That Girl in The Blue Suit issued, with cloyingly artificial glee, a textbook welcome that can be acknowledged with any amount of seriousness only if you are seated in an aircraft.
Welcome to Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Sivaji… the rest, as always was lost to the clatter of people waking up, phones buzzing and the suddenly stifled grunts of the eager beavers among the passengers trying to get the overhead lockers open without remembering to unclasp their seat belts getting partially castrated in the process.
As is the wont, there should be a long rant about the airport, but there wont be, because in Mumbai, the airport is an insignificance. A mere formality that has to be done away with. Like the fungus in the monsoon, you get used to it and after a while start ignoring it. Talking about how good or bad the airport is would be like taking about Usain Bolt’s athlete’s foot on a day he was disqualified for a false start.
It simply doesn’t cut.
What however can be talked about, is everything else that happens there and around it. Like potato being called batata everything that is something everywhere else is a different something else in Bombay. This includes the airport.
Congestion in an airport anywhere else would mean a delay, a few groans in the cabin, and lots of clapping in the eventuality of a take off. In Bombay however, it is something different. Here, it means the shuttle bus that takes you from the departure gates to the aircraft standing ten feet away will take enough time for you to have a low down on the love life of the obnoxiously loud passenger seated somewhere in the last row seats.
And if it is raining, not only are the roads outside washed away, so also are the ones inside. This means that the 10ft bus ride that takes an hour will provide you with all the comfort and excitement a burstingly full bladder would if you were in possession of it on a roller coaster.
Like the roads, common sense also seems to get washed away at the slightest hint of rain. If Ganesh Chaturthi or Ramzan is around the corner, so does any semblance of sanity. If both these come along as a couple, the city takes to writing the user manual on how to keep hell firmly broken in place. All this activity of sanity, roads, common sense being washed usually tends to be wearisome, and tiresome eventually leading to hunger. Anywhere else, this should be an easy enough problem to remedy. But here, in Bombay things have to be different, and different they are.
Completely unlike in some other places in eastern parts of India, any food here will happily cost you half your salary, all of your anal virginity while doing away with your taste buds when it finally arrives half a day later – all this, in the happy happenstance of you being allowed to sit in the restaurant at the first place – the chances of which are about as high as a non-footballer being allowed to bed Imogen Thomas.
Any mention of Imogen Thomas will naturally mean wiping away the large amounts of drool at your feet before trying to find a place that does allow you inside. The second effort will pose curious challenges. Getting to any place by lunch tomorrow will mean starting right after dinner today carrying along with you a healthy dose of break fast coupled with a sleep mask so you can get a healthful sleep while you wait for the lights to turn green. You will need the sleep mask to complement the said sleep with generous power naps while you wait for the vehicles ahead of you to respond to the green, by which time it would have changed both its mind and colour. And Imogen Thomas out of your mind (and loins).
Rain also brings in the additional excitement of what are only revealed to be ‘incidents’ on runways resulting in more delicious delays while your are seated in the comfortably DVT inducing seats while the air-conditioning in cahoots with the humidity starts working furiously on your bladder. While you are feeling murderously hungry owing to the lunch debacle stated earlier, you bladder is trying to wrest out the last scraps of will that are keeping you from murdering the person seated next, to hold on to the water inside especially since the rules prohibit the use of lavatory while the aircraft is about to take off even when the about to is 90 minutes away. The situation can only be paradoxical. While your will is being torn mercilessly between a murderous rage boiling in every sinew and your bladder fighting a fast losing battle to hold water inside, the clouds, as if to taunt you are doing just the opposite by letting the water rip while trying their best to carry out your murderous wishes by arranging for random landslides and planes skidding off the runways.
Surprisingly, these situations also prompt several random acts of kindness by strangers thereby increasing the chances of a line at the pearly gates. If there is any soul on the planet wishing for your safe take off, and wishing so more heartily than the family member or any lover of yours, I can with authority say that this soul must be seated and belted in the economy section of the aircraft that is behind you in the take-off queue and seated so with a full-bladder.
Elsewhere, the wait and the delay are sources of inspiration and innovation. In this case, for and by the cabin attendants. In the while the aircraft is bolted to the ground, they take the opportunity to rehearse the never ever used safety procedures by demonstrating how to put a life jacket on and how to take it off while making love, for a plane that is doing its best to fly away from the sea towards a landlocked plateau
This has the advantages of giving them much needed practice, akin to the mock fire drills the new offices made of styrofoam seem to have, in addition to giving them more time to hawk badly salted nuts at prices that make you wonder who among the three are nuts – you, the airline company, or the contents. Any frequent flier will quickly assert that the last one cannot ever be the case, knowing fully well all the implications of the phrases ‘truth in advertising’ and ‘we are happy to help you’ .
Finally, the plane takes off as even the staunchest of atheists let out silent prayers of relief – a direct result of having the possibility of relieving hunger and more furiously, the bladder.
Since you are hungry anyway, you buy whatever is thrown at you. This will be another revelation. The food can be awarded with both the Atkins and the Baba Ramdev awards for not only making you hate eating for which it will receive the former, but also make money come through your nose which will qualify it for the latter. The only other entity that can claim to achieve this can be spelt with a capital G followed by an OverDose. The consistency with with the former does it will not fail give a feeling that it could teach the latter a thing or two, and do so exceedingly well.
Moral of the story?
To make atheists pray use economy flying.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
happiness?
oh, when you took off.
Now that i get it,i like the moral of the story
Killer Line: Moral of the story?
To make atheists pray use economy flying.
Its a little long. Perhaps, i could not connect to most part of it.
But i liked the way you narrated the entire episode.
Just a thought: If you can, make it shorter. Only if you can.
Thanks for everything well-written here. Looks like a memory well lived!