Travels, 4

As we went out of the terminal building past the armed guard with the taxi despatcher, two people materialised from the crowd, colleagues from IIT Madras, including Arun Kumar, the organiser of our talks there.

After discussion they decided to stick to the plan we had made; Arun would come with us to the hotel (the Southern Comfort Hotel, quite close to the airport) and check that we were settled OK. We really appreciated having him there.

It turns out that after I had replied to Arvind, the Chennai people had realised that they had made a mistake with my itinerary, not realising that we would be staying a day in Chennai to recover from jetlag before venturing on to Kochi. They had been frantically emailing me, trying to get hold of me; of course I had been on a plane with my communications devices in flight safe mode, or in an airport with no free wi-fi.

Anyway, with Arun’s help, we got checked in and taken to our room. It has to be a two-nights booking since we are arriving well before the usual hotel check-in time, though in fact we are leaving earlyish for our plane the next day so will have not much more than 24 hours there. Still, money well spent, perhaps.

It was fairly quiet when we arrived at about 5am, apart from what I took at first to be somebody intermittently practising the saxophone nearby; it turned out to be a particular car horn sound. (Traffic horn sounds are certainly part of the Indian experience.) But as the day grew lighter, the familiar sound of India got going. Just outside our window is a big divided highway, carrying buses (many of them belonging to some of the city’s hospitals and medical schools, cars, scooters and the ubiquitous tuk-tuks). The road divider is a busy railway line up on concrete stilts, where scarcely a minute passes by without a passing train.

We dozed until about 7:30 and then ventured down for breakfast, a buffet which seems to be included in the hotel price. Then back to our room. A mostly idle day, but a few jobs got done: I sent Aparna the slides for my talk, and made a few for an introduction to Rajendra Pawale’s talk, which I am introducing (it is the first in a series of S. S. Shrikhande memorial endowment lectures, and I have a few things to say); warned my coauthors about the CUP request for ability to deal with AI on the ADE book; set various things up for Rosemary including finding on the web the school where she will be addressing the pupils.

We attempted to check in for the next day’s flight, but BA said it was not possible, and we didn’t have the Indigo flight number.

But I did find out a possible reason why I had trouble emailing the visa document at Heathrow. It depends on a wonderful feature of that wonderful Microsoft program Outlook. If you reply to an email, it puts up a space for you to type your reply; but there is a substantial pause until it is ready to accept input. If you start typing “Dear” during this time, it interprets shift-D as the instruction “Delete this email and move the reply to drafts”. This seems to be a fairly new feature, and I have tripped over it many times in the recent past. I didn’t actually type any text into this email, but my reply had been put into drafts anyway; when the same “feature” struck again, and I finished my reply in the Drafts folder, the next email to pop up when it was sent was … guess what?

So at 19:00 we went downstairs. First we arranged a wake-up call and a taxi for 07:30 in the morning. Then we had dinner.

The hotel restaurant was a Chettinadu restaraunt. This meant nothing to me, but a Google search revealed that the Chettinadu were a people from this part of the world who had developed a highly esteemed cuisine, of which the main feature for which it is now remembered is the biryani, that staple of Indian restaurants in Britain (though likely it was much more than that originally). So we both had biryanis, served on imitation banana leaves. I tried eating it with my fingers, but not being trained to that, I reverted to the spoon eventually. It was a very good biryani, certainly. It was a huge helping, liberally laced with chillies, and I didn’t manage to finish the entire pot.

After that, we went upstairs, packed, and went to bed.

We slept well, and in the morning woke just before the alarm call, so were not shocked out of sleep. So we went downstairs, had breakfast, and I left Rosemary downstairs with the small bags while I went up for the big ones. The lift was on the fifth floor, so I took the stairs. I was down again in good time. No sign of the taxi, and I don’t know if it was booked, but one of the hotel staff drove us, for half what yesterday’s taxi cost.

Into the terminal, after showing our passports and e-ticket receipt to the armed guards, we were met by an attendant who brought two wheelchairs. Rosemary accepted one, but I said I was OK. It was as well she was there. The gates we were pointed to were bag drop only, but she went to a “closed” gate where, after a long discussion, she persuaded the check-in girl to take our checked bags and issue boardingh cards. Then there was a moment of confusion when she gave Rosemary her card but walked off with mine; however she did come back. She saw us through security, through a special channel for crew and disabled, and waited while we packed up again.

For a second time I nearly lost my laptop at the airport. I had put it in a tray by itself, and another tray had been put on top; the fit was so snug that nobody noticed. But after a short search, we were saved, and we were taken down by the lift to the departure gate, where she left us (with the wheelchair).

Then everything worked fine. Boarding was on time, the flight left on time, there was enough legroom (the plane was an Airbus A321; I do prefer Airbus to Boeing), and best of all, the following happened. When the seat belt sign was switched off, a member of the flight crew came to our seats, checked our names, and gave us beautiful little bags containing snacks and a drink. The flight was an hour, so we landed on time, and were met at the airport.