Getting Out of Delhi

I was in no particular hurry to get to Delhi airport, but after the rumors I had heard about Syrian Arab Airline's reputation for over-booking (unfounded in my experience) I wanted to be there as early as possible to check in and secure a seat even if it meant a long, hot, uneventful wait. So before lunch, and somewhere around Connaught Place, I found the EATS office that operates a bus service out to what used to be called Palam Airport: I'm told it now commemorates Indira Ghandi. EATS (or some such acronym) was (and maybe still is) a bus company in which the T stands for transport and the other letters indicate that the service is run for or by ex-servicemen. The main point is that this was an excellent way to get to the airport which didn't involve the spending of a large number of rupees which would have to be changed back from the dollars they'd just been changed into: nor did it entail battling with crowds. A good, solid, no-nonsense, reliable bus service and nothing more. But when?

The transport office was the usual bureaucratic challenge I've come to expect and enjoy, and which I always mistakenly think I've learned how to handle until I open my mouth. Why an office for one small bus was necessary remains a bit of a mystery, but at least it offered a blank wall to pee against which is what people seem to do in India as departure times arrive and pass. Inside the gloomy office I noticed first the mandatory, garlanded portrait of JFK with smoldering sticks of incense held in place among the faded marigolds. Underneath the hanging portrait a large, black-haired lady in a purple sari was installed on a wobbly seat behind an enormous, empty, dusty desk.

There seemed to be sari everywhere, acres of it, as if the lady had taken it all off to track down a flea that had been bothering her all morning, but had been taken unawares by the appearance of an unexpected and unwelcome customer, and she'd had to wrap up quickly without paying due attention to proper anchoring. Now the sari was coming undone, and purple, silky cloth and lighter-coloured lacy stuff was gradually colonizing the desk and cascading onto the floor around her feet.

I couldn't tell if the lady was embarrassed, but she was certainly uncomfortable, so I stated my business:

“At what time does it leave for the airport, the next bus?”

Hearing the question asked out loud made me aware of how awkwardly I had phrased it, but it didn't matter because when I looked directly into her face to pose the question I realized that the lady was drunk, and judging by the furtiveness of her expression and the furtiveness of the man who I soon noticed lurking in the darkness of a doorway behind her, I guessed that it was certainly not for the purposes of tracking down a flea that her sari had been misarranged.

The lady kept her composure and applied herself to the task I had set her. She took a deep breath and filled her chest, pushing it further over the desk towards the front door, and with it a few more strands of errant sari. Then she unlocked and pulled open a very stiff drawer and heaved out an enormous book which she slapped down onto the desk in front of her, sending clouds of dust and weevil-like creatures in my direction. She seemed to take some perverse pleasure in my spluttering and for a while it looked like she was going to lift the volume and slap it down even harder until she thought again and continued with what she was paid to do. The drawer was then banged shut with similar vigor, and locked, and the keys were returned to a pouch somewhere within the folds of the ever unraveling sari.

She cleared her throat and began to consult the book, a timetable I supposed. It took her some time to make up her mind about which page of the book would be relevant to the business in hand, but after a while she settled on the page that the book seemed to fall open at of its own will, as if it was offering a bit of help without the lady having to compromise herself by admitting that she was hopelessly lost. Her stained finger ran up and down the lines of Devangiri script which seemed to make as much sense to her as it did to her fingers or to me. At last a decision seemed to have been arrived at and the book was slammed shut in triumph scattering more dust and insects in my direction.

The keys were retrieved from the folds of the still-loosening sari, but not from quite the same place they had originally been put, and the drawer was opened, the book returned, the drawer relocked and the keys shoved underneath her not-so-small rear after an aborted attempt to find another safe fold in the sari. Throughout the key-locating exercise the lady engaged my eyes with her stare to keep them distracted from the muddle that was taking place around her midriff, cleavage and behind, and she obviously thought I had noticed nothing amiss. She even included a few muttered asides to whoever was lurking in the next room, while keeping an imbecilic smile fixed around her podgy face.

Eventually the lady spoke to me, wearing a look on her face that told me she had forgotten what she had just read in the timetable, and she said nothing for a while, looking quite vacant. I wondered about the need for the timetable, given that the only route the office was responsible for was the route that a single bus worked to and from the airport ten times every day. I wondered about a lot of things, but especially about the information I needed to help me get to the Syrian Arab check-in desk at the airport before anyone else. At last the answer to my original and almost forgotten question arrived, though only after a lot of throat-clearing and chest-filling:

“The next bus to the airport has just left.”