My first air travel

The very first time I flew by an airplane was when I was in my early twenties. I was in my first job and was asked to travel from New Delhi to Chennai (then Madras).

This was also pretty exciting for me because this was a journey of almost 3 hours by air, and I felt quite important.

As I started preparing, I realized I had no suitcase or luggage rack.

My mom dug through our stores and came up with an old, brown-colored attaché which had a disinterested lock and a reluctant zip. It was a familiar artefact, one that likely came over with Mom when she had got married. As such, it was older than me and deserving of appropriate respect and consideration.

For a lock, it had a kind of floppy clasp that clicked into a recess, and this, together with the zip formed the defense of the thing.

And of course it had no wheels.

It did not matter much to me… I was young and packed a 3-days’ worth of stuff and was ready.

But where to go…? On the day of travel, there was confusion as to which airport (Delhi then had two) was the flight supposed to be from… I was embarrassed to ask someone in my office… anyhow this was sorted out and I was in my way.

Deposited at the Indian Airlines terminal, I found my way to the check in counter and got myself checked in.

I was now free to pass away the spare time, as keeping with Indian middle-class values, I had reached grossly early.

I dawdled in the lounge, not sure if my expenses would cover tea and snacks. The brown attaché sat on the floor next to me, like a reluctant and somewhat irritated relative who is being made to take a journey against his wish!

A young man who sat nearby looked at me interestedly. “Why don’t you check in your bag?” he asked. “Look, I have checked in all my stuff, and I am now free!”

You see, I had no idea that luggage could be “checked-in”, so to speak. And even if I had, I was not going to do it! To me, the act of handing over my brown attaché case would have been akin to abandoning an aged aunt at an old people’s home… God only knows what might have happened.

I stuck close to my sullen bag…

And of course, when the time came to board, the attaché had to be accommodated in the overhead. I forgot to mention that besides having a misbehaving zip and a limp flap, the whole bag was made of some extremely soft and pliant material, which made it behave more like a sack of sand, than a formal gentleman’s portmanteau!

Well, to cut a long dosa short, I reached Madras, and then the hotel that my office had booked for me.

This was an establishment called “Greames International”. Situated (naturally!) on Greames Road, this venerable edifice was a neat, slim brownstone building. It was non-pretentious, but cheerfully busy, and while it did not boast of “star” items like a swimming pool, or billiards table, it did have a “Tiffin Room”.

As I checked in at the reception, irresistible smells of dosas, idlis, sambhar and other mouth-watering savories wafted through the lobby…

I was told that the ‘tiffin room’… aka the dining room, or, coffee shop, was one level directly above the reception lobby.

I was smitten with this culture in Madras of having “tiffin” any odd time you felt like it. A tiffin could be anything from a hot, soft, white, fluffy idli to a thali with 7 or 8 small side dishes surrounding and mothering a mound of steaming white rice.

Prior to visiting Madras, my encounters with South Indian food had been limited to the dosas we used to eat at Evergreen, the big fast-food place in Delhi.

These tiffins were as different from those dosas as the Taj Mahal would be as compared to a humble shack!

It was heaven!

My room was clean, though not very big, had an attached bath, and overlooked Sindhoori Hospital across the street.

The Sindhoori Hospital and Greames hotel had a symbiotic relationship… this hospital was famous throughout the State for various medical specializations, and people came from all over, for treatment. Almost all of their relatives, as well as patients waiting for their appointments, and also recuperating, stayed in Greames Hotel.

Madras was a magical, colorful, intriguing place for me.

The office where I needed to work, was about a KM from Greames Hotel, and every morning, as I walked from Greames to my office, I passed small eateries on the roadside with incredible smells… I discovered how simple dosas without any seasonings or supplementaries are eaten and consumed for breakfast… I found that Idlis are more often eaten with something called ‘Gun Powder’, and the north Indian system of having 2-3 chutneys and sambhar was not de-rigueur!

And then I discovered the unlimited banana leaf meal… something that must have been invented for the Gods!

Madras was full of restaurants offering these BLMs… essentially, they are like communal eating joints… one goes and sits and get a neat, green banana leaf washed and dried in front of you. And then the procession starts! If you are a vegetarian, even in the humblest of these places, you are likely to get at least sambhar, rasam and 2 veggies, besides salad, curd and poppadum and of course the ubiquitous rice! I think I put on several KGs during that visit!

I was also totally enchanted by the auto-rickshaws (3-wheeled taxis): in Madras they were primarily driven by large jocular men, wearing checked shirts and whitish lungis, but bare feet!

The notion of driving a motored vehicle without shoes was simply outstanding and inspiring to me! To top that, these Auto-rickshaws which were open from both sides (no doors, you just kind of stepped in) had large music systems fitted in, blaring out raucous Tollywood music! Delhi’s autos, which I was used to were driven by and large by morose, bored looking guys, who wore a standard uniform, with slippers or shoes and had no music. These spiffy auto-rickshaws did have meters installed by the city management, but they all preferred to negotiate an amount… in all my 7 days there, I hardly saw anyone pay anything by the meter… it was a happy, conjugal relationship that harmed no one (except perhaps the city mandarins!)

My work in Madras required me to visit a venerable publishing institution, which owned several popular newspapers, primarily in Tamil. I was then working on developing Tamil language GUI and fonts and needed to consult the veterans in this institution about linguistic and technical nuances. This was an enormously important and sensitive topic, as Tamilians are justly very proud and protective of their language. To build software for Tamil was a big task, and I was proud to be a part of it.

During my spare time, I took to walking around a bit… Greames Road, I found, was quite near Mount Road, the main artery of commercial Madras. And here, to my utter delight, I found something rarer than a blue elephant: an original Higgin-Botham’s, right on the main Mount Road.

As the story goes: An English librarian named Abel Joshua Higginbotham established Higginbotham's after reportedly arriving in India as a British stowaway. The captain of the ship ejected him from the ship at Madras port. In the 1840s, he found employment as a librarian with a bookstore named Wesleyan Book Shop run by Protestant missionaries. However, the store suffered heavy losses and the missionaries who ran the business decided to sell their shop for a low price. Higginbotham purchased the business, set up his own store and called it "Higginbotham's" in the year 1844. Higginbotham's is, and was, therefore, India's oldest bookstore in existence. It soon gained a reputation for quality. John Murray, in his Guidebook to the Presidencies of Madras and Bombay in 1859, describes Higginbotham's as the "premier bookshop of Madras”. In March 1859, in a letter to Lord Trevelyan, the then Governor of Madras wrote:

Among the many elusive and indescribable charms of life in Madras City, is the existence of my favorite book shop 'Higginbotham's' on Mount Road. In this bookshop I can see beautiful editions of the works of Socrates, Plato, Euripides, Aristophanes, Pindar, Horace, Petrarch, Tasso, Camoyens, Calderon and Racine. I can get the latest editions of Victor Hugo, the great French novelist. Amongst the German writers, I can have Schiller and Goethe. Altogether a delightful place for the casual browser and a serious book lover.

I spent many happy hours browsing through the books and simply staring rapturously at the venerable old building!

I loved my first air trip to Madras… due to it being a much simpler time, and due to a happy concatenation of circumstances, I was given a set of experiences I have cherished all my life.