Lost in Flight

Last summer, I went back to Karachi, Pakistan after nine years. The only reason I went is because my  mother was very sick. I felt massively nauseous for two weeks after I heard about my mother’s illness and then, once the nausea cleared, I realized I had to head back home which led to a new wave of nausea on my part. Nausea is my body’s way of coping with extreme stress and anxiety. Doesn’t bode well for me if we all still lived in the jungle with real predators, “oh look, there’s a predator coming towards me to kill me. I’ll just sit here for a while and feel nauseous!"

I packed up my two little sons and my husband took us to the airport in Chicago. I hate goodbyes so it was especially aggravating to me, that on that particular day, my husband decided we would be ticketed if we went even slightly over 65 mph because of all the new, jazzy signs saying “radar enforced” on I-94, designed exactly to scare the living daylights out of people like my husband. It was a long, slow ride to the airport with many impatient drivers giving us unfriendly hand gestures. Thankfully my sons didn’t notice. My dear husband. He is a very patient man.

Our flight to London was fairly uneventful and just exhausting. That’s all really to be said about that. We spent two days there with my wonderful sister and then headed off to Karachi. And that’s when the “fun” began.

We stood in line for an hour before my brilliant sister realized there was a separate, much shorter line for people who had already checked in online. There were some people rudely laughing in the line. I didn’t pay attention to them at first and then realized they were laughing and telling everyone that the flight had been delayed five hours. I felt irritated by them….troublemakers…and then realized they weren’t joking. We were told the flight was delayed and were given “vouchers” for meals. No further explanations were given.

It was a long five hours with my two sons. Thankfully Heathrow’s terminal 3 is filled with shops and my sons spent the better part of their time playing with the toys in Hamleys while I sat outside the shop with all our luggage, feeling nauseous.

Finally, we got onto the airplane. It was a HUGE airbus with over 500 people on board. People were grateful to get into their seats and we all settled in for our six hour flight to Dubai. After about an hour of nothing happening except a baby crying pitifully behind us, the pilot announced that one of the passengers had decided he didn’t want to fly with this airline anymore and was getting off the airplane. As a result, they were going to have to open the cargo hold and take out his luggage which would take a while. And after that they were going to have to account for everyone’s hand luggage on board as a security precaution.

I felt like crying, but it was one of those awful moments when I realized I was the mom and couldn’t break down crying. I looked at my two sons sitting peacefully next to me playing with their Leapsters. There were so beautiful and innocent and didn’t complain at all about anything. I felt massively sick to my stomach and quickly went to the bathroom that was right by our seats. In the bathroom, I had two very sudden thoughts. First, I realized I was experiencing my very first panic attack. Second, I realized the baby was still crying and it was adding to my anxiety. WHY WOULDN’T SHE STOP CRYING?

I sat for a few minutes in the bathroom and tried to breathe deeply because I felt strangely strangulated. I realized I could not give in to this panic attack. I hadn’t eaten and slept for days and I think my body was starting to break down. I got up with great resolve, burst out of the bathroom surprising a stern looking man who was reading a newspaper upside down, and went to find that crying baby.

I walked up to the mother and guessed that she was Pakistani. I asked her, in Urdu, if everything was okay. She looked so tired. Her baby was just crying and crying and crying. I think she had tried everything and had now given up. I realized they must have had to wait for five hours at Heathrow too. She looked up at me and said in Urdu, “she just won’t stop crying. I don’t know what to do.” I asked her if I could hold her baby. She gratefully gave her to me. I took this little strange baby girl, held her close to me and started walking up and down the aisle gently patting her back and making shoosh-shoosh noises. Good thing my little boys used to be so fussy and gassy back in their baby days. I knew exactly what to do. And miracle of all miracles, the little baby stopped crying. I felt like we were helping each other, somehow. She needed me as much as I needed her. It took the attention away from my nausea and I instantly felt stronger. The poor mother got up and asked if she could go to the bathroom while I held her baby. I felt so sorry for her. She had needed help but couldn’t speak any English and didn’t know how to ask for help.

