Cattail Class

Like the horns of a bovine creature rose the wing tips of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, and I sat inside the ruminant securely fastened to my seat. It was an elegant sight outside the window, but not so much inside.

No offence, but my journey from London to New Delhi on Air India had a mood of riding a tractor ploughing through a dusty farm during the harvesting season.

I can’t quite explain the whirlpool of emotions I felt during those eight hours, but I did feel like they were being tumbled in a washing machine. As I sat exasperated, I observed that the atmosphere of the plane was alien to my fellow travellers who were being served with gourmet food, wine and reclining seats, while all they wanted was a heap of rice and a flat surface to sit on and spread their limbs.

Everywhere I looked, I found proud Indian sons of the soil. They were the grass-root simpletons who looked like they loved the smell of the earth more than the recycled air of the plane. They were the village folk of mother India romanticised in numerous hindi movies from the 60s and 70s. But funny thing was none of them were Indian citizens. They all held the citizenship of a generous North American country, other than the US, which I found really strange until I was enlightened on this phenomenon by someone more knowledgeable. On an international flight crossing several countries, I was probably the most ‘firangi’ looking individual, yet probably the only one holding an Indian passport.

What was the meaning of all this, I asked myself? But soon gave up, and after I had completed my customs form in a blink of an eyelid using the cabin lights, I lent my pen to a family of three, who spent the better part of the next four hours filling up their immigration forms in the dim flicker of the entertainment panels. I sat clueless looking at their rigmarole. The old man had wrinkles the size of Himalayan river valleys and the young man had fingernails the size of javelins. The woman of the family was clueless as to what was going on.

The women on the plane were probably wondering what they were doing in the long round hole in the sky instead of sitting comfortably on their charpais (traditional Indian beds), chewing betel leaves. They were literally like fish out of water, all thirty thousand feet from it. They speed-walked their heavy frames through the narrow isles, hitting any protruding arm. One was in such misery, and sitting right behind me, that she began to repeatedly hit her head on my seat much to my chagrin as I was trying to take a nap. The little daughter of a respectable lady sitting beside me kept playing a talking Tom video over and over again on her iPad, more than a hundred times. The tune has now created a scar in my mind the size of Russia, and I apologise to all my future acquaintances from beforehand if I happen to freak out at the sound of it on their mobile devices.

The men were no better, walking up to the toilet whenever the seatbelt light went off (or sometimes even disregarding it), and for some reason just stood there even though the toilets were obviously open as the green light over the doors were on. It was probably a residual response to a very Indian habit of queuing for a public pee. More annoying though were the announcements to stop smoking in the plane, which were being repeatedly ignored. The rule was violated on at least four occasions with the strong stench of stale smoke filling the stale circulating air of the plane. There were more blatant evidences of the said lawlessness in the form of cigarette stubs lying on the wash basin. The stewards even made stern announcements of potential passport confiscation, but to no avail. Nothing seemed to deter the spirit of these simpletons.

Then there were the long bearded Sikhs whom I imagined to be pious people, but who were indulging in Ballantine’s whiskey and canned mojito, then right before de-boarding, combed their long beards and arranged their waxed moustache while still clutching onto their man-purse like one would clutch onto their heart during an attack.

I seemed to cut the most interminably inactive figure on the whole plane.

The only things redeeming the otherwise cataclysmic flight was the food and the fact that it was the Dreamliner, for which I had booked those tickets in the first place. The food took the crown of course and it was better than most other more expensive carriers.

In the end I was fortunate to still have all the hair on my head intact when I landed in Kolkata. The dreadful Lon-Del flight coupled with the anxiety suffered in catching the connecting flight to Kolkata was too arduous a twenty-four hour day to explicate in one small essay.