After more than a year of application and admission related hardship, things had fallen into place. However, on the eve of departure, as I sat in Bangalore International waiting for baggage check-in, I started to wonder whether I had any damn clue as to what I want doing. I turned around and looked at the gates of the terminal. The urge to make a run for it was overwhelming. At that point in time, it did not make any sense to leave Bangalore. What.. for an MS degree? Pffff! (Stick your tongue out here. More effective if you add spittle)
I kept imagining what all might happen if I just walked out of the terminal. I would go to my friend’s place. He would be damn happy that I was back and we would reminisce all night about how this situation was so similar to when I quit my nebulous military career and had sought asylum in his house. When I would go home, my parents, who would have been expecting an overseas call, would have gotten a rude shock. They would probably wait to hear me out, smile and then paint my face black, mount me on a donkey, take me all over the village and christen me the village idiot. This disturbing thought tilted the resultant force towards the baggage counter, towards which I slowly moved. Oh well, in addition to this, I had a busted ankle, owing to my heroics the previous night. You see, a little black dog that was too curious for its own good decided to make contact with my front wheel. I was probably too preoccupied thinking about the pretty lady sitting behind me. So in the last minute I did my spare-the-dog act only to crash hard on the road almost breaking my ankle, not to mention horribly bruising the gal too.
With such an illustrious start to the first leg of my journey (get it? first leg! Ha!), I had very little to expect from the rest of the journey. What should have been an exciting experience involving pretty air hostesses, female co-passengers and a show of my incredible bravado by saving everyone’s lives aboard that plane in a Desperado style was reduced to middle aged my-aunt-Molly air-dont-hostessess, two giggly high school girls and a beer drinking grandpa. I guess cool stuff happens only in the movies.
Quite soon came the first challenge of air travel - A Mensa puzzle called ‘Seat Belt’. I am not sure whether the point is to make people feel safe or just to confuse them with the intricasies of the seat belt. I believe I am a fairly intelligent guy, especially with stuff like this. It really hurt my pride when I had to ask the giggly girls how to strap the damn thing. Once that was done, the giggly girl next to me developed an affinity to a strategic part of my anatomy – The foot that had an ankle with a big gaping hole. Her foot banged against my ankle once. I turned from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde, the nice Mr Hyde however, and told her to watch it. Happened a couple of times more after a while. She was very sweet about it but the bad Mr Hyde was already at large.
“Oh I am so sorry I keep stamping your foot!”
You know, thats the thing with women! They think they can get away with anything by being sweet!
“Do that again and you’ll wish you had a parachute”, I said.
As the horrific realization dawned upon her face, I smiled to myself, patted myself on the back for a job well done. It was not really her fault. When Lufthansa says economy, they mean that with all their (cold) heart. I was just in a rotten mood because of all the pain (between you and me, I might have also been doing an impression of Dr. House). We were all set to take off. I somehow wasn’t excited at all. I guess take off/landing is something you would enjoy as kids or as pilots. I was however very very amused. There I was in a Lufthansa 747 (oooooooh!) which rattled as badly as a KSTRC red bus. All through the take off and quite a while after too, I had the this-is-freaking-unbelievable look. The point is when you have never air-travelled in twenty-three years of your life, the people who think your life is sad because of that tell you fairy tales about it. You know the “Its so huge! Its so smooth! They give us food!” stories. So naturally I had very high expectations. All nonsense, let me tell ye!
We reached Frankfurt after ten hours in that flying dungeon. The pilot said we had gotten an apron position due to which buses will take us to the terminal. I found the whole deal with the pilot very funny. He would give an elaborate description of everything he had to do. I was reminded of a Seinfeld standup act.
Pilot: “I am gonna be heading north. Take a 45 west via Dublin, and yadda yadda yadda”.
Passengers: “Huh? Umm.. Fine. Just end up to where it says on the ticket okay? You can do that?”
We got a nice blast of cold air as we got out of the plane. Very refreshing that. The bus took us to the terminal where couple of guys I was travelling it decided to tinker around with the pay phones to make a call home. The rest of us sat around making small talk. I was having a nice time trying to identify the nationality of each person passing by in front of me. As I went Indian, American, Korean, Indian, Indian, African, Arab, Euro, I heard an airport attendant talking very slowly in English to a woman who apart from so obviously not understanding a single word, was also smiling ridiculously. I don’t know why he thought talking slower would help. This was my chance to regain my glory that the uneventful flight so unfairly deprived me of.
“Do you need some help translating?”, I said.
“You can do that? Please!”, he said.
“Please tell her that she has to walk from here till that point there till a colleague of mine comes to fetch her”, he told me as I approached.
The lady was still smiling. It was the I-donno-shit kinda smile. She said she knows only Malayalam – the one language I had no clue about. Sweet irony. I reasoned that Mallu folks must have a reasonable understanding of Tamil so tried that. She gave me the nod that school kids give when they don’t know what’s going on but they want you out of their face.
