Travel book - Shantaram

Taken from The Paper Bouquet
I have been reading Shantaram and absorbing a new perspective with each turn of the page. Shantaram is an outsider who befriended India and its people in a fearless exploration of crime and culture. Through the writing of Gregory David Roberts, I can identify with and appreciate the humanity which is the epoch of Indian society.

Passengers were filing in. And then suddenly it struck me how noisy everyone was. It was not just a little boy who was excited, there was a veritable buzz in the air. People were chatting and greeting each other as they took their places. The elderly mother of the frantic lady was helped into a seat next to her daughter and someone else stowed their luggage away respectfully (all five bags of it). A balding, bespectacled uncleji passing onward to his seat, stopped with a "Good day!" and made conversation with the brat while his mother and grandmother smiled back. A group of middle-aged men passed me on the left, their eyes staring because that is how you acknowledge a woman in India. The old uncleji with a cameraphone was still clicking away and he harkened loudly to a friend sitting some rows behind me, who responded with a shout. It was all very lively and I was quite entertained.

We were finally in the air. The little boy wanted to explore every gadget around him. The honeymooning couple laughed when he lunged for the handle to open the luggage compartment. On the third jump he made it, and the newlywed husband jumped up to shut it before anything could spill out. No one actually knew each other, but everyone was traveling together and that meant something to them. The Gujju uncleji's friends came to visit him from the other end of the aircraft and sat down in a neighbouring empty seat to have a chat. It was then that I noticed that there were a lot of people standing around the aisle, especially around one seat towards the back of the plane. At first I thought maybe something was wrong. Then I realized that they'd been there for a while, and one of them was seated on the armrest of the seat opposite the aisle to be close to the center. Others had asked people to "adjust" so that they could form a circle....and play cards :D People from front rows had moved back to join the game, while those at the back had simply come forward, stretched out in the vacant seats and gone off to sleep. And just like the little boy, I felt like I really was in an overnight journey in a bus, like I really was going home.

(more notes from an aeroplane, here.)