Namaste!
NEW DELHI — I was flying to Delhi in the days leading up to Diwali, the biggest day in the Hindu calendar, and so direct flights from Dubai were full. The only option was to fly to Bombay and grab a connecting flight to Delhi from there. I’d played it safe and gave myself six hours between flights. What could possibly go wrong?
The Air India flight was four hours late in leaving Dubai, but no sweat, I thought. I’d planned for this, and two hours to make my connection would still be plenty. The lady back at check-in assured me my luggage would be waiting for me in Delhi, and my boarding pass would be waiting for me at the gate, so all I had to do was clear customs and find the 8:05 to Delhi and Bob would, in theory, be my uncle. The flight landed in Bombay at first light, and the passengers — all-Indian and all-male, it seemed, heading home for the holidays, plus me — piled into a bus on the tarmac and waited. While standing there on the bus, I thought about what little I knew about travel in India, most of it gleaned from Seinfeld.
Half an hour later we were in the international arrivals hall, which resembled what I’d expected an Indian train station to be like. The crowd shuffled past hand-painted signs in English and Hindi through a labyrinth of makeshift hallways, which were all particle-board and exposed wiring and, strangely, stank of urine. I made it through immigration, and found myself at the luggage carousels. My luggage was supposed to go straight to Delhi, but I had a funny feeling about this, and so I waited at the carousel until all the luggage had been claimed. Indians, I noted, have this endearing habit of drawing waybills on A4 sheets and taping them to their luggage, indicating their name, phone number, and address of their destination, usually with lovingly ornate, hand-drawn typography. My rubberized Swiss army surplus rucksack didn’t have a homemade waybill, nor did it appear on that luggage carousel. This was worrying. I had to know for sure where my luggage was, so I approached a half-dozen airport employees and got a half-dozen different answers. Most of them could confirm, though, that no international flights to Bombay had their luggage automatically sent on to Delhi. From the looks of it, my luggage didn’t make it, not to Bombay and not to Delhi for that matter.
There was no lost-luggage desk at that arrivals hall, so I abandoned all hope for my possessions and concentrated on getting myself on that plane to Delhi. I followed the signs reading DOMESTIC TRANSFER, and after a 20-minute queue I reached the source of the bottleneck: an impressively moustachioed man flanked by two policemen wielding WW2-era, bolt-action Lee-Enfield rifles. He wanted to see my boarding pass.
