Delay

I'm feeling a bit depressed. I shouldn't be, but I am anyway; reading through my flist, my friends are all happy and Christmassy, and well, everyone knows how much I hate Christmas. Most of all, I hate it at the moment because everyone wants to be with their families on Christmas, and that means I have no friends and nothing to do except work.

I am at home, finally. I had a long, horrible day yesterday; it began with my getting up in Palam at six in the morning after four hours sleep, and going to the airport in mild fog that got thicker as we went along. The visibility slowly dropped to zero, and the everyone, strangely for India, was slowing further and further down until we were crawling, watching the trees and traffic loom appear like photo negatives in the grey. When we we reached the terminal, my mother went to check in. I sat by the departure board, which is not one of the electronic ones you get in Europe; it clicks over manually with pleasing clickclickclick noises. And I'd previously though that this was something you only see in cloying movies about being home for Christmas, but when I was sitting there, every flight on the board made the clickclickclick noise at once and shifted to "Delayed. Delayed. Cancelled. Resecheduled. Delayed. Delayed. Delayed", etc, etc, you get it. My personal favourite was a flight to Kolkata that was now apparently "Indefinite".

Ah, that wonderful fog. I made some inquiries. The fog was now so thick that all incoming flights were being diverted, and the one from Munich had been sent to Chennai and would have to be sent back. Chennai is very very far from Delhi. Very far. If you want to fly there domestic, it takes you nearly three hours. When my mother got back from checking in, it had become pretty clear that our 9.55 am departure flight was now going to be departing at two o'clock.

Four hours later - four long, boring, hours sitting in a departure lounge, unable to sleep and terminally bored - we were told the incoming flight wasn't comning until half past three.

At half past three, we were told five o'clock.

Seven hours' flying time after that, I landed in Munich. The flight itself was unremarkable, mainly because the attendants and crew were all apologised out and were simply sorry for existing at all. Munich was a shock to the system. It is, after all, in Europe, and that's always a jolt after India. It couldn't be more different, because, well, it's clean. It's organised. The floor gleams, the windows are transparent and there's no exposed wiring hanging from the ceiling. Most of all, it's silent, what with that British-and-European habit of not shouting in public places. It was almost worth the headache of rearranging my connecting flight.

We were lucky, actually; there still was a flight we could take (most of the other passengers were being shifted to hotels for the night) and I got to Manchester eventually, having been travelling for more than twenty-four hours and very much ready to go home. Our luggage didn't come. I didn't get pissed off, I was tired. And here I am now, safely home, and I've had some sleep and I'm feeling better, but now I'm sort of feeling that all I wanted, after Silchar, was to come home, and now I'm here all the things that make it home - like warmth and your own clothes and my friends - are conspicuously absent.

I guess I'm still tired. I was writing about what happened in India, I remember; I'd just got up to Ahmedabad. More on that shortly.

Edited to add: I'm not doing Christmas this year - I didn't fill in the card polls or the wishlist meme, I'm being deliberately Scrooge-ish because I can't face it all this year - and yet, regardless, people have sent me cards. gamesiplay, flickgc, thank you very much. Your cards were among the few bright things yesterday. Also, I have a card from Sarah, and am unsure if this is apestaartje or mettanna. In the absence of a Belgian postmark, I suspect the latter. Thank you, too.

Kolkata and Assam

It turns out, what cheers me up is a proper shower, a change of clothes (despite most of my clothes are in Munich), and someone calling you up demanding to know why you're not answering your phone just when you thought the world had given up on you. Life is better. Colleen and I gossiped and geeked all afternoon, and she will be returning before New Year for Christmas Invasion squee. For that matter, I miss squee. Fannishly speaking, I'm enjoying the surge of girl_doctor fic, and am working on the fic commentaries that were requested before I disappeared. If anyone has any suggestions for girl_doctor fic they want to see, drop me a comment. I'm all ears.

Where was I up to? Ahmedabad. Like I said last time, Ahmedabad is in Gujarat, and it's hot, about twenty degrees hotter than Delhi. I wandered off the flight and gasped at the heat, and it was night, then. It's a different city from Delhi. To start with, it's not the capital and it's not a government city. And it's a Gujarati city and correspondingly full of Gujarati people who speak Gujarati and not Hindi. Consequently I can't read what the signs say, which makes life a little more complicated. But as Mashi says, it's not a very exciting city. We were there only to visit family, and I did enjoy myself, but as far as travel goes, it wasn't mind-broadening. Mashi always likes places and people that emulate the West, so that's the sort of thing we did. It was only on the second day that we went to Udaipur in Rajasthan, which was very different.

