Getting off the island, part II (once more unto the breach; any breach)

While I was busy attempting to stare down the entire Mumbai division of Delta airlines, poor K had been sitting at home with no updates, and, because I'd turned in my office mobile earlier that day, no way to contact me. So, he'd summoned the driver, locked up the apartment for the last time, threw the other cat in the car, and set off to find me.

Long story short, K was expeditiously ushered into the airline back room (I didn't even know, up until that point, that there was a back room) and, I think, served tea, while he and the manager had a man-to-man chat about how best to ship his disagreeable human cargo.

Me, I sat with the suitcases and received periodic, contradictory and confusing updates from K, from the manager, and from that hateful little assistant manager. Occasionally, an employee from some airline or another would run out to tell me I had to have my bags screened "right away!" and I would point to the accumulated security stickers and explain that my bags had already been screened that night by every other airline in Terminal 2 of Chhatrapati Shivaji airport, and then, of course, we would together gather everything up except the cat and run it through the machine again, and then I would go sit down until the next guy came over. As the hours ticked on, I began to get increasingly anxious over how long the poor cat was going to have to spend in the carrier, whether I would be forever able to hold at bay all the screeners eager to x-ray him, and about my dwindling exit options.

"Air France?" I prompted the manager when he appeared again.
He looked at me scornfully -- how could I even think such a thing?
"Not possible."
"Alitalia?" I asked. True, I'd gotten food poisoning the last time I flew Alitalia, but it'd be worth it to throw up outside of India.
"Uh-uh"
"Air India?" I asked. Ok, I mean, AI is pretty much "Air Greyhound" -- when we took it to Bangkok last year, I was horrified to discover how badly the plane stank at the beginning of the trip, and that every exposed surface was sticky. But, fourteen hours to take my leave of that kind of noisome filth forever? Yes, I could do that.

The manager shook his head and scurried off.

The assistant manager appeared, strutting like a bantam cock.
"Madam, you must decide now!"
"Decide what?"
K came over during the squawking.
"Hush up a minute now," I told the little rooster, trying to confer with K, and he turned a dangerous shade of purple.
"There are two possibilities," K started, and began to outline something about NY or Atlanta, but with tight connections...
The manager rushed over and told me if I wanted "the NY flight," I must leave right now.
I looked at K.
"Do I want the NY flight?
He nodded.
I looked at the manager.
"Business class, and they're cool with the cat?"
He nodded.

Some sort of subaltern (the assistant manager having stalked off in disgust) thrust a fistful of dogeared and hand-scrawled flight coupons at me, my nice neat (and informative) preprinted tickets having been broken down into their constituent and simpler factors. The modern world versus India: it's India, in a headlock, in three -- but they play dirty.

A quick kiss to K, and then I hurried along...about five feet, before being stopped by baggage screeners. Rather than protest, I dutifully loaded the bags through again, and explained for the zillionth time that night that the cat did not get x-rayed. And, of course, these baggage screeners, unlike all the prior ones, "found something" -- perhaps a chemical trace left by all the other airline screening stickers -- and made me search frantically for the bag's keys so that an overenthusiastic man could root around in all my laundry, which was flying out and onto the floor. When I protested, they misunderstood, and made me wait until they could procure a female staff member, who proceeded to violate my lingerie and carefully-wrapped bottles of feni in exactly the same way.

Then we raced to Immigration, and of course I hadn't been given the form while I was waiting all those hours. It's very hard to fill in passport details with a sweaty man standing over you exhorting "come on, COME ON!" -- as if all of this was my fault -- so I just scrawled out something like "just let me out and we can sort all the details later, I promise," tossed it at the official, and sprinted down the very long concourse with my very heavy backpack, and a very angry cat in a bag bumping against my hip at every step.

One more quick stop through yet more security -- cat out, cat back in, a "sister, you can't be serious," to the lady frisker who playfully threatened to withhold returning my ticket until she got to cuddle and coo at the cat, all while the sweaty man jumped up and down and gnashed his teeth -- and then, pop, last person through the gangplank, just as the startled flight attendant was beginning to seal the door.

As I made my way to my seat -- not only coach class, natch, but also bulkhead, with no place to stash the cat -- I realized I didn't actually know what airline I was on. As I took my seat (between two small children), and my heart gradually stopped pounding enough that I could hear the various reassuring chimes and whirs of the departure preparations, I uncrumpled the flight coupons and studied them from every angle. Their hatch marks and quite possibly Urdu annotations, written in a nervous hand, refused to reveal their mysteries. I realized I had absolutely no idea where this unknown aircraft was heading.

Nor did I care.