Aviating & honour.

          Short story by Pranati Pathak.

           Aviating & honour.

People question me why I never learned to drive a car. For whenever someone said, "You don't drive." Well, I tell them just what they didn't expect, "I don't drive because I fly." They always assume that I fly an aeroplane or a helicopter, but I don't tell them unless they ask. I was at a party with my colleague who was a doctor of spacecraft. He respects me and understands me better than my friends, I still addressed him as Mr Lee as I kept professional boundaries at work. A well-known friend of his was Mr Lombardo. The party was so formal that couples referred to their spouses by titles. Well, engineering is just not my cup of tea. Mr Lombardo, whom I knew because I learned his name, well, because everyone was chanting his name as he entered the party as if the fellow was a god. I observed that some women crossed their professional boundaries and may have flirted with Mr Lombardo, even though they knew that the man was happily married.  Otherwise, the conversations there between man to man and woman to the woman were like an interview.

 "How long have you been a doctor/engineer?"

 or 

"What is your field of study?"

 and

 "how much have you accomplished?" 

and

 "have you any Nobel yet?" 

It was time and I knew when Mr Lombardo popped the question,

"Miss, What is your field of study?"

"Astrophysics."

"Oh."

"How long will it take you to become an astronaut?"

"About three years ago."

"Pardon me miss, you're an astronaut?"

"Yes, I was in the SpaceEx program, I worked with Elon Musk too."

It was an interesting evening, as it went from a friendly atmosphere to fake happiness for Lombardo, and then they were all jealous of me. Public fickleness, one might say. It turned out that I was definitely not the most qualified but the luckiest person there. 

So what I do think about not being able to drive a car or bike but being a second pilot of a well-known spacecraft, is that even if you die driving a car or a bike, it'll be all right but if you die piloting the spacecraft, you'll die with the honour of being in a spacecraft.