The Lion, The Witch & The Rucksack
by Lynn Kilcline

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE - INDIRA GHANDI AND OUT

When we arrived at the not very international Indira Ghandi airport we intended to carry our two boxes of doorknobs and bathroom fitting as hand luggage. Brian was big and strong enough to make them look light and they weren’t particularly large.
Things were going well until someone woke up the airport manager and he decided to strut around taking an interest in all the passengers. We were two of the ones he decided to take an interest in, and after having checked in our luggage we were asked what we had in the boxes.
We explained and the manager insisted they must go in the hold. We did not dispute for one moment that he was right, but we doubted that we would ever see them again if they travelled that way. And if we did, they would not arrive in one piece. No amount of objections would sway him and we had to join a long queue to have the boxes
X-rayed. [They did not X-ray hand luggage so we could have travelled with bomb components as long as we had them in a handbag!]
We knew we would have some sport when the boxes went through the scanner and indeed we did.
I stood behind the guard as the packages went through and was able to watch the screen. Even though I knew their contents, when the towel rail and fittings went through, they looked for all the world like a machine gun.
It was great fun, especially when highly excited guards with guns opened the boxes. They could see that we didn’t have a machine gun stashed away, but I don’t think they could identify much of what we did have in that particular box, especially the toilet roll holder.
We’d had reasonable expectations of the departure lounge after Chennai but Delhi airport was a real dump. Dot had told us about the exorbitant prices for tea and coffee and she had not been wrong. Thankfully our aircraft was on time so we did not need to avail ourselves of the services.
It was illegal in theory to take Indian currency out of the country and the three Indian banks in the departure lounge gave such a poor rate of exchange that I would sooner have flushed it down the toilet - if I could have found a toilet that flushed.
We boarded the Emirates Airliner that was to take us to Dubai. We were on the first leg of our journey home.

We had undertaken an adventure into the unknown, survived, and had a tremendous time. We had learned a great deal about India
and its people, and learned a great deal about ourselves.
I had learned that I could endure far more than I ever would have though, and Brian learned that there was indeed life after football.
There was a big world out there and we were going to be seeing far more of it.
So watch out, world!