We’re familiar enough with long-distance travel nowadays — “Back yesterday? Los Angeles? Oh, Tokyo.” — and so routine is such travel that we all but take it for granted that our journeys to and from the airport are more dangerous than flying at 35,000 feet, where the outside temperature is -50ºC, and whence a 200-ton aircraft can descend and land so smoothly that many passengers do not even notice.
We have, in addition, become almost indifferent to the weirdly early or late starts, the lines, the frisking, the meat-processing. Once in a while though, elements of the process come to our attention, as I discovered recently at Chennai International Airport. Checking in was easy enough, as I was early; a polite, efficient clerk did the needful in about a minute and a half before pointing me in the direction of the passport check, where two long lines of people waited, dozing on their feet at that late hour.
We inched forward between long periods of immobility which turned us into characters in a joint Beckett-Ionesco play. There were about a hundred people in each line, and at the end a man — with no official insignia — in a cream shirt and black trousers told the passengers which desk to go to. Helpful, but for a long time only three desks were staffed. Then Mr. Line-Regulator disappeared too. To be fair, the immigration staff came back, and they saw us through in three quarters of an hour.
Then there was the security check, which was — well, all it should have been, and after being rubber-stamped, I looked for signs to the boarding gate. That was the usual long way away, down some corridors and then across a large, low-ceilinged hall where, at the height of summer, the air-conditioning was barely perceptible. The boarding gate itself was like Adlestrop; there was nobody waiting, and nobody at the gate. Nobody went, and nobody came.
Parched after being processed, and reluctant to spend something like the national budget deficit on a bottle of water which would only end up in a bin (there were no recycling bins in sight either), I wandered around until I found some drinking-water taps. They were out of order. Somewhere in the distance was another range of taps. There were no paper cups in the paper-cup holder.
In the still-deserted hall there was a spot with a faint breeze from the air-conditioning, but that had no chance of damping down the pervasive smell of stale food from the fast-food outlets around the hall. I was mildly unwell and a tablet was trying to quell simmering unrest inside me, but the pong was too much and the unrest flared into rebellion.
The loos? They had been cleaned, but the cubicles had clearly been designed only for some minuscule species of protohominid, and most of the fittings were broken or missing. At least the basics worked.
Well, they finally called the flight. We wandered through yet more checks, and boarded to an unctuous welcome from the cabin crew. We found our seats and fell asleep.
The return flight awaits. Flying eastwards, I’ll probably be so dazed that I won’t notice if we’ve landed at Meenambakkam or Mulhouse. In any case they’ll keep us waiting an hour and a half for the luggage.
And next time? I’ll book with that fine new carrier, Airumaimadu. At least they won’t frisk me when I board for Mylapore. Or will they?
