With a restless heart,
I wander from corner to corner,
I, Gatwick Airport,
Searching for the passengers of AI One Seven One
In every passing face.
That day, it took off
From Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Airport,
A normal flight, "Ahmedabad to London,"
But it never arrived,
Nor ever will.
Something abnormal must have happened
That it didn't reach its destination.
Everyone shrugged their shoulders, saying,
'Everything was fine on our end.'
Then why did it meet its end?
There was ample hope in its wings,
To measure the sky of its own will.
Then why couldn't it continue,
A ten-hour flight for even ten minutes?
The sprouts of waiting withered,
Laughter died, Sorrow froze,
The laboratory of tears melted.
The blood in bodies turned black,
An echo spread on cracked windows,
Doors threw out mangled corpses.
The rules of prayers were spurned.
Such a cruel fate,
That it swallowed
Endless days along with that one afternoon.
Something departed from life:
The grace of dawn,
The smile of dusk,
Giving in return a black hole of despair.
Think, before silence becomes immortal,
How loudly helplessness must have screamed.
Like an unnecessary matter,
How quickly you forgot.
How could you forget,
And how can I forget?
Whispers roll across my chest
That they won't come.
I feel cursed.
Who will compensate
My hope for overtime,
Which neither rests nor stops?
I, Gatwick Airport, London,
Will not be satisfied even after reading all the theories
In the files of those visitors
Whose footsteps time confiscated,
Who were meant to happen,
But merely remained 'happened'.
It cannot be normal,
So many footsteps stopping at once.
Who must have stopped them?
Who must have welcomed them?
From the moment of stopping to reaching.
If anyone could give a deep embrace to those departing,
It was the walls and roof of that hostel,
And those chosen few
Who would have been called doctors yesterday,
They too had to prematurely wear
The amulet of death.
My eagerness
Remained a lament in my desperate gaze.
Such a tragic tale of becoming unanimated
In life's curriculum.
Sometimes it feels
That in creating humans,
God is also learning the art of being human.
The essence of the unspeakable pain
From the emotional human to the unsolved rubric,
Surely you can unravel.
But from Bageshwar to Grok,
Don't let anyone say
That you know everything.
To remain human while being human, one needs
A titanium heart.
Then, even in my waiting area, there can be
An atomic test of pain.
