The Surrogate

It's 10 p.m. My brother dropped me at the airport, and we hugged and kissed goodbye right there at the curb, under the sodium-orange glow of the drop-off lights, with a security guard already gesturing at him to move the car along. We didn't linger — we never do, our family isn't built for long goodbyes — just a tight squeeze, his hand patting my back twice like punctuation, and then he pulled back and looked at me the way brothers look at sisters they're pretending not to worry about. "Call me when you land in London. Not Mumbai, London — I know you'll be tired, just the first real one," he said. "I will." "And don't talk to strangers." He said it like a joke, but not entirely. "I'm going on a trip specifically to talk to thirteen strangers, so." He laughed, shook his head, and got back in the car. I stood there with my trolley bag and watched him pull away from the curb, the taillights shrinking into the dark outside the terminal until a bus blocked my view and I couldn't see him anymore. This is going to be the best month of my life, I told myself, standing there a second longer than I needed to. I waited for the excitement to catch up with the thought. It didn't, not fully. There was a low static underneath it, something I couldn't quite locate or name — not sadness, not fear, just a faint wrongness, like a note played slightly under pitch. I told myself it was nerves. Or the four hours of sleep I'd gotten after staying up packing, refolding the same three tops until they fit into the last inch of space in my suitcase. I'd booked my own flights — to and fro, separate from the group's shared itinerary. It gives me flexibility, I told myself when I was booking it, which wasn't a lie. But if I'm honest with myself standing here at gate check, some part of me had also wanted an exit that belonged only to me — a return ticket nobody else's plans could hold hostage. A month with thirteen strangers from a w******p group was already a leap for someone who color-coded her calendar. At least the flights were mine to control. I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the group chat one more time before switching to flight mode. Euro Explorers – Batch 7. Thirteen names, most of them still just names — profile pictures of monuments and pets and one alarming close-up of somebody's motorcycle — coordinating trains and hotel check-ins through voice notes and too many exclamation marks. I checked, again, whether anyone else was flying out of Bangalore tonight. No one had said so in the chat. I would likely be meeting all of them for the first time somewhere on the other side of this — London, probably, or wherever the group's first stop actually was. The thought gave me the same static as before, just dressed in slightly different clothes. I checked the departure board glowing above the check-in counters. Gate 14. Two hours to go. Enough time to feel every minute of it. After I dropped my bag — the woman at the counter barely glancing up as she tagged it, sending it off into whatever system swallows luggage and returns it, usually, at the other end — I found a quiet row of seats near a pillar and let myself actually sit for the first time all evening. My shoulders came down an inch. I pulled out my passport, if only to look at it, running my thumb over the visa stickers and stamps, the small bureaucratic proof of weeks spent standing in lines and filling out forms and waiting for emails that started with "We regret to inform" or, thankfully, didn't. I deserve this, I thought. Not as a boast. More like something I needed to hear myself think, the way you check a lock twice even after you've already checked it once, just to quiet the part of your brain that keeps asking. Security took longer than I'd budgeted for — it always does, no matter how many times I fly, no matter how early I show up expecting otherwise — and by the time I was through, patted down and re-belted and reunited with my shoes, I only had enough time to grab a bottle of water before they called my boarding group. The flight to Mumbai was short and unremarkable, the kind of hour-and-a-half where you don't even finish settling into your seat, tray table still up, before the cabin lights dim for descent. Mumbai's airport swallowed me the moment I stepped off the aerobridge — that particular hush of a terminal at 1 a.m., footsteps echoing off floors so polished they looked wet, glass ceilings holding back a sky I couldn't see. I felt very small for a second, the way big airports always manage to make you feel, like the building was built for a scale of movement bigger than one tired woman with a trolley bag. I was grateful, at least, that my connecting flight left from the same terminal. No shuttle bus at this hour, no scrambling across a stretch of tarmac in the dark. Small mercies, the kind you only notice when you're exhausted enough to need them. I checked my watch — the Van Heusen with the gold-toned strap, the one I'd bought myself the day my promotion letter came through. Nobody gifted it to me. I'd walked into the store alone on a Tuesday evening after work, still in my ID lanyard, and paid for it in full without waiting for a discount or a second opinion, and it had felt like the most honest kind of celebration I knew how to give myself. 2:30 a.m., it said now. Still hours between me and the version of tonight where I'd finally be horizontal. Immigration was its own small ordeal — the queue folding back on itself twice, tired officers stamping passports without quite looking at the faces attached to them, a woman a few people ahead of me arguing softly but insistently about her visa category while her husband stood by looking like he wanted to be anywhere else. By the time I finally cleared it, my legs ached from standing and my eyes had that dry, sandy feeling that comes from being awake well past the hour your body had quietly agreed to. My flight to London wasn't for several more hours yet. I found the lounge, scanned my card at the desk, and sank into a chair that reclined further back than any chair had a right to. I thought about calling my brother and decided against it — he'd be asleep by now, and there was nothing worth waking him for except I'm tired and it's very bright in here, also there's a man asleep by the buffet with his shoes off. I thought, just for a moment, about my parents — what they'd say if they could see me now, alone at an airport lounge at 3 a.m., proud of a trip they hadn't entirely approved of — and let the thought go before it could unfold into anything bigger. Not tonight. Tonight was supposed to be the beginning of something good, and I intended to protect it, even from my own head. I set an alarm — just enough time to freshen up before boarding, splash cold water on my face, maybe find something resembling breakfast that a body four time zones deep into confusion could actually stomach. I curled into the lounge chair as much as it allowed, tucked my bag against my leg the way my mother taught me to the first time I flew alone at nineteen, and closed my eyes. Whatever the static was — nerves, exhaustion, some quieter and harder-to-name thing sitting just under my ribs — I decided, right before sleep finally took me, that I wouldn't let it follow me onto the plane. A month. Six countries. Thirteen strangers who didn't yet know my name. And somewhere on the other side of all this tiredness, a version of myself I hadn't gotten to be yet, waiting. The alarm, when it came, felt like it arrived seconds after I'd shut my eyes.