Together We Enter, Together We Leave

by NINAD JOG

When I booked a flight from Dalat for me and my friend, I had implicitly assumed that we would be assigned seats next to each other. But imagine my surprise, not to mention dismay, when his boarding pass said 29G and mine said 29E.

Clearly, he had a window seat and I an aisle. How could the airline have made so callous a mistake, such egregious an error? Hadn't we booked two seats under the same reservation? And which passenger, in his right mind, would knowingly choose a middle seat and sit smack dab between us? What had kept him from choosing a window or an aisle?

I confided in my friend my misgivings, but he was not too concerned – a reaction that, oddly enough, reduced my agitation and calmed me down.

All was not lost. At least we would be sitting in the same row on the same side of the aisle. He would look out the window at the inky blackness and the clouds and the unfolding city lights, while I would lose myself in a book, trying my best not to get distracted by the hurly-burly of passengers heading to and from the toilets and the attendants serving drinks and checking our seat belts for the umpteenth time. Besides, the flight would be a short one, no more than an hour, and before we knew it, we’d be on the ground in Ho Chi Minh City.

Yet I couldn't help feeling cheated. I longed to sit next to my friend, not only because he had gone to such great lengths to make my first-ever trip to Vietnam a stunning success, but also because it would be his first flight. I wanted to whisper in his ear what little I knew about the minutiae of flying: the plane is pushing back from the gate, it's taxiing, it's waiting in line for take-off, it's taking off, it has reached cruising altitude, it has started descending.

But above all, I wanted to sit by his side and comfort him, reassure him, if he got scared when the plane picked up speed while taking off, or shook when it hit a wall of clouds or bumbled into an invisible pocket of turbulence, or bumped violently when it landed – events that had scared the daylights out of me when I took one of my first flights, from Mumbai to Goa, over three decades ago, towards the end of my teenage years.

Of course there was another possibility that would let us sit next to each other on that day, my penultimate day in Vietnam. What if the plane became narrower in the back, as many airplanes do, and there was no room for the middle seat? My friend would get his window, and I my aisle, and we'd still be sitting next to each other. But an Airbus 330 doesn't narrow down to such an extent, and even if it did, our seats were not in the back of the aircraft, although they were closer to the rear than the front.

But this possibility did not strike me. Which was just as well, for if it had, it would have offered a glimmer of false hope, a momentary one, before being snatched away by disappointment.

Then I had an epiphany. All I had to do was swap seats with the intruder in our midst. Of course any passenger in his right mind would relinquish his middle seat in a heartbeat for an aisle. How could this simple solution have eluded me? Why, oh why, had I agonized over something so trivial?

Boarding time came and went, but there was no sign of the plane at the gate. Maybe it was there but we couldn't see it in the dark. Oddly enough, the flight had two flight numbers, even though it was not code shared with another airline. Both flight numbers were for Vietnam Airlines flights, something I had never seen before. Even more strangely, the flight had two boarding gates, one for the flight with one number, and the other for the other. First the odd seat numbers, and now the odd flight numbers. Things were getting curiouser and curiouser.

To all intents and purposes it appeared to be a full flight. Throngs of Koreans milled about in the waiting area, talking excitedly to each other. The Europeans were more sedate, as were the Vietnamese and other Asians. I looked for Indian faces, but in vain, and unsurprisingly so.

When our gate opened a quarter of an hour after boarding time, one of the many secrets was revealed. We hadn't been seeing things when we didn't see the plane; it was indeed absent. It was parked not at the gate but a short way away on the tarmac. Which was understandable, as Dalat's airport was a small one. And gleaming in the darkness were two flights of stairs, one in the front and the other in the rear.

We entered the plane through the rear door, unlike most of the other passengers who were fixated to the front door like bugs to a glowing lamp.

And lo and behold, another surprise was in store. There were two passengers in our row – a man and a woman, elderly, European, sitting in the two aisle seats across the aisle from each other. I couldn't believe my luck. The unthinkable had happened. The woman had read my mind and swapped her middle seat with mine. She must have sure possessed some ESP!

A wave of relief swept over me. I had been saved the bother of asking a stranger for a favor. My friend and I could sit next to each other and I could comfort him all I wanted and whisper in his ears to my heart's content.

I looked up at the frame below the baggage racks for the seat signs. There was a large sloping symbol, followed by the letters GED. I was taken aback. Something was not right. Who would have thought the sign would pour cold water on our parade?

"Our seats are G and E," I told the woman, staring uncertainly at the two vacant seats.

She got up immediately. "G is the window, and E is the aisle," she snarled, with a brusqueness, a contempt that caught me off-guard and led me to suspect she was French – a suspicion that was we later confirmed when we overheard her talking to her travel companion. She stepped aside and waved us in, and not gallantly.

Confusion was written all over my face even though my desired goal had been achieved. I motioned for my friend to take the window seat and eased myself into the middle seat. "What on earth happened to seat F?" I wondered off and on throughout the thirty minute journey while taking breaks from telling my friend all about the mundane minutiae of the flight.

Only days later did it strike me that the letter F does not exist in the Vietnamese alphabet, so G does indeed follow E. Shame on me for not realizing it, despite having learned the alphabet and a few Vietnamese words in the days before my trip to the country.

The sloping symbol preceding the G was a picture of a window, although I didn't understand it at the time. Perhaps I would have latched on to the missing F if the letters had been reversed to appear in the correct order, DEG. Or perhaps not; perhaps it would have confused me to a different degree.

But I have no one to blame but myself. If anyone made so callous a mistake, such egregious an error, it was me. Or rather, I.