A man on a layover in Dubai, flying back to Mumbai from New York, found himself talking to an aunty a few hours before the airspace shut down. Strangers in transit talk differently — no context, no stakes, just two people passing time before a flight.

She was headed home too, after a couple of months with her elder son in the US. He’d gone over in 2014, finished his master’s in a year and a half, and landed a job at Amazon — the kind of story families repeat at weddings. Except there was a second half she hadn’t mentioned at first — he’d recently been laid off.