A Passage to India

I’m here! I had a series of travel disasters, self-inflicted, of course, none enough to sink me. I find myself lumbering clumsily through the world accompanied somehow by genies of good fortune who have my back despite my best efforts to screw things up. I did actually miss my flight to India, quite a trick. Most of the time I know that a departure time of 2040 printed on the ticket means 8:20 in the evening, but what with moving myself out of my house, my renter Adam Goodman and his friend Peter in, transferring my car to Sharrona and Ben who will soon have a new baby, and packing at my friend Litty’s, who housed me for the transition, I managed to convince myself, but only myself, that 2020 was TEN twenty in the evening. An angel of a flight agent rebooked me for following day at no charge, (there was a moment when 3 agents, all working class Philly girls of a certain age, were huddled putting the thing together for me, I bless them) .

For my sins I had a middle seat and a six hour layover in Frankfurt. FINE. Even here those genies were at work, as you will see. My friends Sharon and George rescued me with a bed for that night in lovely, green, restful Wallingford, and the next day I got to the airport with time to spare. By some serendipitous inattention of the flight agent and plotting of the genies, I paid no overweight on some very overweight bags (I was carrying all my books, at least 2/3 of the total weight the weight of my luggage) The plane sat on the tarmac for six hours after the time it was supposed to take off, hot and no food. There was a tail problem to fix, then an impossibly long line of planes ahead of us, while waiting we ran out of enough gas to go across the Atlantic, then we had to drive to the airplane gas station, spend 40 mins. filling the tank back up, then drive back and wait again for our takeoff.

My middle seat was between a young mother and her adorable, just learning to crawl seven month old Guiliano, and a lovely grandmotherly German. Mom needed help with the baby when she had to go to the bathroom or whatever, during which I played with Guiliano and looked around for things he could eat, the corner of my Kindle case, my bracelets, various toys, the disinfected seat remote, that sort of thing, getting him to smile, and just looking at him while he slept.

When they had thought it wouldn’t take long, and the inside was getting hotter and hotter, they let us off the plane for 45 minutes. Be sure and take your passport said the hostess. When we filed back on, guess who was the only person without her passport. So while I emptied the contents of my stuffed purse, frantic that I was about to hold up a planeload of passengers then 90 minutes into their waiting period, mom went back and retrieved it from between the seats where it had fallen. I wasn’t holding anybody up at all since we were due for hours more wait. So the genies were helping again. They helped the whole plane, keeping everyone remarkably forgiving and good natured about the wait. When I said at some new announcement that events were unmoglich, the German abuela (sorry, can’t remember the German word) , replied charmingly that they were shrechlich.

And that six hour layover? I needed every minute. The plane made up an hour over the ocean, so we spent a total of 13 hours on that aircraft and arrived 5 hours late.—the passengers were remarkably forgiving and calm, and we landed. My bags were transferred to the plane to Delhi, but I thought I was supposed to claim them to take them through customs before getting a boarding pass from Lufthansa. So I was the last person in baggage claim, sans bags, till the nice agent came out and explained, no, I needed to go on and get my boarding pass for the Delhi leg, time’s a wasting. I spent some time running around getting lost, only to hear myself paged when I finally surfaced in the proper concourse. WHAT? I had visions of the next flight waiting for me and paging to find where I was. It turns out you can’t answer a page in the cavernous Frankfurt airport at an airline desk, no, you need an information desk, which in Frankfurt was as scarce as water in a desert. When I finally found one, the alarmed agent there told me I had left my handbag which I knew contained all my money, my credit cards, medicine, and various other crucial things, medicine, BUT NOT MY PASSPORT, which I was now carrying in my zippered cargo pants pocket, at baggage claim. So I had to sprint a quarter of a mile or so back (having practiced earlier at the Swarthmore track near Sharon’s, I had a good fast pace—I also have had memorable sprints in Bejing and Charles de Gaulle) and talk my way backwards through lined up Germans (very cooperative, thank you) and passport checkpoints to pick up my purse, miraculously intact, then talk my way back through a different set of Germans and travelers and passport checkpoints, and run another quarter mile back to the Lufthansa desk, where I didn’t have any regulation documents since I had been re-booked. I had to go to another desk to acquire those—you get the picture of frazzled, furious with myself passenger, and MADE IT to the next gate. Who says you never get any good exercise on a translantic flying trip. The Frankfurt Delhi flight was, against this background, uneventful, though I had not slept at all, and so was up for about 30 hours straight, which was, from a genie point of view, perfect for making the transition to India time, 10.5 hours ahead.

No major disasters at the Fulbright guest house in Delhi, apart from losing my room key once. No, the disasters came when I had to fly from Delhi to Varanasi. Jet airways, my original airline, was on strike, so I was rebooked on Air India, which left 30 minutes sooner than the original booking. Alas, the cab to the airport was not similarly rebooked (not my fault for once) and the rain was ongoing, so there were massive traffic jams and flooding, and I ended up at the airport at 10:00 am for a 10:15 flight. Stilll they got me on, even though I had to go wait at two different counters to pay overweight, at the last minute, misplaced and couldn’t find my boarding pass (are you getting the pattern here?). I was the last passenger on, transported in my very own shuttle bus to the plane, boarding at 10:40, but the plane sat until 11:15.

I am a moving travel disaster, with a cloud hanging over my head like Al Capp’s famous Dogpatch character Joe Bftrsplk, from which everything falls out—keys, passport, boarding pass, glasses, credit cards--but the genies got me here anyway.My two days in Delhi were quite interesting. I survived a tout with my money intact, an adventure for another time since, in the next post, I’ll describe my visit to Humayun’s tomb.