AUG-A-7
GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS, AND WORSE
PROSPECTS:
I AM NO LONGER STRANDED IN HIMALAYAN
LADAKH;
I AM, INSTEAD, SERIOUSLY STRANDED IN
HOT, HUMID
AND CROWDED URBAN DELHI
August 23, 2003
After the several swings and misses, I DID get my guaranteed boarding pass out of Leh, and I am not on the road to Simla with the subsequent problems of getting out of the “Hill Country” toward a major urban airport, a process that could take well over a week. I made it on board the Jet Air flight from Leh this morning early and landed in Delhi and took a taxi to the Hotel Ajanta from which I now write to you. We first called Ambassador Travel in Connaught Place to tell them that we had been instructed to come over and get our tickets stamped to confirm our respective flights out tonight on Air France (for Kishor) and on Lufthansa (for me.) The agent there advised us instead to go directly to the airline offices, also in the sprawling Connaught Place.
I had directed the taxi on how to find the Ajanta Hotel which I know from several frequent trips into Delhi before, just past the Railway Station. So, I now decided to walk over to the Connaught Place through the teeming mass of India pushing in on all sides, eager to be the special agent and dependent of this white man with a safari suit now soaking with sweat. As I walked by the public urinals (no privacy) and the long lines of lathered up men being shaved on the street as the horses, sacred cows, and begging lines of small and large people with their hands out looking as pitifully as they can. There were “boxed schoolchildren” being pulled to school, their uniforms crisp, and their book bags on top of the rickshaw with the school’s names printed on the sides. There were the throng of passing pedicabs, trucks and buses with the occasional horse drawn “Victoria” all upsetting piles of fruit stashed on the walkway, and men sleeping on the dirt excavated from whatever broken public facility was beneath the former pavement—be it water main or sewage line. The sights and smells of urban India are overwhelming, but not as much as the sheer press of the masses of People. Everywhere, scurrying like ants, and more plentiful, at least here. I am reminded that I have extensive experience in the only underpopulated area in all of this vast subcontinent.
We had to walk all around the Connaught Place in trying to find the office of Air France. We were directed many times over to another false lead as to what building housed the office. We made it after several tries, along the way one at a Kashmiri merchant’s shop to whom I showed the addressed letter from Imtiyaz, and he immediately replied, “Oh, I will take you there, but only after I show you this =very fine rug!” No thanks, we are on a mission.
We got to Air France and had to sign in through an elaborate security system. After a wait, in which I saw the old USA Today headline about the deaths of 20 people including the UN chief of mission in Iraq in a bombing attack, Kishor got a wait list ticket of tonight, and a confirmed seat on the Paris to Newark flight. That sounded hopeful, so we started up on the next long hot trek to find the Lufthansa office. After sweating some more we came to it in the Jamput Building.
The agent at the desk was in no hurry to see me, and was downright hostile when I sat down and showed her my ticket. “You have no need to reconfirm your passage—see the sign on the door!”
“Oh,” I said, “But this is to get the re-ticketed seat assignment from the flight missed last night and re-booked for tonight after being stranded in Leh.” I gave her the tickets and Ambassador Travel’s notes.
“There is no way!” she said. “We are paying passengers to offload, and all our seats are booked fully for a month. We do not have even a ‘wait list’ so I will not talk to you about this since the only way you could get out of here in the month of August is to buy a Business Class ticket, and there is only one of those available on a wait list for August 28. There is no way, and you will not leave India on any carrier through any port, since all the flights are completely sold out and over booked.”
This is not the assurance that I had received from hem before his departure on the long road trip to Simla, when he said that all I had to do was to go to Ambassador Travel and have them stamp the reconfirmation of tomorrow’s flight. The Lufthansa agent did not have to be a specialist in customer relationships, since she had too many customers and could turn them away at liberty. “So, go back to your travel agent!”
And so we did. After another long pilgrimage around the Connaught Place, I found the Ambassador Travel Agency, not well marked, but I had been there several times, each time following screw-ups, such as when they had kept my locked Action packer loaded with wet clothes from Nepal, and had not forwarded it when I had the trip to Spiti and two trips subsequently. It was also during the post-September 11 era when I had to change a flight from one date to another because of the delay, and I found myself in the Delhi Airport told to buy a new ticket. I had to do so, and that cost was still never reimbursed.
Now, we went in to see the manger and told him that the Lufthansa agent would not even talk with me, to whom he had sent us by phone that morning. “Yes, of course, and we can do nothing either, since we would have to go to the same agent and we though you would have a better chance, There is no flight available from anywhere in India for the next weeks.”
He denied any responsibility for this mishap, which essentially has me immigrating to India without a near term hope of leaving. I pointed out that it was his one-way ticket to Leh that had got me in this situation, and that when this was pointed out to him on July 19 with six weeks to fix it, nothing was done about it.
No, it is your fault for not making it to the flight last night. I was given the order from Himalayan Health for only a one-way ticket to Leh for you and Kishor.” And he ruffled through some papers to prove it. Well, I am now missing a flight to Alaska and a very expensive vacation and will be cooling my heels in the Ajanta hotel, for an unknown period of weeks until I can get back to my job, and what are you going to do to fix this?”
“Nothing at all.” So, we called Ravi, but it was midnight in the US, to tell him that we were now booked in at the Ajanta Hotel Room 414 with no prospect of getting out of India this month, missing every commitment made in the interval from this point because of the primary failure to issue a round trip ticket and then not fixing it with a six week notice of this problem. So, I had lost my last chance to leave India last night, and it I do nothing further about this in any rather directed way, I might still be stuck here in India long enough that I would be fired for non-appearance back in Washington, let alone missing a very big and expensive vacation trip to Alaska which has all been pre-paid and pre-arranged with waiting bush pilot flights.
So, I am having a séance of meditation here in my Ajanta Hotel, and will probably try to go to futilely agitate at 2:30 AM in the Delhi airport, and then return here until something breaks. There is a big meditation sign in the room advertising a meditation guru with the promise that Meditation cures everything in “Perfect Health” and enhanced relationships, etc, with the final irrefutable advertising punch line: “ If you don’t walk within…..you walk without.”