Given that my life is a veritable parade of ironically dramatic events, it made perfect sense that right after I wrote about my flight-phobia, I had to spend the next two days running around an airport!

Praneet, my cousin from Ohio, was flying to India for the first time by himself. He was taking a flight from Cincinatti to JFK in NY, and connecting to Air India there. He had 2 hours between the flights, so I figured I’d make the 3hr trip (using public transport) to go meet up with him and make sure he got onto the plane ok. Now, I wouldn’t go to such trouble for too many other people, but Praneet is a lot more than a cousin; he’s my little brother and since we both grew up together as only children, we were always each others replacement-siblings. I try to take my responsibility as a big brother seriously, so I am usually put aside my selfishness and laziness when it comes to him. I always have loads of fun when I go up to the sleepy old village in Ohio his lives in with his folks (he goes to Ohio State now, luckily for him), and the best part of last week’s trip was the night we spent getting drunk and rolling with laughter watching an all-night Scrubs marathon. Anyways, that’s pretty much the ‘aww’ story behind why I would give up a nice lazy Tuesday evening to spend a whole afternoon in dirty trains and subways to get all the way up to Queens to spend an hour making sure he go on his flight ok.

As is turns out, he ended up NOT getting on his flight ok. This is how it played out. His Delta flight from Cincinatti was supposed to have landed at 6:10pm, and according to the airport status screens, it did land then. So I figure I somehow missed him after he got off the plane, and rush to try and find him at the Air India check-in place, which is in another terminal. Ofcourse, JFK has a very convinient Air Train to travel between the terminals, whose use requires the mastering of a schedule/route map that make ancient Mayan treasure maps look like something Angelina Jolie could figure out while wearing figure enhancing lycra clothing. So after getting on two wrong trains, I finally end up at the right terminal and franctically start scanning the Air India area for a short brown kid with glasses. Usually, in most parts of America, this wouldn’t be such a hard issue, but since the terminal is filled with Indians, it was like looking in a hay-stack for one single strand of brown hay.

After running back and forth between the check-in counters and the gate where the flight was supposed to depart from, and managing to convince a airline personnel to check whether he had already boarded the flight, I was told that he hadn’t even checked in yet. Panic attacks. The flight was gonna leave in 30 mins, and this kid hadn’t even taken his boarding pass yet. I frantically call his parents to alert them of the situation, and finally find him nonchalantly trying to make a call at one of the phone booths. Apparently, although his flight has landed on time, Delta had trouble finding an open gate for them, and he had finally gotten off the plane at 7:15 pm. By the time he found his way to this terminal, Air India had closed the plane and he was stranded. Aaargh!

So we ended up spending the night in a Ramada which Delta graciously provided for him, along with two $7 meal coupons. Right. Pretty much all the food at the hotel restraunt came with a minimum price tag of $20. Such generosity. After an hour of lenghty deliberations with my exasperatingly non-trusting family, who were somehow worried that him and me would leave the hotel to spend a night in Manahattan (which, if we had come from a family with any sort of normalness about it, or perhaps no amount of desi-ness in it, we should have logically done, given that all he had to do was take the next evenings’ flight), and wanted my uncle from Edison to drive up all the way to JFK and get us home for the night. Somehow, we convinced them that we would behave and just stay at the hotel for the night, and agreed to wake up early and take public transportation back to NJ just so Praneet could say hi to the family here. Madness. So we spend about 6 hours going back and forth, becoming master’s of public transportation in the process; 5 modes of transportation were required: the hotel shuttle to the airport, the AirTrain to the MTA subway stop, the A subway to the WTC, the Path train to Newark Penn, and NJ Transit to Metropark. Madness. Mind-numbingly exasperating madness.

Yet, through all this, I actually had fun spending time with Chinni (as we all lovingly call him). I’d only gotten to spend a day with him last week, so I guess all this travelling together made up for some of the time. We checked out hot European tourists, ate bad Chinese food, dissed our family, ribbed each other about losing hair and pretty much made the best of the situation (well, making the best of the situation would’ve been actually showing him around downtown and hitting up a few clubs the night we stayed at the hotel, but still). We even ended up making use of the 2 lavish $7 meal vouchers to get a decent fried shrimp meal before he boarded the plane. Good company makes even the most tiring stuff seem not too bad, I suppose!