The Return

Sunday, April 13th, 2009

 We are scheduled to fly out at 4pm. The local agent assures us we have to leave the hotel by 1.45pm, so we plan to have a quick breakfast and then walk back to Thamel for those last little things we so need. The brisk 20 minute walk turns out to be less pleasurable than we had imagined; the morning pollution is so fierce that many people are wearing masks (I am walking with a Kleenex pressed across my nose and wiping my streaming, stinging eyes) and from time to time dilapidated, hopeless children detach themselves from their family clumps and wheedle and plead with us for something, anything, until they finally give up - as we walk on tensely, head faced forward. It is almost impossible crossing the road - you wait, wait, and then make an awkward dancing dash for it. Jytte and Ole show me some impressive trees hung with rather large bats - which have apparently lived there for more than 30 years. We get our shopping done and also feel quite done with Thamel - a little goes a long way - and grab a Suzuki cab for the return to the hotel, where we have time for lunch in the garden. Then it's off to that airport again - the one where you get your luggage x-rayed at the entrance, where you pay $20 to fly, where you stand in long hopeless lines, where female military personnel touch you all over while your luggage is ex-rayed once again, and where, as a final touch, you join another hopeless shuffling line to have every little thing pulled out of your hand luggage for inspection, before you can finally settle down near your gate - now separated from my friends, who will take a different flight. 

Suddenly I have plenty of time, but I am too disperse to take out a book. I watch the unspeakable tv - worse than RAI I think - looks like an Indian 'novela' where a heavily made up brunette repeatedly turns from cobra to woman, cobra to woman ...and the hero doesn't realize! Most interesting is an actual fight between 2 cobras, watched also by a gentleman in a white polyester suit and dyed black hair sitting next to me in the lotus position on his plastic airport chair. Outside the glass walls some female workers are done for the day. They are dressed in loose pants, a long over shirt and have their hair covered. Shedding their sandals they come over to a faucet leaking water where they clean their feet and grind their heels into the wet cement to remove dead skin as they chat companionably. An airport person suddenly announces a flight and I rush to stand in line. Before boarding the bus it occurs to me to ask whether this is right flight. Well, no, this one goes to Calcutta and mine in headed for New Delhi. I have to return to my seat with several other confused passengers from all over the world. A lady in  a sari, having sat patiently and unnoticed by airport staff in her wheel chair for a long time, and whom I had obseverved laboriously take a long slow trip to the toilet, resolves to move. She starts towards the corridor to the departing flights awkwardly turning first one wheel, then another. Finally a Canadian gentleman gets up and pushes her through to where she wants to go. 

When I finally get on my flight, it's a whole different story. Air France has most generously put me in Business Class and I enjoy a splendid lunch with a cool bottle of Chardonnay, while I happily read my book about Bhutan.

Photos:

http://picasaweb.google.com/schateaubriand/KathmanduAgainAndReturningToDelhiAirport#