A couple of passengers looked up at me and smiled gratefully. My sons looked at me in surprise and my oldest asked where I got “that” from. I explained she was a baby girl and not a “that” and he seemed satisfied with the answer and thankfully didn’t ask any more questions.

I returned to my seat after the baby had fallen asleep and gone back into her mother‘s tired arms. We finally took off, eight hours behind schedule. I thought I could now rest and get mentally ready for Pakistan. But it was not to be.

About an hour into the flight a man sitting two rows in front of us suddenly started crying. I thought jokingly, he is crazy. He’s probably a suicide bomber and is going to detonate an explosive device on all of us. I was still wondering what on earth made me think of the word “detonate,” when the man started screaming as if he was in pain.  My children were blissfully unaware of the disturbance, thanks to their headphones. A few stewardesses came over and spoke to him in Arabic. I had no idea what was going on. I grabbed a steward’s sleeve as he walked by and asked him what was happening. He told me the man had had too much to drink and wouldn’t accept no for an answer when they refused to give him more alcohol.

I realized that, he, too had been waiting at Heathrow like the rest of us. He probably started out drinking. And then he drank some more. And then a friend might have called him over and asked him to share a drink. And then, he might have walked over to one of many pubs in the terminal and had a few more….you got it…drinks! All this while I was watching my boys playing with a talking monkey in Hamleys!

They managed to calm the drunk man down. He then promptly passed out for the rest of the flight and that was the end of that. So here we were in the middle of--okay I had no idea where we where. We were in the middle of London and Dubai. I felt totally trapped. I guess I was trapped. I took a few deep breaths again (thank goodness for yogic breathing exercises) and I helped my sons eat their dinner and then we all settled down to sleep. I thought to myself, things have to calm down now. Right? What else could possibly happen? Famous last words.

A woman two rows behind us suddenly screamed “Help! We need help!” and even though more than half the people in the cabin immediately woke up, she felt compelled to let out a shrill whistle. For a moment I marveled at the shrill-ness of the whistle--I have never been able to whistle with my fingers in my mouth like that-- and then watched as five stewards/stewardesses crowded around her almost instantly. I think her companion had suddenly fainted. This very tall, good looking steward gently slapped the companion’s face and told everyone to back away and give her some air, with a little more fanfare than was necessary. We all stared in silence. It took a few moments or perhaps it was less than that, but the woman came to. She looked a little shocked and a little sick. But she settled down and things were finally quiet.

I spent the rest of the flight, wide awake, unable to do anything but somehow getting fixated on a movie the guy in the seat right in front of me was watching. It was sub titled and I ended up watching the whole thing from his screen. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to put my own movie on. I even got a little impatient at him when he blocked my view to take off his shoe! It was a horribly disturbing, Hindi movie about a serial killer. Just what I needed.

We got to Dubai and it was wonderful to get out at this shopping mall they call an airport. It was glowing with lights and duty free shops. They had luggage carts one could use. Imagine that, Heathrow! And free strollers for kids. Heathrow, are you listening? I still couldn’t eat. Still felt nauseous. But it was good to stretch our legs and get my exhausted kids some food.

Luckily our final flight to Karachi left Dubai on time. It was going to be a shorter flight, thank goodness. We were almost home. We all fell asleep. I woke up when the pilot was announcing that we were about to land in Karachi. I stared out the window onto the rapidly approaching ground and saw those familiarly ugly prickles of dessert grass scattered on the rugged landscape and burst into tears. We were home. Home! After nine years! And the prickles of grass! They were so amazingly beautiful!

Thankfully my children were still sleeping. I am not one of those people who can cry gently with a single tear trickling down my cheek. I cry loud and hard with my body shaking uncontrollably. And I don’t cry very often. I was grateful to be sitting at the very back of the airplane. A little girl who had been watching me with her mouth hanging open now began to throw up into a bag her astute mother had produced out of nowhere in the nick of time, and with the gross sounds of her gagging, and the pathetic sprigs of grass staring at me from the landscape below, we landed in Karachi.

If you haven’t found all this to be deathly boring, stay tuned for more of my trip to Karachi and how this all leads to my identity crisis which is the reason why I started this blog in the first place.
And one more thing, may your travels be less eventful than mine!