Don’t you just love getting a window seat when you are travelling — whether by train, plane, car or coach?
Settling into a corner and leaning one’s head against the edge of the window/porthole is the equivalent of tucking oneself into a cosy bed, and it has the bonus of a great view. You can face forward trying to appear blase and well travelled and way too adult for “silly” things like trying to spot your house from the sky and you can still get a good enough view out of the corner of your eye; you can turn and press your nose to the glass like an enthusiastic child and try and imprint every image on your brain; you can glance out casually from time to time — but whichever way you do it, it is your own private space, your little cocoon that the person next to you cannot enter and even if they do tower over you enough to get almost as good a view as you — you are sure that they are not “seeing” what you do.
Because, when flying from Athens to Istanbul, you visualise Achilles and his Myrmidons heading for Troy; when crossing over the verdant French countryside on your way from Barcelona to London, you picture the landings at Normandy on D-Day; as you drone over the endless brown and red land mass of central Australia you “see” Mount Ayers (Uluru) in that large monolith down below.
A window seat can do wonders for the imagination — but window seats in our car were hard for me to come by when I was a child because there were three of us children and just two windows to struggle to “possess”. As the youngest, I invariably lost the battle. I couldn’t run fast enough to hog the window seat, or if I did manage to slip in first by some miracle of manoeuvring, I was quickly elbowed away by the superior size and strength of the other two siblings. And when my size eventually caught up with theirs, their superior arguments convinced me that what I actually wanted was to be well protected in the middle!
Adulthood didn’t improve my prospects much because before I knew it, there was another generation (mostly not of my making) staking their claims for a window seat. I was reduced to just a convenient — and comfortable — lap for wriggly nieces and nephews who spent entire road journeys bouncing this way and that, but I considered myself lucky that I wasn’t left behind — and I held onto them and sometimes even got to look out between and over the various parts of their bodies that slammed into my nose or dug into my side!
Watching the world whizzing by
Now, however, things are different. Fellow travellers — and by that I mean the fellow senior citizens in our group — seem to prefer the aisle seat in planes so that they can stretch out, they can get to the toilet easily, they can rise whenever they want and walk up and down to relieve cramped legs and avoid embolisms and the like.
Who am I to argue with their logic? Pretending to be very accommodating and virtuous, I slide over to the window seat, secretly relieved that I didn’t have to use my fists to get it like I did in the past, and I curl up contentedly to watch the world whizz past.
But, wham — now here comes a study that says your preference for window seats has something to say about you: That you are selfish, irritable, you like to seal yourself away from others, and you have a not-so-caring “every-person-for-themselves” attitude to life.
You didn’t see that window into your soul coming when you were revelling in that window seat, did you?
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
