After saying bye to an emotional mum and "couldn't predict what was going through in his mind" dad, I was in the waiting area of the not so state of the art Chennai international airport also MAA newly constructed back in 1954. I have been on several domestic flights and I can tell you this, domestic flights are not the same as the international flights; you don't have to keep checking every 8 minutes if the passport is in its holder hung around your neck however this urge is replaced by the need to check once in every 34 seconds if the pilot has decided to make an emergency crash landing not because the pilot had to emergency land but because he can or because he was not paid for the last 14 months by the national flag ship airliner that is on its way to crash landing as well and generally the pilot decides to crash land in a paddy field where you wouldn't get help for at least next 48 hours or until the stench of the bodies from the crash reaches a nearby country which ever is not earlier. On the other hand I am not a big fan of international flights either partly because of the long journey hours partly because of the diuretic passenger who always sits in the middle of the four seats and always wants to rush to the lavatory from my side and partly because I get bored of checking the safety of my passport after 499 iterations and mostly because the airline operators have gone gender neutral these days and have started giving more opportunity to male attendants. Four male attendants out of 8 attendants and out of the remaining 4, 2 are dedicated to those rat bastards travelling in the business class which means out of the 100 percent of your ticket cost almost 90 percent is spent on useless fuel surcharge and only remaining 10 percent is used for actual flight and occasional glimpse of a female flight attendant.
Whoever draws up the roster for flight journeys is generally a cretin who must be suffering from high blood sugar and insomnia and almost never fails to come up with a horrendous flight departure and arrival times. Typically the flight journey in India starts with a commotion near the boarding gates, sometimes because the wrong gates are assigned to the wrong flights, ah who am I kidding almost all the time wrong gates are assigned to the wrong departures. If you are not a little sober there is a very high likelihood that you would end up boarding a wrong plane bound to hanger for cleaning before its next trip. By my sheer ability to decipher the sign boards or by chance I took the right queue and the right gate. The algorithm that is generally followed all over the world to let the first class and business class board initially, followed by pregnant women, specially abled and mothers with babies and finally the economy class filling from the back of the fuselage doesn't work in India. When the announcement is made on the departure of the flight, people start boarding all at once and is a sight by itself reminiscent to the Olympic marathon when all the athletes start at the same time when the gun shot is heard...... eventually I made it to the equipment that was mentioned on my itinerary - a Boeing 777.
Approximately after 62 years since the last of their regiment - The Somerset Light Infantry left the sub-continent where sun had set for the first time in 1948 since AD 1601 from when the sun was on the British Empire Schedule and was not allowed to set, I was following them back and I was sitting inside an elegantly yet cheaply furnished section of a fuselage fully owned by the government of a country that made all of its fortune in an industry that helped catalyse poking holes on the atmosphere large enough for the sea levels to raise just enough perhaps for a small island inhabited by handful of ingenious people somewhere off the coast of Australia to disappear from google maps. I was on my way to England via Dubai.
Heuristics from my travel data suggested I was going to have co-passenger in the form of an old granny with a chronic coughing dis-order or a separated dad with a baby with no knowledge whatsoever on dealing with crying infants or a teenage punk who tries to fall asleep on my shoulder and I would be thankful if he did not drool and fill my pocket with his nicotine and gum flavoured saliva. After a while I was happy that I was going to travel alone as no one showed up to fill the seats next to me with their despicable hind sides. Just when I was drifting in to my own thought someone had just taken the seat next to me and I couldn't believe my luck, it was not the drooling Drake who took the seat but it was a middle eastern girl who could have easily given the flight attendants a run for their money. My luck did not last 2 minutes when she realised she was on the wrong seat and took the seat right behind me. I was still happy that I was not having Mister Drool's company but that happiness wouldn't last either.
Almost all the seats were taken and at the end came a man who looked like someone who ate small rodents and babies for breakfast, lunch and dinner. A Caucasian with tattoos all over his body and a ring on the eyebrow that could have been as big as the basket ball hoop and a dangling on the left ear that must have weighed more than his entire luggage and possibly the airline company would have collected extra baggage just for his ear dangling. He looked like the ugliest version of David Hasselhoff....no wait he looked like the pippa pig with body art and piercings.. He came and stood right next to my seat and removed his man bag that was over his otherwise not covered hairy body and pushed it in the hat rack. He took the seat next to me and I am sure you could guess if I had a pleasant journey to Dubai. I am sure he did look like not cute pippa pig in most of the angles...not David h.hoff......
I had dozed of for a short while when the flight attendant woke me up and asked me to sit upright and keep the window shutter open and handed me with a warm hand towel that smelled like eau de cologne produced in Burma. Ugly pippa took one as well and gave the towel a tour of his upper body accessible to both his hands and by the time he had finished the ritual the towel had accumulated enough body hair and looked like a Chinese fur toy. After seeing the spectacular event that was taking place in the seat next to me and the thought that the towels are recycled gave me an instant need to use the bathroom unless the old granny sitting in front of me had a desire to be sprayed with my puke. Fortunately before something could materialise from my mouth and or nose the air hostess came to collect the towel and she was genuinely disgusted inside that disguised pleasant smile to collect the towels that smelled like everything from an expensive signature perfume from Paco Rabanne to salty sweat infused with flavours of cigarette and fish fry from yesterday's lunch. When I saw the tray where she was replacing the towels which were pure & white not long ago, I could see the wide spectrum of colour that ranged from tropical green to bile yellow and all the way till pitch black.