“You can’t talk to her?, asked the guy.
“No I can’t. Its not so simple. Where I come from, we have around thirty different languages”, I said.
By this time, the guy who the attendant was waiting for had arrived. The attendant heaved a sigh of relief as the lady left and so did I. I tried to make my exit as inconspicuous as possible when I heard “Thank you!” behind me. I couldn’t help but mutter ‘for nothing’ to myself. A while after this little event, the guys were back. We decided to head to our gate where we had to rendezvouz with another dood. We met up with him and boarded our plane. The flight to Atlanta was as uneventful as its predecessor. The most interesting thing that happened was the flight not getting permission to land because of which the pilot showed us the bird’s eye view of Atlanta for a little while.
As we got out of the plane, I figured, it was going to be a long before I got out of the airport. I asked my friend to look for a wheel chair. He found an attendant with a wheel chair. After a little bit of explaining, she looked at me and said “Alright, hop on!” This nice lady got us through immigration on a priority basis. I made a mental note to feign an foot injury the next time I needed preferential treatment. In addition to this, all of us got a ride in the elevators too! We had to pick up our baggage after this.
“How many bags ya got?”, she asked.
“Three. Two suitcases and one air bag”, I said.
Everytime a bag appeared she would look at me for a sign. Once I showed her my bag, she would go and pick it up for me. She did an awesome job with that simply because each one of those weighed twenty-three kilos. Watching her pick that up put my pride on the line! The rest of the guys were running around frantically for their baggage. Meanwhile this lady went and got a trolley and loaded it up with my baggage. We were waiting for the others to follow suit. After a while, I guess the lady thought they were all bungling and decided to throw in a helping hand. Soon we were on our way to customs. This woman, she was pushing me with one hand and 70 kilos of baggage with the other. After a little while she stopped, huffing and puffing.
“Why don’t you get the baggage? I’ll work the wheel chair”, I offered.
“You do that, they fine my ass!”, she chided ferociously.
That was enough for me. She would have made my mother jealous. There I sat with my arms folded across my chest. Our group split at customs. I was carrying nothing but a few of the guys had stuff to declare.
“Yo friends are gonna take a while here”, she said as the customs people made them open their baggage.
“Lets move along. I’ll wait for them in the lobby”, I said
As we went along, I decided to make small talk you to cut the tension.
“So you been in Atlanta long?”
“Too long”, she said. This was also probably an indication for me to shut it.
From the lobby, we had to take an underground train to reach the main terminal. You see, Atlanta airport has this concept of ‘Concourses’ and there are six of them. My flight landed in Concourse ‘E’ (the last one) and I had to go to Concourse ‘T’ (the first one) to get out of there. Ergo underground train. The lady loaded up my luggage on another belt that would take it to Concourse T.
“I can take it from here”, I said, once we reached the lobby.
“Are you sure?”, she asked.
“Yeah. I’ll just wait for them to catch up with me and then we’ll take the train. Thank you for your help”.
“Sir, are you aware that I accept tips?”, she said.
At first I thought I did not hear it right.
“What??”, I exclaimed, almost daring her to say what I thought I heard her say.
“ARE-YOU-AWARE-THAT-I-ACCEPT-TIPS?”, she said slower, louder, pronouning each and every syllable.
“Er.. No.. Umm.. Let me go get some change”, I blurted out.
As I went to the exchange to get some change, the realization of what had just happened dawned upon me. By the time I got change, the whole episode started to seem funny. I realized that I had gotten totally conned by those words. My don’t-be-a-cheapskate instincts had kicked in before I knew what was happening. All in all, I felt she deserved it for everything she had done and that she probably had to poke and prod us types to be sensitive to her requirements, in which, I am sure, she found no pleasure doing.
“How does that work for you?”, I asked as I handed her five dollars.
“That would be fine. Thank you very much sir”.
As we reached the main lobby of concourse T, I found my friend, Nags, waiting for us. A relative of my roommate, Ravi, had also come. They had all been waiting for almost two hours at the terminal. Ravi gave us the good news that we had our apartment ready. About the apartment – This was something we all had worked really hard on. Getting a apartment booking while sitting back home in India is no joke. After looking through countless websites and reviews we finalized on an apartment and got our people to check it out. Once they were happy with it they made a booking. However till the very end we were not sure whether we will get to move in as soon as we arrived. There seemed to be last minute hiccups creeping in everytime we thought it was on track. So this was really awesome news indeed.
I stared in awe as I entered the apartment. Fully carpeted, air-conditioned, kitchen with a microwave, oven, dishwasher and a cooking range, all through the day hot water.. Wow! Lap of luxury it was really! Beyond this, I decided that I will explore further later. My foot was in pretty bad shape after almost 24 hours of continuous stress. I fell asleep as the guys went out for some desi food. The pain I was in kind of freaked the guys out. I decided to sleep it off again. Had a very important day coming up.
The Georgia Tech day.
Stay tuned…
