The flight that threatened not to be..

"what?"
"yes sir, you heard it right. The flight was preponed because of bad weather conditions."
"Are you kidding me? Tommorrow morning you'll postpone it for the same reasons" I said suppressing my frustrated smile. "How can you prepone it and not let the passenger know?"

It went on for a while before the spicejet lady got me another ticket for the next morning at 7:00. Helpless I called up Manish and Bhaskar who had dropped me there to come back halfway and pick me up. After some loafing around we drove back to Bhaskar's place in Delhi's fog which seemed to be trying to beat its previous best.
Mist and fog had set their minds to keep my word with the spicejet lady.

Staying at Bhaskar's I struggled to get up at 5 in the morning to enquire about the flight status. With no surprises the flight was delayed by another 3 hours to fly at 10. So when we left again for the airport in much worse fog, Bhaskar was at his cursing best when he could not see anything in front. After bidding him good-luck for the drive back at 8 am, I wished myself better luck for the ordeal that was about to begin. What I saw inside rather suited to a railway station. People were jostling past each other with all the buzz in the air. I somehow contrived to get the boarding pass and as soon as I got past the security check the SpiceJet were further sorry for the further inconvenience caused by further delay of 2 hours. Yes, it's too further for comfort. So now I'd depart at 12 noon. This is when frustration mixed with anxiety started to creep in. Just like I had forgotten to ask the new boarding time spicejet as well managed to do the same.
Helplessly I settled somewhere in a seat. Luckily I was carrying few episodes of 'F.R.I.E.N.D.S' on my laptop which came to my much needed rescue for the next few hours. At 11 am, the laptop battery had enough of me and died down. I put off the earphones only to hear the last announcement for my spicejet SG201 flight. I ran for the boarding remembering Paulo Coelho's word from 'The Alchemist'
"when you desire something the whole world conspires to help you acheive it"
Afterall, SG201 was still alive to take a flight among the clouds unlike some of its siblings and cousins whose life support had been mercilessly(for the passengers) withdrawn.

I got into my seat in the plane and a horrible 70 minutes later realized that Mr Coelho couldn't be more wrong. The pilot and crew alike feigned to forget that the creature they were sitting in could fly as well. And this long wait made my hardened bottoms decipher the formation of metamhorphic rocks. Reading the "Use the cushion under your seat for floating" sign I wished I could do that.
Still gazing at the runaway, the ill-fated plane made an attempt to take off. But alas! 'twas only a warmup lap. I bet the pilot must've been one disciplined athlete in his younger days that he did that. Meanwhile a Gujarati contingent seemed to be enjoying their first flight. Any feeling remotely good had already distanced itself from me. So instead of enjoying their joyful cries I was sinking deep into irritation. Then the pilot finally realized and gave us a rough take off making the Gujaratis nonetheless more joyous amidst their cries of 'Bais Jaaoo'. The kids expressed themselves running down the aisle with air hostess running after them. "So early in your life kid, you don't get a nice looking girl running after you" I thought trying to amuse myself. Though one of them was made to sit down he kept fidgeting and shouting till he began to throw up. Now I found that along joy pity too had escaped me and I couldn't feel sorry for the kid.

"The flight is going through a bad weather, please keep your seatbelts fastened" announced the lady at an oportune moment.
"Oh, so you finally realized, huh!. By the way is it the flight or the future of spicejet she is talking about", I thought.

Interestingly spicejet tried to add a bit of spice to an already doomed recipe. The no-frills flight came up with some frills to make up. But in the hindsight it didn't seem like a good move. Kind of backfired. The food was as cold as the spicejet had been so far. "Better have some thought for food instead" I came up with another Chandler Bing like statement. "Why don't you now onwards start thinking of jet in your name" and another Bing-o!

One of Gujju group then took the empty food boxes and stoved them under the seat in front. The others followed in act. When the plane halted for a stopover at Ahmedabad, the Gujjus got out talking how they finally extracted out everything(I guess they were referring to sickness bag for the kid) in their very first flight.

The break did good to me. Change of passengers was a relief and we finally took off again for Bangalore.
Everything seemed okay till the lady dealt us with "Sorry for the inconvenience. We hope you had a good flight and would choose us again in the future".
I couldn't resist picturing a smirk crossing her face.

"Your sense of humour hasn't deserted you, m'lady?"
My riposte? Au revoir!