The minute we stepped into the claustrophobic, stiflingly hot departure hall, a man asked us where we were flying to and pointed us to the British Airways queue and from then on we were just part of a shuffling line of weary humans going through various checks, rechecks and interrogations. I had both my hand luggage and my case checked but all they were concerned about was my trusty travel kettle that was inspected and passed as of no threat.

The departure lounge was packed and we couldn’t find seats near the B.A. gate so the rolling news being played on an overhead TV was in Hindi. We were still able to make out from the occasional subtitle that there had been a series of bombings, in the holy town of Varanassi where Mike and Brenda are spending a few days later in the week, and in Faisalabad which is a suburb of Delhi that we had driven through the previous day. Bombings and civil disturbance are rife in India and generally don’t get reported around the world and are quickly resolved but occasionally they target tourist areas. There had been several people killed in Ajmer a month previously when a very well known temple was targeted and road checks are frequent but this was the first time something had happened close by while we were there, all-be-it unknowingly at the time.

The plane was on time and the flight passed without event…just time to watch two episodes of Rebus (WHY do they change the storyline? Read the books by Ian Rankin, they are much better!), The Shawshank Redemption, Sliding Doors and an episode of Grand Designs, eat a couple of meals and stare out of the window at the snow topped peaks of Iraq as we flew over Tashkent, then on to Warsaw, Kiev and finally into Heathrow.

We had to wait half an hour as some plane or other was in our parking space but our cases appeared on the carousel as we stepped up to it and Martin was waiting for us at the arrivals barrier.

The roads home seemed curiously deserted. It was odd how the traffic stayed in lanes and used those funny little orange flashing things a lot, the lorries seemed curiously and boringly plain to look at and why wasn’t anyone sounding their horn????

And so we arrived at home to a welcome from the dogs and an almost fitted, fitted kitchen. Mary and I said our goodbyes and she started up her car for the first time in a month and drove off home to Somerset.

The sentimental bit

Later that evening, I stood looking at the stars out of the bedroom window and thought about India and the people we had met, Pushkar and TOLFA and the dogs who would be fast asleep in their pens. I was reminded of the closing scene of Local Hero where MacIntyre, who has been sent over from the States to a remote Scottish costal village to buy it up on behalf of the Knox Oil and Gas Company, opens the doors to his apartment, hears the traffic below and thinks of the village. The film ends in Scotland with a shot of a red phone box on the quay, ringing and ringing with no-one answering.

 I’d like to think that back in TOLFA, a dog woken from sleep by something it couldn’t quite pinpoint opened one eye and looked to see who was about, before settling back to sleep again.
But it probably didn’t.

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