Returning to India after a long time abroad is educative. If you’re coming back on an Indian airline, then your reintroduction to des usually starts at Heathrow or JFK itself. The long queues. People trying to jump the queues with piles of luggage teetering back and forth. Kids behaving atrociously, unchecked by parents. On the aircraft, the faint smell of a failing Tandoori restaurant. The Velcro holding the seat bottom gone, so that you’re sliding around for nine-and-a-half hours; the recline button stuck, so moving the back becomes an exercise class. The entertainment system glitching, the headphones not working. The food and drink mediocre and parsimoniously served. The passenger next to you inevitably under the impression that both armrests and half your seat belongs to him. Other passengers treating the cabin crew like serfs, the crew indiscriminately taking out their irritation on everyone, even the most polite passengers. The toilets becoming filthier and filthier as the flight progresses. The switching on of phones before the wheels have touched the tarmac, the standing up and opening the luggage compartment doors even as the plane is taxiing on the runway. The jostling and pushing to get off the aircraft as if it’s on fire.
A pleasant surprise
But no, I lie, this time was markedly different. The boarding was extremely orderly with everyone following instructions. The passengers were polite and the ones next to me exceedingly civil. The seat button was stiff, sure, but the movie system was acceptably functional. The two members of the cabin crew assigned to our section were efficient and friendly, the food okay, and the wine reasonably plentiful. The flight was the most comfortable and uneventful I’ve had in a long time. There was some solid turbulence flying over the neck of land between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, just near the point where that Malaysian Airlines plane had been shot down by a missile a few years ago, but otherwise I watched a bad Hollywood movie and slept. As the welcoming dawn enveloped us, I decided to cleanse my mind by watching a film from the Satyajit Ray collection and got entangled in possibly the worst of Ray’s early films Kapurush , but you couldn’t blame either the passengers or the airline for that. In a while, the breakfast snack over, the loos still clean, the plane began to descend into the yellow muck over early winter Delhi. The captain announced we were forty minutes early. Jai Tailwind! As elongated dots of sunlight slid across the cabin, I congratulated myself and the whole nation for having vastly improved our flying habits.
Monday morning blues
The shock came only when I reached the short escalator from where I could see the concourse of immigration desks. Below us was a Kumbh Mela of deposited passengers. Long queues snaked into each other like the matted coils of some holy man’s hair. Long and unmoving. Forget the forty minutes we’d gained, this was the Mother of all Headwinds and by the time I got out of the airport, it was as if my flight was three hours late. I went down the escalator and quickly went up the edge of the concourse where you could still move. I was hunting for the shortest queue for the counters marked ‘Indian Citizens’ and it wasn’t good – all the queues looked unending. The Special Assistance and Medical Visas counter had the shortest line and I seriously considered joining it, but realised I was a wheelchair short.
Finally, I chose a queue and after fifteen minutes of still being the last one in it, jumped to another one that seemed to be moving quicker. After a bit, a young man from Pitampura began a business phone call, promising one Sir ji to look into why the goods hadn’t been supplied on time. In the Special Assistance Queue, one large Punjabi man in a wheelchair was explaining the pitfalls of GST in a loud voice. Clearly aware there were ladies present, you could hear him pause and swallow each juicy family-based curse aimed at the progenitors of the new tax. Shuffling forward like prisoners at the end of a huge war, I saw an airport official. “Why is there this chaos today?” I asked him. The man stopped and replied in Malayali-accented English: “Sir, ten flights have landed at same time, you know.” I had a vision of both of Delhi’s runways receiving a jumbo jet at each end simultaneously. “Why did they let that happen?” I asked. The man smiled. “This is normal only, Sir. Every Monday morning it’s like this only.” I nodded at his conversational checkmate and he went off.
After a long time I found myself within striking distance of the counters. To my fury and that of people around me, many of the twin-desk counters only had one officer on duty. If Monday morning was the busiest period, surely they should have had all hands on deck, stamping away? When I reached the counter, the man asked me what I did. I told him I wrote for newspapers. He stamped my passport with an approving nod. I asked him why there were such few officers on duty. “Only they know why they’ve decided to keep the roster small. These are your achhe din , Sir, you should write about it!”
