Help Yourselves
We have set alarms for 3:30 in the morning, an unholy hour to be waking up. We have a car to the airport at 4AM—more unholy hours. Once we’ve successfully navigated the racist bureaucracy of the Indian domestic travel system, we settle at a café near our gate for breakfast. I have a (insultingly small) Scotch; Matthias has a mojito. India is ten-and-a-half hours ahead of Boston, so by now it’s nearly 5PM back home.
Fortunately the food on the airplane is halfway decent. We’re served Maggi-brand veg biryani. Apparently Maggi is something akin to Ramen; it’s a brand that has become so much of a household name that its products are referred to by its name. [Editor’s note: The brand originated in Switzerland.]
We eat our not-Ramen biryani and settle in for the short hour-and-a-half long flight to Delhi.
We hear some commotion in the row directly behind us. Being prude Americans, we avert our eyes and pretend not to notice. No one else on the flight does, however—people crane their necks to see, stand and stretch or make no attempt to hide their busybodiness.
There’s a woman behind us gasping for breath. Her rowmate calls—and I kid you not—’Is there a doctor on the plane!?’ There is one, two who respond. Both of them are men, and they’re both trying to administer aide to this woman, battling with older women on the plane who are also offering their own advice. Bring sugar, bring juice. The woman is gasping for air. She is laid down across the three seats, still trying to breathe. Oxygen is brought. Neither Matthias nor I have ever been in a public situation like this and we look at each other wondering what, if anything, we should do—we look at each other because out of the corners of our eyes we can also see the row behind us.
In the Indore airport, there were signs up that said:
How would you rate your airport experience?
? ? ? ☹️ ?
Matthias had hit the angry face in the airport. Now, on the plane, I type a note to him on my phone and lean over to show Matthias:
How would you rate your in-flight entertainment?
? ? ? ☹️ ?
Everyone having survived our first little leg from Indore to Delhi, we meet up with my coworkers to catch our next leg to London. Tessa and/or Drew had had some trouble getting into the airport in India, which I’ve noted before for its ridiculously unnecessarily secure domestic airport bureaucracy, and none of us is eager to have to deal with any more.
Unfortunately that’s not in the cards for us.
We follow the English signs from the domestic arriving gates to the international departing gates, but even as we disembark it seems like something is wrong. The airport is tiny and no one is around. There are barely any gates. But this is Delhi.
Finally, after following the signs, we realise that we’re to take some sort of shuttle bus to our other gates. It’s not a big issue as we have time, but it’s also one of the reasons that Newark is on my no-fly list.
There are ticketing windows, but they’re all closed. All of the signs we read seem to indicate that boarding this bus is all a normal part of the process for getting to the international departing gates. We ask some men in guard-like uniforms how to get to the international departing gates, and he says that we have to take a shuttle. We ask how much it costs, and he says that it’s included in our ticket.
We queue up with the others with their large suitcases for the shuttle bus.
It arrives and we step on. We start moving, and soon we’re on a highway. A man is walking around collecting tickets or fares. We watch Tessa and Drew pay theirs. He approaches us and asks for the far, which works out to $1.50, or $0.75 each.
We explain to him that we’re catching a connecting flight—in no universe would we willingly be on this bus that goes from one airport terminal to the next—but he insists we need to pay a fare. We explain to him that the men at the terminal told us it was included.
‘We can pay for you!’ Tessa calls up from the front.
‘No!’ we should back at her, ‘It’s the principle of the thing!’ Matthias adds.
We start to cause a bit of a scene, but at this point we’re just exhausted and frustrated, and there is no way that we are paying anyone any money for the inconvenience of having to navigate an airport that was poorly planned.
Eventually the man leaves us and asks the next customer for his chit, wherever he got it we don’t know.
Our itinerary never mentioned the airport shuttle between terminals. Neither the itinerary nor the guards mentioned that the ride is 7.6 km, or 4.7 miles—about the same as it takes to get from Logan to downtown Boston.
If you travel enough, you learn stop worrying so much about being kidnapped and instead assume that it’s just all part of the ride.
When I started this post, I wanted to wax poetic about the stereotypes we hear about other nations, about what prejudices Matthias and I had about Vietnam and India. I wanted to talk about how Indian food far outpaced Vietnamese food, how Indore far surpassed Delhi—but about how we both enjoyed Vietnam much more and are itching to get back the first chance we get. I wanted to talk about white saviourism, about how to make decisions that do the greatest amount of good for the largest amount of people, about how the people best positioned to fix things are the ones who are most impacted by them directly.
I wanted to draw a clever analogy to the T, and ask my Bostonian readers whether we would accept anyone other than Bostonians attempting to fix it (and even then…).
I wanted to say, ‘What if the solution to the T’s problems was to drive more considerately? Would we accept that fundamental shift in our culture, even if it were promised to make things better?’
I wanted to say that Bostonians would say that we reject any solution that was proposed by those who so clearly don’t know a thing about what they’re talking about. How else are you supposed to get onto Storrow?
But I’m here late, tidying up these posts in the early hours of July 2nd, 2020. We’re already being asked to accept fundamental shifts in our culture to make things better. Some of the tests we’re passing. Others are yet to be determined, but at least they’re up to us.
That woman on the plane—she was all right. The doctors and flight attendants on the plane told her that she should make sure to eat something before flying. That her blood sugar was probably low.
I’m not sure. I know that if I were a woman flying alone and started having what seemed a lot like a panic attack, I wouldn’t want to be told how to change things in the future so it didn’t happen again.