Rajasthan is a desert state. The road there is long, winding and full of dust and sand. Along the way, we listened to music, filmi stuff and old Texas hits, and I was entranced by the changing landscape. The city gives way to farms and craggy hills and old shacks by the roadside selling heavily sweetened tea. About halfway there, Mashi and my mother decided they needed the toilet. There wasn't one for miles, of course, but there were a lot of bushes. We stopped the car, and the two of them wandered into the wilderness to find an old bamboo structure they could hide behind. I stayed by the road and looked up the hillside. There was a long pause. And then a women dressed in an old sari, driving goats, appeared at the top of the hill. she looked down at me. And then she looked down behind the shack. There was another pause. Her hat fell off.

I smiled to myself all the way to the border.

Udaipur is a richly old and beautiful city, and the site of the Mewar royal family. The family are the world's oldest, claiming descent from Lord Rama, which may or may not be true but stands up to scrutiny. There is even a current maharajah, still living in the palace, although half of it has been turned into a museum. We wandered around the palace, looking at the beauty of it. Before the British came and even after, they lived not like kings but like gods. Whole rooms with gold and silver inlay, beautifully carved pillars and gardens, jula where the ranis would swing in the breeze. Outside the palace is the lake, Lake Patiola, with the lake palace in the centre. We took a boat around it, a low, small boat that splashed us all and showed us all the beautiful old palaces lurking around the lake edge. It was like another world, so different from Delhi, so different from modern times even.

(I actually have photos of all of this, but my camera is in Munich.)

Back in Ahmedabad, we didn't have much time. Only one more day, which I spent sitting in the apartment working on my maths, watching bright green parrots fly past the window. I had stopped eating very much food by then.

The next flight, the one back to Delhi, came in late at night and I slept soundly through till morning, and the chill had started in the capital. I read the newspapers, reading about the new Delhi Metro (clean and new with people being fined for any litter, graffitti or spitting, which is a good, good thing), allegations of corruption in the Lok Sabha (nothing new) and a demolition drive through Delhi. And I worked a bit, by gaslight because the power had gone again. The gas always makes an intense, white-hot light, and it hurts your eyes after a while. I slept until the power came back, and through the night, and through into the day, and avoided food.

The next outward flight was two days later, through the domestic terminal. My uncle is an electrical engineer with Indian Airlines, and aircraft are his passion. A side-effect of this is free flights for himself and close relatives, providing the plane is not full of paying passengers. He only knows he's flying at the very last minute, which makes life tense; but we managed to fly, he, my mother and me, to Kolkata, arriving into smog.

Kolkata, which was called Calcutta by the British but is once again rejoicing in its old name, is again a very different city from Delhi. It doesn't have CNG, the compressed natural gas initative which has removed so much of Delhi's pollution, so the smog is thick and lethal. The main language is Bengali, not Hindi, and whilst my mother's first language is Bengali, I know none of it. It makes life difficult. We were only there for a night, staying with an old family friend, and we left early to make an early morning flight to Silchar. I was flying alone, which I like, in a 30-seater propellor aircraft. It was wonderful. It flew low enough to make my ears hurt, but the enfolding landscape below was wonderful. It looked like the India you read about, with the tropical greenery and palm trees and large, lazy rivers and baked red ground. I was listening to my iPod, quietly over the roar of the propellors, and it was a magical flight. The airport barely deserves the name, being tiny enough to be mostly unnoticeable from the air. We landed with a shriek and skidded to a graceful halt right outside the terminal building. I walked through a tropical heat haze, shaking off the chill of the Deccan and marvelling at the sunshine. It was shockingly beautiful, but everything was miminal and tiny. Silchar is 4000km from Delhi and it shows. The central government doesn't allot much money to a provincial backwater like Assam, and that makes for some of the most terrible, grinding poverty I've ever seen and ever hope to see.

But more on that later: I think I need to muster up the courage before writing any more about Assam. Back to my fic commentaries for the time being, and I'm working tomorrow in Pritchard's, which should be nice, considering it's Christmas Eve and all the staff, past and present, are descending en masse. It's good to be home.