paper with strange, unfamiliar names on them. It was nothing short of a miracle when I found my name. We both shouted out in relief and excitement and the cobwebs trembled...

That single incident had shattered any illusions I may have harboured about studying any further.
As if to cement my case the  3 year degree course that I had originally enrolled for had stretched to more than 4 years - not because I was dim witted, but because the administration of the university could not get their act together.

I was tired of discussing metaphysics and the dialogues of Plato with my erudite and intellectual friends. I had heard rumours that things were very different in Bombay. Bombay was the happening place, Bombay was the place where people who wanted more from life gravitated to. This was my opportunity! I must not allow the old ways of thinking to hold me back, to clip my wings even before I had taken flight.

Armed with a free railway pass from my father, the letter from Air India, the contact address of an uncle in Navy Nagar, Colaba, I boarded the Howrah - Bombay Express on a warm April day in 1977. I had  Rs.250/- in my pocket. But as wisdom teaches us, when you touch rock bottom, there is only one way to go : UP. And up above 30,000 feet is where I would be spending a lot of my life from now on. But there was some turbulence to deal with first...!