Air India

AIR INDIA

July 2015

I am at the airport in Mumbai, ready to head to JFK and then home after a short trip to the Ganges River. I came here to celebrate my 60^th birthday and I am relaxed and renewed.  The trip was a success.

“Ok, your seat is all set. We only have middle seats left”, the Air India clerk tells me.

“No, I have an window seat” I tell him emphatically. There is nothing worse than a middle seat, especially on a 13-hour flight.

“Sorry, Madame, it is no loner available,” he tells me without emotion.

“Then get me another window set”, I demand.

He checks his computer and then lifts his head to tell me, “There is only one window seat left  on the whole plane and I can not give it to you. It is the seat by an emergency door.”

“Why can’t you give it to me?”

“Because you are a woman and you are too old,” he tells me laughingly.

I am incredulous.  I have only been 60 for five days and already, I am being left behind. I protest at length but it is to no avail.  Finally, he offers me an aisle seat in the first row of economy.

“You will have much leg room and I am sorry if I offended you”, he says trying to mitigate the damage.

I take the damn seat only to find that it is a tighter squeeze than the other seats because this aisle as to accommodate the tray table that does not lean from the seat in front of me.  So now, as I sit down, I find a second reason to complain about my lot in life.  A woman sits at the window seat. Then a young woman parks herself in the middle seat.  She is holding an infant.  Now, our limited space is encumbered by four people, not three people. Yet another reason to be annoyed.  We are so tight in this space that I wonder how we will make it through the next 13 hours of flight. 

Then we take off and the stewardess comes by and places a bassinet in front of us for the baby.  There is no room to move at all and all three of us are required to work in unison for each and every move we make.  I am fuming. I would have had far more space in some damn middle seat somewhere else on the damn plane.  I have paid my fair share of a ticket and I am now encumbered with all of this damn burden.

As I sit there with my arms folded, fuming and focused on my injustices, the baby, ever so innocently, grabs my pinky finger and takes hold of it. He just holds on, without thought of my anger.  And his innocence surges through my being and I sit there and think to myself, “How lucky am I to have this beautiful, simple interaction with this child of God.”

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