Send-off

Our final day in India was overshadowed with illness. The previous night, one sister had to retire during pre-dinner drinks, claiming nausea, then the other one had to leave mid-dinner, feeling faint. When my mother and I returned to the house we discovered that the first sister had diarrhoea and vomiting. During the night, my mother and my other sister had the same.

I had a little diarrhoea but nothing extraordinary or debilitating, and I felt pretty fine. We wondered if there’d been food poisoning, but it may have been something as simple as heat exhaustion from Cochin’s savagely hot, humid weather. Even Mr Fixit, when he turned up, admitted that he’d been so tired he hadn’t even had dinner the previous night, which is about as big an admission of weakness as he’d ever be prepared to make.

During the day we rallied enough to take part in a farewell Australian-style barbecue. Just like at home, this involved sitting in the garden with our alcoholic beverages of choice, chatting while a select male (in this case Mr Fixit) grilled various meats on the barbecue. The only real difference is that we didn’t serve ourselves, but instead engaged in one final battle with the servants as waves of chicken and fish and lamb and prawns and pork came off the grill and they took affront if we resisted any of it. At least we could blame the lingering fragility of our digestive tracts for our recalcitrance.

Meanwhile I took some photos of Delaware and Maryland in the garden, exploring the water lily troughs and the 300 year old Chinese bonsais.

Finally it was time to head back to the airport, with fond and slightly tearful farewells to The Boss and his staff, although in the case of the staff the tears may have been due to having to haul our extremely overloaded bags into the SUVs. At the airport, even the stony Mr Fixit teared up a little and hugged each one of us goodbye, but not before invisibly organising a couple of airport porters to push our luggage carts for us all the way to the check-in desks.

There was some sort of issue with our reservations, and the check in agent asked us to stand aside for half an hour while he investigated. Ten minutes later, one of our porters noticed us standing around and asked what the problem was, then, once we told him, scurried over to the check-in agent and within a few minutes, our issues were solved and our bags were tagged and sent for loading. The shadowy hand of Mr Fixit is at work even when he’s miles away.