65/ 100 Another Delay, and Another Letter to Write

The clock on the wall behind the check-in desk inside Varanasi Airport showed us things that we didn’t want to see. Apparently there were only about 30 minutes left to go until our aeroplane to Udaipur departed, and we were still nowhere near the front of the queue to even check in to the flight. We had even joined the desk for expedited processing because we had paid extra for Spice Max upgraded seats but, it would seem, this didn’t really make much difference.

After a few more agitated customers started fighting in the line, shouting insults at each other in a language we couldn’t understand and didn’t really need to, I politely squeezed to the front of the queue to attract the attention of the Spice Jet employee working there who seemed remarkably unfazed. I suspect it is always chaotic like this. When I explained our predicament and he realised that, unlike most other people in the queue, we were actually supposed to be in the express line, the pace of things suddenly increased dramatically.

Reminiscent of the time in Argentina when Fiona and I were ushered to the front of the line, past hundreds of bemused passengers, because one of the ground staff saw her walking stick, workers here too appeared from nowhere to part the seas and bring us to the very front of the line ahead of everyone else. All we had to do now was show our ID and the credit card we had used to make the booking. Bugger. The card I used to buy the tickets was helpfully changed by Tesco Bank a month before we flew out, and now we had new cards with new numbers. This seemed to be a really big problem and the staff were panicking.

Gaining absolution from blame through a letter

With absolutely no explanation at all a man in a suit and giant moustache appeared from a row of offices behind the desks and ushered us into the bowels of the airport. Along the back of the baggage carousels and into a bustling Spice Jet office we went where we then met an even more official looking person with an even bigger moustache and shinier trousers. The first guy explained our predicament to his boss who sat looking increasingly sterner by the second. It transpired that for some weird reason the lack of the original credit card wasn’t actually an issue. The problem, it turns out, was actually that Spice Jet did not want to get the blame for our missing cards and we had to absolve them of everything.

This being India the only way we could proceed was by writing some letters (remember Agra train station?) so, in a busy office, I had to stand by a ridiculously small shelf and basically write that we, Fiona and Trevor, lost our original credit card and now have a new one and this was most definitely not the fault of Spice Jet in any way whatsoever. I had to write several copies (I wasn’t permitted to use the photocopier next to me) and there was no carbon paper either, probably because the Transport Police had stashed it all for their own bizarre triplication requirements in Agra.

As if we were completely unaware of it, the man who had taken it upon himself to guide us through the airport process came back to tell us that we were really late for our flight and that we ought to hurry up a bit. I was far too tired to offer any explanation so we followed him back to the concourse where we were finally allowed to go through security and get scanned all over again. Still, we had progressed a tiny bit nearer to our plane and it had only taken 4 hours or so, which is pretty good by Indian standards.