FROM KATHARINE HART'S DIARY

October 9, 1989
I cannot believe I am sitting next to him, yet again, on a plane. How many times we have done this, how many flights, transfers, holidays, my passport and ticket always with him, even my boarding card; he was the man, the head of the family, he held the travel documents. And when it was all over, that was among the many rights I had regained, the right to be myself on an airline. Not an appendage, not a wife, not Mrs Rudyard Hart, no longer resigned to his determination to have the aisle seat, no longer waiting for him to pass me the newspaper when he'd finished it, no longer having to see the look of irritated long-suffering on his face when I disturbed him to go to the washroom, or asked him to catch the stewardess's attention to get something for the kids.

The kids. It's been years since we've all travelled together, as a family. He enjoyed travel, he often told me, but on his own. He was self-sufficient, he didn't need things all the time like we, the rest of us, did -- juice, or entertainment, or frequent trips to the bathroom. He made it obvious that being accompanied by us was not his preferred mode of travel. But we did it often enough, till the kids began to rate airlines and hotels and transit lounges the way other kids compared baseball teams. An because of Rudyard's posting, the kids had an unusually exotice basis for comparison. "Emirates is cool," Kim would say, because that airline had video monitors on the backs of the seats and a wide range of channels to choose from. "But they make you fly through Dubai," Lance would retort, pronouncing it Do-buy "where it's just shops, shops, shops everywhere. Schiphol is cooler!" At Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, his own favourite, Lance would pray for our connecting flights to be delayed so that he could have even longer in the arcade, shooting down monsters and dragons with no regard for jet lag. 

How wonderful it is to have you monsters and dragons on a screen in front of you, to be destroyed by the press of a button, and not inside your heart as mine are, hammering away at your soul. Monsters and dragons, not just at an airport arcade between weary flights, but on the plane, in your seat, in the seat next to you.

In the seat next to me sits my monstrous ex-husband and wife, merely father and mother. Father and mother with no kids in sight. Kim couldn't get away from work, where he tells me junior stockbrokers are lucky if they can take Thanksgiving weekend. And Lance -- Lance, who could never understand why I had to leave his father, Lance is in a world of his own and has no need of other worlds. But I'm not going to worry about Lance today I've got too much else to think about.

Priscilla.
Priscilla with the baby blue eyes and the straight blond hair and that took of trusting innocence with which she greeted the world. Priscilla with her golden skin, her golden smile that lit up the eyes of anyone she was with. Priscilla with her idealism, her earnestness, her determination to do some good in the world. Priscilla who hated her father because of what he had done to me.

I look at him now, trying to read a magazine and not succeeding, his eyes blurring over the same page he has been staring at since I began writing these words. I look at him, and I see Priscilla: she had his eyes, his nose, his lips, his hair, except that the same features looked so different on her. Where his good looks are bloated by self-indulgence, hers were smoothed and softened by gentleness.  And that sullen set of his jaw, that look of a man who has had his own way too easily for too long, set him completely apart from his daughter. There was nothing arrogant or petulant about Priscilla, not even when she was upset about some flagrant injustice. She was just a good human being, and no one would say that about Rudyard.

I look at him, trying to focus on the page, mourning the daughter whose loss he cannot come to terms with. Cannot, because he had already lot her when he lost me, lost her while she was still living. Despite myself, I feel a tug of sorrow for him.

It hurt so much to use the past tense for Priscilla. My baby, my own personal contribution to the future of the world. I would give anything for it to have been me, and not her. Anything.

Shashi Tharoor has authored five books, including critically acclaimed "The Great Indian Novel". 

('From Katharine Hart's Diary' is an excerpt from Tharoor's novel "Riot". Published by Daily Star Books, it is available at rokomari.com.)