Humor - Arriving in India

 Jeff Meller

13 Nov 13

Words: got a little carried away

Travellers in Indian international air terminals resemble Napoleon’s routed army in retreat from Moscow.

International flights depart and arrive between midnight and 3 a.m. because India is only a way station on longer flights between Europe and other Asian destinations. Madeleine and Genevieve  Meller, 4 and 1 respectively, wail their puzzlement at being awakened in the middle of the night. My wife, Christine, and I suppress our own wooly-headedness and try in vain to soothe the girls.

The Meller family trudges, bleary-eyed and disheveled, into the lobby of the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi at 1 a.m. Indian Standard Time. Indian Standard Time is a half-hour different from all other time zones around the world, but that’s a tale for another day.

The lobby is festooned with traditional Indian designs fashioned from ropes of red and yellow marigold flowers. Rajasthani musicians serenade travellers with classic ballads of the desert. But these welcoming gestures are drowned beneath the nose-crinkling, bitter odor of paan (beetle nut juice), which airport workers spit in any corner where they think the red stains won’t be noticed by supervisors. The lavatories exude a gagging perfume of urine and disinfectant.

It takes a painful hour to grind through immigration and a second cruel hour for baggage to arrive. Airline baggage unloading, like much else in India, is accomplished according to the enigmatic tempo of fate: airline bags arrive when fate says they will arrive.

To pass the time we tramp drearily round and round the immobile baggage carousel. The carousel is not revolving because the power is off; the power is off because the electric utility has run out of coal; the utility is out of coal because the coal mine is flooded; the coal mine is flooded because there is no electricity to operate the water pumps; there is no electricity to operate the pumps because fate dictates when the pumps will operate.

When our bags appear I expect to be released from arrival purgatory. But the State Bank of India, the biggest bank in the country, inflicts one last hour of torment converting a paltry quantity of US dollars into half inch blocks of rupee notes, each block fastened with a giant, steel staple through the batch of bills. The delay is caused by the teller, a forlorn, government bureaucrat in neatly pressed polyester clothing, filling out forms in triplicate using carbon paper; you may have seen carbon paper in black and white Hollywood movies, perhaps starring Katherine Hepburn as an alluring yet highly competent  secretary. When the apprehensive teller finally gives us our money, I point out that 1,000 rupees is missing. Resignedly he hands over the balance, his hopes for a self-conferred gratuity dashed.

Finally we emerge from the terminal into the eye-watering miasma of a Delhi winter night. A thermal inversion, where temperature increases with altitude, traps close to the ground cold air condensing from the Great Thar Desert, acrid coal smoke from a power plant, mixed with the sweet smell of millions of dung fires.

We endure a gauntlet of touting taxi-wallahs soliciting our trade in Hindi, Punjabi and English. They are as abundant and predatory as maggots on the carcass of a deceased bovine which has suspended in perpetuity its contribution to the dung fires.

A dilapidated 35-year-old Hindustan Ambassador, a vehicle manufactured unchanged in India since 1958, clatters to the curb. The Ambassador is long since out of production everywhere in the former British Empire. It now can be seen only in two places: the Antique Transportation Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the streets of New Delhi.

We try to enter the car. None of the door handles works from the outside. The ponderous Sikh driver in a purple turban demonstrates surprising, practiced agility by opening them all quickly in succession from the inside. I climb in; the car smells musty. I try to put down the windows to let in what passes for fresh air, but the cranks don't work. The Sikh has an assistant who wears a gray, wool scarf wrapped around his shoulders and face against the winter chill. Like that other mainstay of the transport fleet, the Boeing 737, each taxi has a two man crew: one man to drive and the other to lower the flag on the mechanical taxi meter; you may have seen mechanical taxi meters in black and white Hollywood movies, perhaps starring Spencer Tracy trying in vain to resist the secretarial competence of Katherine Hepburn.

The driver is eager to show off the latent horsepower under the hood of his vintage chariot. He guns the engine, grinding rapidly through the gears. The Ambassador races out of the airport parking lot at top speed - 45 miles per hour - to our destination, the airport hotel, 45 seconds down the road.

The sign announces: "Centaur Hotel.” Beneath the name it proudly proclaims “Owned and Operated by the Government of India.” For what it is worth, the Government also owns and operates the airport through which we just have been welcomed.

Dubiously I register. Were I not so tired, I might notice the splendid lobby crafted from the same Makrana white-mottled marble used in the Taj Mahal, marble initially formed as limestone on the ocean floor then re-formed, in the never-ending tectonic ballet, by heat and pressure into metamorphic rock. But I am too tired to notice.

Christine asks for a bottle of cold beer to celebrate our arrival. I ask for a crib for baby Genevieve so she does not fall out of bed.

“Beer – ees not posseeble,” the receptionist informs Christine. "Eat ees a dry day in Deeli because of Hindoo festeeval. Dee night manager weell try to do the needful."

And a crib for baby Genevieve?  “Yes, yes,” the receptionist assures us.

After half an hour an aged porter dodders into our room with a thirst-quenching quart of Rosy Pelican Lager and two glasses. Rosy Pelican never quenched thirst so refreshingly, except when it was not served lukewarm.

I remind about the crib. "Ji hain," the porter replies – “yes.” “Yes” is the unequivocal answer to every question in India, regardless of whether or not the request can be honored. The crib does not arrive.

But while waiting, the power goes off.

Fortunately, Christine and I carry tiny flash lights when we travel. We use them now to find the bathroom and our toothbrushes. I twist the left hand faucet on; only scalding hot water sputters from the tap. I twist the right hand faucet; again only scalding hot water comes from the tap.

We give up on water and rinse our lightly-brushed teeth by swilling Rosy Pelican Lager. It is the girls’ first beer, a couple of decades below legal drinking age.

At 4:45 a.m. we lay down to sleep and dream, not without a little anxiety, about tomorrow, the first day in our new home.

-       30 -

Sources:

None.