Upon realizing that I had a grand total of $78 among my checking account, my savings account, and cash, I decided that I would still take my long awaited trip to “The Fishy Room,” a gathering place in India for people with eating disorders (loosely based on an internet discussion board which I sometimes visit.) So I drove to the airport and approached the ticket counter.
“One round-trip ticket to Calcutta,” I said confidently to the Delta agent.
“That’ll be $78,” she replied. So I eagerly handed over the last of my money.
The plane was ordinary, and the flight was rather uneventful; however, when I arrived at the Calcutta airport, I was so awestruck that I forgot my black backpack on the plane in the overhead compartment. My black bag was my only piece of luggage and inside its front pouch was my boarding pass for the return flight. In my amazement, I forgot that I had luggage and began wandering around the airport to find the fishy room.
Finally, I saw a flashy sign above a curtain. I stood in front of the curtain, and it began to fall from top to bottom leaving an open space at the top where a gridiron began to lower (think entrance to a medieval castle inverted). When the grid iron had dropped low enough, I stepped over the rest of it into an entrance, which looked like the winding plastic slides in play places at fast-food restaurants. So I took a deep breath and hopped onto the slide, quickly spiraling downward and crashing off the slide into the fishy room, whose decor reminded me of a scene from the Disney movie Aladdin with the towers with the turban looking tops painted on the walls in fuchsia, purple, and other colors in that scheme. The fishy room was not an ordinary room; it was like a ball pit from a play place. I surfaced and began wading across the deep ball pit (the balls came nearly to my shoulders.)
I walked past a girl who said, “hi,” and then saw a few other people engaging in conversations. One American girl was speaking in English to an Indian girl who seemed utterly confused by the foreign language and stared blankly at the American girl. Suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten my bag on the plane and in a panic left the room to search for it.
Finally I had returned to the lobby of the airport, which looked like a receptionist’s area in a nice law, accounting, or engineering firm. I approached a uniformed man who looked like he could possibly be a pilot. I explained my predicament to him and asked him what I could do.
"Buy a new ticket," he said.
So I reached into my pocket and took out my Mastercard ~ only to realize that I could not charge the tickets because my parents did not know that I had spent my last seventy-eight dollars on a plane ticket to sneak off to Calcutta. Ahh, I would use my check card until it dawned on me that I had no money in the account.
"Is there any way that I can go onto the plane and just retrieve the bag?"
He said, “Um, sorry Ms., I’m a pilot for American Airlines, but if you go that way (he pointed to the right side of the room), you’ll see the Delta concourse. Maybe they can help."
The Delta concourse was really unexciting. There was only one gate with a flight departing for Indiana at 9:55 (AM/PM?) At the counter of the gate stood the grocery clerk from the movie You’ve Got Mail. She was wearing a vest that looked like it had been made from draperies from the late sixties/early seventies or possibly the ones from The Sound of Music. In the other half of the concourse, a group of women in their twenties were taking lessons for some new kind of dance which was a cross between hula and belly dance. Someone asked me to join the class, but I declined, saying that I had to find my luggage so I could return home. I started walking out of the concourse toward the ticket counter once more, accepting my fate of being stuck in a Calcutta airport.
And then the phone rang, waking me from this strange dream.
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