Arrival

What do you do when you unexpectedly find yourself dumped in the centre of Singapore for a day with lightly smelly clothes and no forward planning? In my case, it was to walk out of my hotel (after a suitably bracing breakfast), pick a direction, and walk that way until I saw an interesting landmark then walk towards that.

The first recognisable structure I saw was the Marina Bay Sands building. I got as far as the waterfront next to the Esplanade Theatres, but stopped there as I would have to divert a long way to find a bridge to take me closer.

From there I wandered northish, until I stumbled across the famed Raffles Hotel. While I would have loved to pop in for high tea, this is not the sort of thing you can do without booking ahead, preferably by a couple of months, so I just wandered along the crisply painted white verandahs and ogled tchotchkes in their gift shop.

By now it was early afternoon, and Singapore’s infamous humidity was starting to take its toll, so I went back to the hotel to sit in my airconditioned room for a while. But the siren song of exploration was too much for me, so I walked over to the Fort Canning Park, virtually next door to the hotel, to take in the lush greenery and the heady scents of their spice garden. And then, after half an hour, it was back to the hotel to lie on the bed with the airconditioning cranked as high as it would go, as marching about Singapore in the mid-afternoon is about the dumbest thing a humidity-sensitive person can do.

By the time I’d recovered, it was time to grab my carry-on luggage and take a taxi back to the airport for our evening flight. There was even enough time to explore Changi a little, taking in the butterfly house, drinking a Singapore Sling in a bar, and generally being a mature, sophisticated individual who would never stoop to juvenile sniggering.

After our experience the previous night, we were absolutely scrupulous about presenting at the departure gate at the posted time. After some opaque shuffling, with uniformed staff wandering back and forth with no apparent aim, we were allowed to push our carry-ons through the security scanner and then board our flight as, from what we could see, the only white people interested in doing so.

Singapore Airlines doesn’t fly its aircraft to Coimbatore, our destination in India, but delegates the task to its budget minion Scoot. Judging by pleasantness of the flight, or rather the lack thereof, Scoot is named after that thing that dogs do when they have itchy anal glands. The seats are hard and cramped, the refreshments are extra, and the only entertainment system is listening to a baby screaming from across the aisle.

At least when we landed four hours later we were finally in India! Tired but relieved, we walked into the terminal and got into the immigration queue, noticing that we were still the only white people in the entire airport.

Indian bureaucracy is globally notorious, and Coimbatore’s airport was proof of that. Where Changi had online arrival paperwork you can complete on your phone, in this airport it was on little slips of paper… with no pens. While Changi had seamless biometric scanning that was almost invisible, at this airport they had an old webcam taped to a partition which had to be rebooted several times. And where Changi had professionally aloof immigration staff who all but silently ushered us through their stations, this airport had staff who struggled to even deal with us on a conceptual level.

“What is your purpose for visiting India?” one asked me.

“I’m on holiday, visiting some friends,” I replied.

“What friends?” the agent asked, slightly incredulously, as if to imply that I had no business having friends, least of all in her city.

“Family friends,” I responded, in a tone that I intended to remind her that the name and contact details of said friends where on the arrival slip I’d had to complete with a borrowed pen not five minutes earlier.

“And where are you staying?”

“With the friends,” I replied, now with a very pointed look at the arrival slip in her hand.

After a little more back and forth, with me being blandly inoffensive and her being mildly irked, I was allowed to pass through to the baggage carousel.

Which was empty.

It was now after midnight, and my sister, who’d made it through before me, was politely hovering while the baggage officer dealt with the three or four parties who were also missing their luggage. Once she’d reached the front of the little queue, she had to assist the officer to laboriously complete the lost baggage form (again, on paper, because India), providing answers to reasonable questions such as, “What brand is the luggage?” (Mine is from Kmart! It doesn’t have a brand!) and “What colour is the luggage” (I don’t know, I didn’t pre-identify the Pantone code! Grey? Silver? Pewter?), all while ignoring the fact that every bag was barcoded in Perth and should be instantly trackable through the Singapore Airlines system with the press of a button on the elderly computer that was sitting ignored on her desk.

So it was the middle of the night, we’d just flown for four hours on an airline named after a gross thing that dogs do, we had no clothes other than the by now stinky ones we were standing in, and our bags, with all of our clothes, toiletries and medications, were missing. After pointedly taking photos of the paperwork with our phones (just in case it, too, went missing), we exited the airport and were greeted by a pair of drivers sent by my parents’ friend, who tutted sympathetically and only winced slightly as we smeared our greasy selves into their pristine SUVs.

Like many well-to-do Indians, both my parents’ friend and his daughter had houses within a single family compound, and as we pulled through the first gate, where a uniformed guard smartly saluted us, I started to get my first inkling of just how well-to-do these people were. It was a little hard to see much in the darkness, but I could see lush tropical gardens, big imposing buildings, and in an open carport, a row of six large cars: different colours, different body styles, but all Mercedes.

After two more gates, each with separate uniformed guards, we arrived at the daughter’s house. Or more specifically, her holiday house, since she lives in Singapore and only comes back to India a few times a year during school holidays so that her sons can see their grandparents. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

We were shown into a three storey mansion inspired by Ray and Charles Eames’ Case Study House No. 8, all polished terrazzo floors, glass walls, spectacular modernist artworks and Memphis School-influenced designer furniture. A polite housekeeper in a pink sari showed me up to my room on the first floor, which was bigger than all four of the bedrooms in my house combined, with a king-sized bed and its own ensuite bathroom. The magnificent modern oil painting hanging over the bed was larger than my car and probably more expensive.

I gingerly lowered my disgusting, sweat-stained body onto the exquisitely soft sheets and was asleep within minutes.