My Special Powers

After much introspection and recalling past events I have reaffirmed my previous hunch - that I have hidden powers. You may think I am talking about psychic visions into the future or the ability to read minds. No, nothing as mundane as that. It is a very special ability – to exude some sort of strange energy that will make sure that something out of the ordinary will happen, usually of the strange and unpleasant kind, especially, whenever I am travelling. Here are some examples to illustrate my point.

I have tried boarding a plane only to be told that the flight was delayed until the next day –because the pilot was missing.

A flight I was to take from Frankfurt to Singapore was delayed indefinitely because of a freaky storm. Hundreds of flights had been cancelled and then there was a bomb scare because of an unattended backpack on the floor. I just happened to be right next to it.

A flight to the Maldives which I was to take from Kuala Lumpur was delayed till the next day because the plane had to stop at Colombo and the airport was closed because it had been bombed that very night!
The flight I was to take home from Bangkok was cancelled indefinitely because the airport had been taken over by thousands of Red Shirts who wanted to bring down the government.

You may think this is a feeble attempt to let everyone know how well travelled I am but believe me it is much bigger than that. What I am trying to do here is to establish the possibility that somehow, whenever I am supposed to travel, something weird will happen.

Take the latest gem. Recently, when I was just about to resign myself to a long, grueling journey, contorting my body to accommodate it in a seat meant for midgets, finding the right point of placing the pillow so that I could semi sleep through the whole ordeal, the most unexpected thing happened.

I could hear someone sobbing from the row of seats next to me. It was a Middle Eastern –looking (sorry for the racial profiling) man sobbing his heart out while the woman next to him was trying her best to soothe him. He started cursing loudly, trying to get up with his sister begging him to sit down. He wanted the crew to open the door so he could jump out! Sometimes even I feel like that but this guy was serious.

I realised that my better half who had been in one of the seats had disappeared. Later I learnt that he had decided to flee the scene after the man kept repeatedly asking what film he was watching, not being satisfied with the answer.

Suddenly another man came from the front and started shouting at him. Now this man's wife came down to drag him back – she too was shouting. This was the last straw for the cabin crew and it took four crew members and a passenger to physically restrain the crying man and tie his hands at the back. The other man too had to be hauled away back to the seat. The rest of us were dumbfounded. The man was under the influence, it was clear, though it could have been more than just alcohol.

While the hallucinating man kept shouting for the door to be opened, I realised uneasily that my daughter and I were right next to the emergency exit. All I could do was pray that he would not see it. Thankfully he didn't. But it was an interesting way to land in London, with the man, trying to stand with both hands tied behind the back, screaming and sobbing and his sister trying to gag him with her scarf. When we did land guess what – we had to sit tight until three British cops wielding guns and walkie-talkies and in bullet-proof vests, came along to drag away the man and get statements from other passengers.

I have to admit that the adrenaline rush this bizarre incident produced did in fact help to fight the monotony of the flight. So, in a twisted way, my special powers had done something positive –given my co passengers something a lot more exciting than the regular in-flight entertainment.