Flying high, yet feeling the pull of depressing reality

Seven miles above the earth, sipping on Dom Perignon while I nibble on Haagen Dasz chocolate ice-cream with some kind of pie that has orange peel in it. Bailey’s on ice frappe to follow, and for the first time, I wish air travel still permitted smoking. A cheap sweet cigar would have been so good here. Or perhaps a fill of Amphora Cherry Cavendish.

Far below us is Iran. The porthole frames an expanse of mud. From up here, it looks like Reza Shah Pallavi and the Ayatollah ruled over the world’s largest WWE mosh-pit. Then a ridge appears above the plains, like a crocodile’s back surfacing. A great river valley runs from north to south, diagonally across the plane’s nor’westerly track.

A series of little lakes, each with its own patch of cloud standing guard above it, dwindle into the north like yeti footprints. The in-flight screen shows us flying across the Arabian Sea, skirting Karachi and indeed all of Pakistan, passing way south of Kandahar and Kabul (such rhythm to these names!).

Our path lies north of Esfahan, south of Tehran, past Yerevan, over the Black Sea, past the south-facing port of Sevastopol and on over the Alps. Sevastopol. That last line from Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustam: “the new-bathed stars/ Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea ...”

Such romance in these names, such visions of deserts and caravans, ice creaking under oaken hulls and fir-bristled crags in the drifting snow. And yet the reality far below is so far from romance, a world where the fears raised by darkness howl forth in broad daylight.

Where Babur’s pomegranate groves watered by the cooling streams of Esfahan may no longer exist, where the Buddhas of Bamiyan are long gone. While I love these flying geography lessons, like Goh Cheng Leong brought to life, or the Oxford Atlas in bright new 3-D, a closer look would show how geography is now a function of economics, where forests vanish under the blades of greed and history is wiped out by ideology.

Mosul. Tabriz. Qazvin. Yerevan. Azerbaijan. Qom. South of the Caspian Sea, Amol, Sari, Ashkkabad. Far to the north-west, Rostad la Danu. Baku, a name hovering in the north.

From 7 miles in the air, the lights of Tehran. The city grid outlined in lights, a smudge of cloud or smog floating above the western part. Outlying clusters of lights mark the suburbs, dwindling into hamlets, between them the occasional single pinpoint of light, the “good deed in a naughty world”. Farther east the darkness swallows the scattered lights.

I can understand why those who believe in God imagine that he is somewhere far above the earth. Floating here, so far from the demons of the dark, watching the last glimmer of the day fade from the horizon, there is a sense of detachment, like watching a story unfold upon a silver screen.

At the same time, it is equally easy to imagine the rigours of life in the wastes, miles from any other human settlement. Easy to imagine the dragons of isolation, of solitude, that eat into the mind and start the cancers of fear and exclusion, fuel the winter dark and fill it with the terrible unknown.

Where a God unknown is a bulwark against cold and hunger and sudden pain, where even the outpourings from a rabid bigot offer refuge from the uncertainties of the coming day. As I turn from the window to my cocoon of light and comfort, empathy grows and judgement no longer seems so easy.

The author is a reluctant bureaucrat and an avid photographer.