I must have been about 10 years old when my eldest cousin showed me a photo in his album that made me swell with pride and gave me reason to gloat.
The picture showed me as a toddler in my cousin's arms. Both of us were in an aeroplane and were looking out of the window. It was quite a big, square-shaped window, perhaps the only open one on the plane's left side. Apparently, it had no glass.
It was a small, single-engine aircraft with its two front wheels and the one at the rear still outstretched, as if it was ready to land. The pilot, and the other passengers, were not visible. The plane must have been flying at high altitude because you could see clouds in the photo.
Nevertheless, there were signs of some city below, with scattered clusters of dwellings, as well as green patches of land. A few grazing quadrupeds were also clearly evident, even from that height.
And, lest I forget, a couple of birds that appeared to be eagles were also visible. But they were certainly quite far away, and posed no threat to the aircraft.
Despite the window being open I felt we must have enjoyed a breeze, if not a forceful gust of air, but the photo showed no signs of it having even ruffled our hair. Also, it was obvious that neither my cousin nor I had suffered from any fear of the height.
I was grown up enough to wonder how somebody could have taken our photo at that height. But I told myself that someone with a camera must have been sitting next to a similar window in another plane that must have been flying alongside, like two trains moving on parallel tracks in the same direction.
The pilot of the other aircraft must have taken adequate care to maintain a safe distance so as to avoid any brush with our aircraft, while remaining close enough to enable the photographer to take a clear close-up with his box camera.
In the late 1940s, when India was under foreign yoke, flying was the exclusive privilege of mainly defence personnel, VIPs and the most affluent. For the ordinary man, it was a dream. He did not know much about aviation and the terminology associated with it. So, photographs like this one were taken at face value.
That was certainly the case with me. Bubbling with enthusiasm and pride, I boasted to boys of my age about how as a toddler I had travelled in an aeroplane under the care of my cousin, a privilege no other child in our city would have enjoyed.
One boy would not swallow it. The same evening, he came to our house and pricked the balloon of my pride by placing before me a photo showing his brother looking out of the same aircraft's window.
Much to my embarrassment, I learned that the aeroplane was painted on the screen of a roving photo studio that had travelled to fairs held in villages and city suburbs. There was never any dearth of people wanting to be photographed while 'travelling in a plane'.
Today, the aeroplane has been replaced by life-size cutouts of a smiling Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, Shahrukh Khan, Mohanlal, Mamootty and the like. Exuberant young boys and girls have their photos taken in the august company of their favourite film stars, having placed their arms around their necks and with matching smiles on their faces.
Lalit Raizada is a journalist based in India.
