Across the aisle from me is a woman, dark (I'm assuming genetically derived since she seemed otherwise at ease and rested) shadowy circles beneath her eyes, reading The Koran and eyeing me and Anwar occasionally, but never smiling or making eye contact for too long.
We landed in Zurich and headed for a lounge dedicated to the business traveller. Hand over our boarding passes and munch on whatever foods happen to be on hand. Our lady of the dark circles turns out to be a businesswoman and a mother of Pakistani birth. We begin to chat with her and find that her family owns a business of making and then exporting and distributing clothing in North America. She has kids, is, it turns out, Ismaili (same as Anwar) and has a sense of humour.
But never mind her. I have a craving for a cigarette which needs to be assuaged. A hunger which is now more than 8 hours old. I leave the business lounge and eventually find a glassed off room on a lower level of the Zurich airport. The room is 20 feet square and you can smell it's inhabitants long before you open it's one door. Inside the cube, smoke lingers -- thick, floating languidly around the heads of some 10-12 people who are inside. And, as I have a better, second thought, I imagine the smoke clinging to their hair, infusing their clothes, marking them as addicts to their neighbours in the next leg of their journey.
I let the door shut in front of me and head back the way I came. I learn that in order to have a cigarette in Zurich, I will have to pass through security the wrong way, take a short train ride to another terminal and then go through customs (which for a Canadian passport holder is no big deal) and then find a door out into the fresh air. Wow! Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Fortunately, there are two other lounges that only one person so far has thought to alert me to. A lengthy room with high ceilings, good ventilation, a view of the tarmac and no smokers in sight. In other words, the closest thing to fresh air smoking.
I reach into my pocket, cigarette already in hand and find I have no lighter! With no one around at all except people lined up to go through security and out to the terminal, I contemplate my dilemma. The smoking lounge is far enough away that I couldn't ask anyone in line for their lighter, walk to the lounge to smoke and return their lighter before they clear security. I ask a security guard if he has a light? No. None of his co-workers smokes either. So I stand around outside the rectangular smoke room waiting for some other addict to drift by. Eventually, two cops, both non-smokers, saunter by and the older more senior of the pair produces an old lighter that just barely produces a flame and I proceed to fill my lungs with smoke. The cigarette is not nearly as satisfying as I had expected.
We eventually get on the flight to Delhi and spend an interminably long time sitting in business class watching the image of a pixelated plane make its painful way slowly across the backdrop of the Earth.
We land in Delhi at 11:55 p.m. local time (it's mid-morning in Toronto already), and proceed to collect our luggage. And then it happens, the first wave of culture shock: It strikes me as weird that every single person I see is Indian! Here Indian, there Indian, Indians everywhere! We fail to find our driver from the hotel and opt to take a local taxi to, what we think of as, the world famous Sheraton brand hotel.
Our driver speaks no English (why should he?), owns a beat up old taxi of the kind I've seen in Indian movies hundreds of times and has no clue what hotel we are going to or even which area we want him to go to. What's a Sheraton anyways? As the little cab races headlong into fumes and dust, over potholed dirt streets, I turn to Anwar and tell him to prepare to be gang-raped at the hands of a bunch of cab drivers who have a meeting point specially designated for hapless travellers arriving in the middle of the night in a strange city. I designate this imaginary, not unlike blueberry hill or lookout point, as rape point. Anwar runs his fancy new camera and, we find later at the hotel, takes some great video images of the lightless streets leading into the city center.
There is no place in Toronto which compares to what little we've seen of Delhi. If you have ever seen a homeless man, living under a bridge, in a makeshift home, complete with a skinny dog, fumes and dust mixing in the air, smells of cow shit and piss all around, than you have a good sense of what the streets that led us eventually to our 5-star hotel were like.
In lieu of actual pictures of the city, I am enclosing pics of the wholly satisfactory room of our hotel.
Today, we meet with my friend's sister to hand over her sister's care package from Canada and to have her show us the city.
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