By morning, the cow had vanished too

I was supposed to be flying to London.

Instead, sometime late at night, I was in the back of an old van in Mumbai with no idea where I was going.

Winter fog can become thick enough to close Delhi airport, and somewhere near the city our plane had turned around.
A while later we landed in Mumbai.

What followed was not exactly a plan.

There were stranded passengers, airline staff, luggage, instructions that seemed to change while they were being given.

People disappeared into different cars.
Eventually somebody more or less pushed me into a van.

I remember feeling that I had become luggage.

○

I had a printed ticket for a flight from Delhi to London.

I also had a mobile phone, but it was a phone in the old sense of the word.
It could call people and send 160-character messages.
It could not tell me where my plane was, find another one, display a boarding pass or open a small chat window in which someone called Priya promised to look into the matter.

The van bounced through Mumbai.

Rickshaws moved around us.
Music came loudly from somewhere outside.
Chai stalls were still open.

Every now and then the driver braked hard enough to remind me that I was awake.

○

Eventually the van stopped outside a hotel.
The lobby looked tired.
The room smelled humid and slightly stale.

An old air-conditioning unit appeared to have spent several years reconsidering its purpose in life.

I asked at reception what would happen next.
They didn’t know.
Maybe, they said, I would go to the airport in the morning.
Maybe.

Nobody appeared to know that somewhere between Thiruvananthapuram and London I had ended up in this particular room in Mumbai.

I looked out of the window.

Rickshaws.
Drivers chatting.
Dogs sleeping.

A cow staring.

Chai stalls and street kitchens with spicy steam.
Indian music somewhere below.

The city seemed completely uninterested in my itinerary.

I sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the air

conditioner struggle. It felt oddly peaceful.

○

Morning arrived grey and hazy.
Rickshaw drivers were sleeping across their backseats.
The dogs were still sleeping.
The cow had vanished.

Reception knew no more than it had the night before, but arranged a ride back to the airport.

I started asking.
One desk.
Then another.

Someone spoke to someone else.
Eventually I was given another flight.

There was no great reunion between passenger and airline.
No one said:
There you are.

I had simply turned up again.

I identified my checked bag so another label could be attached to it.
Someone checked the tag on my carry-on.

After a night in which nobody seemed entirely sure where I was, there was something reassuringly precise about this.

○

My original connecting flight had probably arrived in London.
Perhaps there had been an empty seat.
Perhaps somebody noticed.
Probably not.

Within a few hours, somehow, I was travelling again.
Later there was a seat on an international flight.
Someone, somewhere, even knew that the person sitting in it had a meal preference.

After the previous night, this seemed almost intimate.

A day late, I arrived in London.
Grey European winter.
People, signs and instructions made sense again.
After the previous months, perhaps a little too much sense.

The spicy steam and sleeping dogs had been replaced by organised urgency.

Then I continued home.

○

For a while afterward, there was just a residue from that night.

A plane had turned around.
A van had taken me somewhere.
A hotel had given me a room.
Fog had erased me from lists, lines and destinations.

A cow stared.

By morning, the cow had vanished.
I was beginning to reappear.

Sometimes I still return to that night.
How easily I had dissolved into Mumbai.
How little seemed to happen when I disappeared.

And how strangely little I minded.