Thresholds of India, curated by Rajeev Methi

Up at 4am, off to Jaipur airport at 4.30. Our group hold baggage was 7kg overweight in total , but we we were told that if we took 7kg of hand luggage and put it in the hold, we wouldn't be charged! 

At Mumbai airport (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj) we said goodbye to Camilla and Sridhar and a couple of others, who were going back to the suburbs of Mumbai, and transfered to International departures. It took me ages to check in for Air India. I queued in a great snaking line while a man in uniform walked up and down asking people if they were going to Bhopal. (Gas disaster, I thought, and remembered the news story breaking on the black and white TV in Marchmont in December 1984). Finally I reached a desk and was told I was in the wrong section, and need to queue on the backside! I queued on the other side and and got checked in. All because the check in machines were not working! Then Security....

We got through to the Other Side, and found a table from where we had a best -ever view of the planes and runway .Once my new friends from the group had departed for their BA flight , I wrote these notes: 

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International

I sit in the sun on a pond-green vinyl-backed chair and watch the planes being loaded. My new friends are on the British airways flight. I shall wait here until it turns and begins to taxi, slowly slowly, until finally it rushes past the terminal, ready for takeoff. The terminal building obscures the final moment of lift off.  

Four men in hi Viz vests stand under the nose cone of my plane, Air India. A large parcel is being loaded through the rear door..

Excitement! British airways is being towed away. As well as the little white truck at the nose, a man walks alongside. I can see his feet on the other side of the fuselage. BA moves forward now, still attached. She is following a pattern of yellow markers on the tarmac. Behind her, a blue-liveried plane lands effortlessly on the runway. The next plane queued for takeoff is an Air India flight. BA is detached from her towing truck. IndiGo comes in to land. Six young men in vests cross the tarmac and enter the terminal building at ground level. They wear blue rucksacks, and joke with each other. Four metal containers have arrived for Air India. 
BA is turning around. She's got to go out of sight and reappear suddenly, seconds before takeoff.

Indian pop music plays in the terminal. Women shout. A baby at the next table plays with water bottles. Her plastic no-spill cup is leaking. Where are all the passengers going? And why? Many have relatives in the UK, I imagine, but there's a bigger story here, of the diaspora of the peoples of a subcontinent.


BA is back in view, on the runway now. IndiGo is waiting to go behind her. BA is off, three minutes behind schedule. I know she must have taken off, because the Vistara flight behind her (not Indigo after all) hads takeno off too. 

Time to check the status of my Air India flight....

Whike waiting. I  also checked out the 'Art Wall'. The art wall is circular and spans all four levels of the airport. There are detailed panels explaining the concepts, and genuine artefacts are included, as above. I've put another in Extras. It took five years to create this wall. The carpet in several sections of the airport is what I learned, as a child, to call Paisley Pattern. Ah, but which came first: Indian design or Paisley manufacturing? The swirls actually represent an Indian motif, a stylised representation of s mango. So much of what we think of as British actually comes from elsewhere! 

My flight was long and boring. My companion next to me started manspreading every time he fell asleep. I had an excellent view of desert, snowy mountains, and sunset. I'd also seen the dawn breaking on my earlier flight from Jaipur. Steve was following my flight on a tracker (Air India doesn't have live tracking) and says I flew directly over Mount Ararat, and Brno in Czechia (I lived near there once upon a time).

We landed at Heathrow on time, I grabbed my bags, got through the system and  down to the bus station. Found that I could catch an earlier bus to Cirencester, and hopped on. Aboard the coach, the lights were dimmed to blue. Everyone was fast asleep. It was winter-dark outside. No one spoke for an hour and a half. Just as I was beginning to think that everyone apart from the driver and myself had in fact died, a few people began to chat quietly, in English. The coach drew into Cirencester. 

Steve greeted me warmly, and we drove home. As we got through the front door, he told me that a huge orange cat had tried to burst through the microchip-operated cat flap to get into our house, and had terrified our Bombay (Mumbai) cat, as well as breaking the flap. All I could think was that there was a tiger on the loose! 

I was so cold! Had a bath, put on the electric blanket, a hottie,  my winter pyjamas, and climbed into bed. Russell texted the group to say he'd ghot home to Sussex and that, taking into account the time difference of 5.5 hours, we'd been travelling for 24 hours. The time in Jaipur was once again 4am.