“Entirely alone”
Stacy Kidder observes, “The plane was packed, but he (Deo) felt entirely alone.” Deo’s lonesomeness is ironic considering that there are other inhabitants in the plane. If he were the only passenger, then the loneliness would have been rational. The ironic solitude underscores Deo’s physical and emotional estrangement which arises from being encircled by strangers.
‘The White skin’
Deo is not startled by the white people around him although he is black: “When he realized that no one resembled anyone he knew, he would relax again. During his medical training and in his country's history, pigmentation had certainly mattered, but he wasn't troubled by the near total whiteness of the faces around him on the plane that he boarded in Moscow. White skin hadn't been a marker of danger these past months. He had heard of French soldiers behaving badly in Rwanda, and had even caught glimpses of them training militiamen in the camps, but waking up and seeing a white person in the next seat wasn't alarming. No one called him a cockroach. No one held a machete.” Deo would have predicted to encounter prejudice based on his skin color, but it does not ensue. The whites in the plane would have exploited Deo’s color but they do not degrade him whatsoever. Stacy Kidder’s narrative represents the blacks as bona fide threats to each other.