The captain announced with his heavy accent that the journey was expected to be fairly turbulent free and it would take about four hours and ten minutes to touchdown in Dubai international airport and that the screen in front of each seat would now show the safety procedures to be followed in the event of him falling asleep or the Rolls Royce engines falling asleep. Finally he finished his speech stating that he was thankful for my choosing his boss's airliner for flying and was looking forward to my flying with them again, although this part of his ranting sounded like his resume was in its final stage of selection with some other airliner. Some dude translated the same message once again in Arabic not that anyone cared. Finally the head stewardess was on the mic and said that she and her team would be happy to assist me to make me have a comfortable journey and that they could assist me in English, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Urdu, Hindi, Swahili, Korean, French & finally Spanish. I was just thankful they did not mention C,C++ and Java.
The seatbelt sign, no smoking sign and "occupied" sign next to toilet where all on and the "occupied" sign just went off after one of the crew member almost dragged a passenger from the toilet who perhaps was trying to soak his whole body with the cheap cologne in the toilet. Finally the pilot started taxying the the plane towards runway for take-off and after a quick halt in the runway both the engines fired up to their full capacity gulping as much white petrol as possible and instantly the plane was making more than 150 mph and the rear of the plane dipped momentarily sending few hat racks open and few baggages rolling towards the rear emergency exit and of course baggage owners disregarded the seatbelt sign and went running behind the baggage while the plane was still ascending. Below, what looked like a never ending city while on trains or buses shrunk to fit end to end within the polarised window next to my seat.
I felt the temperature inside the plane had raised when I started to sweat profusely, then I realised I was wearing a heavy winter coat with the zipper pulled up right up to my chin. A stark contrast to the guy sitting next to me who was nude, give or take. There is a popular opinion in India that foreign is always cold with temperatures generally less than freezing point of water where "foreign" is any country that is not India/Pakistan. When someone goes abroad in India they don't give the name of the country they always refer it to "foreign". If my great grand uncle had an opportunity to go overseas he would have went to the ticket counter and said "One ticket to foreign". And given that the popular opinion 'foreign is always cold' Indians spend freakishly big sums of money on winter wears even if they are going to honey moon in Bahamas. I was no different or at least my mum & dad were no different, since I was going to "foreign" they did spend a fair bit of their money on getting me some heavy winter wear. To beat the cold weather and to cheat the allowed cabin luggage limit I was wearing the coat inside the flight and I had a feeling that there was steam evaporating from inside my coat.
It was 4AM and like any normal day you would want to have your breakfast at 4AM before you go back to sleep especially when you are 25K feet above the sea level. The crew came out with their trolleys and the closed inside of the aircraft instantly filled with the smells that gave your taste buds an heads up of what is on its way and that anything tasty coming in contact with your mouth was next to impossible. A good looking crew member with a perfect smile, a husky voice and a golden tan asked me if I had requested a jain vegetarian meal and placed the plate on the tray in front of me. Not bad, given that he was bald and was speaking broken English he did well to land himself on an air steward job. The guy sitting next to me did not have anything after he washed down some three rounds of alcohol down his throat and was either sleeping or passed out but was definitely alive.
When the map on the in-flight infotainment system said the flight was cruising over Mumbai my mind registered that I would soon be leaving the air space owned by the most multi dimensional, multi cultural, chaotic, complacent, corrupt yet eternally happy country beneath me and be entering the international air space travelling in to a time zone that was in past. The attendants came back to collect the food trays and no luck yet and no glimpse of a female attendant.
Thanks to the ridiculous departure time and a hectic couple of days before my journey I fell asleep without any trouble and after what looked like a power nap I was woke up by the same bald attendant who asked me to raise my window shutters and about the same time the captain announced that we were about to land in Dubai as soon as the ATC gave clearance. It took almost ten minutes before the pilot stopped taking us in circles giving an air tour of Dubai and started the final descend towards the runway. After the plane came to a grinding halt he announced the local time in Dubai and the outside temperature which did not justify my wearing the winter coat unless Dubai had an eye for unconventional fashion. People involuntarily started getting attracted towards the exit, need less to say guys sitting at the rear were having a heavier pull towards the exit than those sitting at the front. I switched on my phone while most of my fellow passengers undid their phone from silent mode, of-course we were all expecting that important call that we generally get early in the morning, inside an aircraft and in a country where definitely the SIM did not pick any signal. Huh, I don't understand why people are in such a hurry to switch on their phones when the plane has landed. Seriously who is going to call you? Even if someone calls, are you going to attend the phone given that you are on international roaming?
After checking my passport and the boarding pass for my next flight were still in the holder, after checking my passport and the boarding pass for my next flight were still in the holder, after checking my passport and the boarding pass for my next flight were still in the holder, after checking my passport and the boarding pass for my next flight were still in the holder, after checking my passport and the boarding pass for my next flight were still in the holder, yes after checking it five times I removed my backpack from the hat rack and started walking towards the exit that was now connected to the leading vestibule walkway.
Before I stepped out of the aircraft my journey was made memorable by a smiling stewardess who wished me a nice stay in Dubai.
