We boarded the plane and took our seats, with a group of annoying Pakistani women causing immense amounts of turmoil as they attempted to load everything they could possibly have ever owned into the overhead compartments, and drafting anyone walking by to help them in this process. When I finally got to my seat, I settled in comfortably to watch chaos unfold from a safe distance, and started nodding off to sleep. Until an asshole with his wife and two kids came and sat down in next to me, and demanded that I move so that his wife could sit with him, instead of in the row directly behind him. Naturally, the manner in which he phrased this request was vile, and raised my hackles, so I bluntly refused, citing muscle cramps as the reason for my having to occupy that particular seat. Disgruntled, he sat down next to me and started scratching his balls with one hand, and excavating his left nostril with the other.

I shuddered and turned away from him as much as I could.

There’s nothing quite as horrific as the flight segment from a Middle Eastern country to a South Asian one. This one proved to be no exception to that rule as the dickhead next to me proceeded to affect the world’s most atrocious faux-American accent and began yelling at the flight staff. He was one of those people who feels that every comment of his must be aired at maximum volume, so as to not deprive the world of his pearls of wisdom, and after about ten minutes of oratory I found myself ready to garrotte him with his seatbelt. It didn’t help that the Pakistani harridans were absolutely traumatised by the fact that the ground staff hadn’t been able to give their families of a dozen or more adjacent seats, and began to weep copiously at the thought of their wee offspring (devil-spawn one and all) having to be separated from the heaving maternal bosoms by the massive distance of one entire row. Beating their breasts and tearing at their hair, they ululated cries of distress into the confines of the cabin, loudly making sure that the Qatar Airways staff were aware that should their children vanish, be abducted or disappear, Allah would curse them, aye verily, unto the hundredth generation. I admired the restraint of the cabin crew member assigned to their particular section, who with far gentler mien than I would have been able to muster, pointed out that the flight would only be for two hours, and would take place in a sealed environment, muttering quietly to herself in Afrikaans that the only way for a child to be lost would be if it took after the mother in brain capacity and accidentally flushed itself down the toilet.

I chuckled quietly to myself, delighted by her sentiment, until I realised that we were half-an-hour late for departure, because a fracas had broken out between another cabin attendant and some raging bitch-whore from Hell who had had the good fortune to secure an exit-row seat and was busily arranging her sixteen larvae, all under the age of twelve, so that they could sit in the same row as her. Apparently, the flight attendant (that bitch, that shameless slut!) had pointed out that children couldn’t sit in an exit-row because they weren’t mature enough to handle the egresses in case of an emergency. I agreed with her sentiment, but that seething cow of a maternal figure had cocked up the entire cabin’s seating arrangement by somehow managing to convince 15 different people to alter their seating arrangements in order to accommodate the maggots brought forth from her devilish loins.

“Hey baby,” bellowed the candidate for retroactive abortion sitting next to me, trying to suck in his gut so that he could get the seat-belt on, “why don’t you come sit in my lap and leave that lady alone, huh? It’ll be the best ride you’ll get on this plane!” Overcome by his scintillating wit, he guffawed loudly, leaving me to add chronic halitosis to the already-lengthy list of his many failings as a human being.

“Hi,” I smiled at him, turning in my seat—as far as I could before his love handles, spilling over the armrest arrested my movement—to look at his sweaty visage. “I realise that we may have got off on the wrong foot, but I was just wondering, could you possibly shut the fuck up?”

“What did you say?” he asked me, jowls purpling from what I hoped would be a fatal apoplectic fit.

“I’ll try that again,” I beamed as sunnily as I could. “Your wife is sitting behind you, and while she’s obviously brain-damaged for having borne your children, you could at least have some sense of personal dignity or respect for her, and not shout crude shit at the cabin crew, who are trying their best to get us off the ground and into the air.”

“You can’t…you can’t talk to me like that,” he stammered. “Do you know what I can do to you?”

“There’s nothing you can do to me,” I snarled, “that your obnoxious presence hasn’t already managed to accomplish, so seriously, shut your pie-hole and let this plane get off the ground okay? And don’t fucking talk to me again, I don’t have the patience for this bullshit. Also? I’m a lawyer [OK a little white lie], and if you even THINK about trying to raise a hand to me, I will sue you so badly that your great-grandchildren will be paying off damages for their natural life-spans.”

The cabin crew smiled at me as they went by, and returned a few minutes later with a small bottle of champagne. But I had eyes only for the vision of mortal perfection who handed me the bottle with his absurdly graceful, long, dextrous fingers, a young man whose name-tag identified him as “Christiaan”. What that man was doing walking the aisles of a plane instead of the catwalks of Milan I will never understand, but he was breathtakingly handsome, with just enough of a catch in his features to make them arresting instead of plastic, and I simply could not stop staring at his crotch which hovered tantalisingly in front of me, bare inches from my face. It was with the greatest effort that I thanked him for the champagne, only letting go of the hand with which he handed it to me when I realised that he was starting to pull it away with increasing force. Dark-brown hair, turquoise eyes, and an ass that undoubtedly could have moonlighted (hah!) as a walnut-cracker.

I quite literally spent the next two hours craning my neck to watch him walk past. His compatriot poured me heavy drink after heavy drink, leading me to start chatting with her in broken German (close enough to Afrikaans), a conversation that led to the discovery that Christiaan too hailed from South Africa (Johannesburg), had been working as a flight attendant for a fortnight (and this was his first flight to Karachi), was single (and would be in Karachi for 24 hours), and to the best of her *wink, wink* knowledge, wasn’t inclined towards the ladies.

Half an hour later, as I emerged from the galley with stubble-burn on my face, I could definitely vouch for the veracity of the last statement.

I didn’t bother exchanging numbers, knowing full-well that I’d not have time to call him before he flew out again, but I did give him my e-mail address. Floating down the corridors of the arrivals area in a haze of barely-fulfilled lust, I realised that the Hot Nerd was talking to me.

“So, are you from London originally?”

“No,” I replied, struggling to bring my mind back from visions of Christiaan in his boxer-shorts. “I’m from Karachi—went to school in the US, moved back a few years ago and studying in London now. How about you?”

“Oh, well, I taught at the [local art college] here, but I’m doing my Masters degree in London now, in Contemporary Art History.”

Somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind, a bell began clanging, trying to overpower the remembered endearments whispered into my ear in Afrikaans as lunch trays rattled and crashed to the galley floor and a safety demonstration oxygen mask demonstrated its potential for violence.

“What area are you focusing on?” I asked him politely, moving my messenger bag in a vain effort to hide a growing tumescence.

“Well, actually I’m doing performance theory? I don’t know if you’re familiar with it…”

“Like what Sedgwick and Butler postulate?” I shot back, sirens in my head getting louder and visions of South African scorchingness dwindling rapidly.

“Yeah, actually” he said, looking at me slightly strangely. “I’m doing…umm…queer theory, you know, notions of…”

“Nation as narration, performance of identity as drag, cultural politics, that sort of thing? Bhabha, Anderson, Myers?” I stared at him openly, with no small measure of disbelief.

“Wow, you’re pretty grounded in the theorists, huh?” he smiled back, slightly nervous.

“I did my honours thesis and my dissertation proposals on those,” I responded. “It’s refreshing to talk to someone else from Karachi who knows about these things.”

“Well, if you get a moment, we should meet up and talk about them. It’d be great to bounce some ideas I have off someone else who understand what I’m doing.”

The only thing you’ll be doing is me if I have my way I thought to myself.