Dubai is the world’s most amazing — to employ that overworked contemporary adjective — travel hub. We spend several hours there at least twice every year and yet nothing ever seems familiar. Everything is new. I am reminded of the London cabbie who, fed up with his just-arrived American passenger’s bombast about things being bigger, better and newer across the Atlantic, hit back with a nonchalant “Wouldn’t know guv. Wasn’t there when I drove past this morning!” to the American’s “What’s that?” as Big Ben loomed ahead.
I am not a fan of instant history, copycat architecture or showy malls. But I do believe that Dubai airport, sprawling over more than 7,000 acres of what was once desert — bigger than Frankfurt where energetic airport officials rush around on bicycles — epitomises “Business Class redefined” as the ads proclaim. It raises comfort to a serene new height from the moment of arrival in the airline’s chauffeur-driven limousine (available in every city save Calcutta) to the last drop of liqueur served with charm and grace by air hostesses in fetching coat and skirt, chiffon flowing out of a jaunty little pillbox hat in token acknowledgement of a hijab, the uniform transforming races and religions into a single attractive tribe. The betrayal is all the more painful, therefore, when the carpet is suddenly pulled out from under the traveller’s feet, leaving him to flounder in the shifting sand. That is what befell my wife and me with nary a word of warning, explanation or apology as we flew recently from Calcutta to London.
The first intimation of something amiss was when our plane taxied to a halt in a remote dingy corner of Dubai’s runway instead of connecting with a brilliantly lit aerobridge bursting with wheelchairs and welcoming officials. Where were the wheelchairs that we had ordered in Calcutta and been repeatedly assured were waiting at Dubai? They are waiting for you in the airport, sir, promised the hostess. But we couldn’t get there without suffering the ordeal of clambering down a long and steep flight of almost vertical metal steps where the crutch I lean on was a huge hindrance, not a help. Can you manage, the air hostess asked solicitously? Is there an alternative? I ventured. There wasn’t. Unless I risked my neck clambering down, I might be stuck in that aircraft for all eternity. We had the London flight to catch in about three hours. Before that we were determined to relax in the special lounge that we knew from experience “explored a new level of comfort.”
Touching ground, we were toldto walk to the terminal building and pick up two wheelchairs at the door. When we got to the door, there wasn’t even a wheel in sight, leave alone acouple of wheelchairs. Go through that door, advised the doorman, and up, the wheelchairs are all waiting there. Up where? The first floor. Just there, he pointed. But how do we get there? The lifts are over there, he explained, indicating an altogether different direction. We found the lifts and got to the first floor from where passages flowed in every direction. But narya wheelchair in sight. No brightlights or welcoming signs either. Nothing in that empty shabbiness to support Dubai’s claim of handling the greatest number of international passengers in the world. Instead, two imperious men in nondescript uniforms stood sentry at a desk, occasionally deigning to throw a word of placation or reprimand to the beseeching crowd.
The optics had changed. First, not a single airline uniform with the chiffon spray was visible. They had all vanished. It was as if the airline that had flown us from Calcutta and accepted our money to deposit us in London had washed its hands of us in Dubai. Second, no one spoke English any longer. The two men at the desk stared stolidly if you addressed them in English. They responded grudgingly to Hindi; slightly less grumpily to Urdu. Third, the fulsome courtesy that is the travel industry’s global stock-in-trade had gone. Sentences no longer began and ended with murmured “sirs” and “ma’ams”. No ingratiating smiles. None of the ubiquitous “You’re welcome” that can get tiresome even though well meant. Fourth — and most important — the journey had suddenly turned into a favour bestowed on us by Dubai’s anonymous deities, not something we had chosen to buy.
It was like Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport before Dubai took over. Aeroflot flew from Calcutta then but despite doubly confirmed onward seats, one had to beg and plead with a stern-faced young lady at the Moscow transfer desk to be allowed to emplane for London. I suspect she was deliberately stern-faced to fend off hordes of young male Indians without reservations trying to date her. Sheremetyevo sold delicious Gaelic coffee. Its tie-up with Ireland’s Shannon airport meant English-speaking staff and lavish duty-free shopping. My son, then a small boy, once got lost in Sheremetyevo. Realising I had lost something but not knowing what, the cleaning women I collared in my panic used her master key to open every cubicle door and expose alarmed men in all stages of undress. But not Deep. He was gazing in rapture at a display of model MiG fighters.
Such frivolity is unthinkable at Dubai. We alone demanded the Business Class lounge. Other anxious passengers with less time just hoped they would make the connection. A man with an invalid companion murmured he had been promised a porter: he was stared into abashed silence. A Mauritius-bound Englishwoman wondered if her island was still above water. Everyone was ordered to walk. We walked. Glimpsing a man trundling a pair of wheelchairs, I rushed forward. The man trundled away regardless. A dozen wheelchairs were stacked against one wall. No attendants, they said. A dozen men lounged against another wall. No wheelchairs, we were told. When a door swung briefly open, I saw men and wheelchairs, plenty of both, inside. But they quickly banged the door shut. The occasional occupied wheelchair swept past us foot-sloggers with a very superior air.
Finally, led by a Hindi-only South Asian, we took a train to Terminal 3, supposedly the world’s biggest. I get confused between the walks we completed and the buggies we rode. But the miles that we covered must have been the most expensive on earth: after all, the premium price of our airline tickets included wheeled transport on the ground as well. Eventually, we reached Dubai’s mandatory security ritual, which is ludicrous for transit passengers who have already been through the mill. Not only that. Smart Singapore would laugh at the archaic checking that still obliges passengers to drag laptops out of cases, measure liquids in droplets, and shed jackets, shoes and belts. Singapore’s Changi won’t let me budge out of my wheelchair, inspecting the insides of my jacket pockets with what look like sensitised scraps of paper. I left behind my belt in Dubai and nearly lost my walking stick. My wife managed to snatch back her wristwatch before a madly efficient conveyor belt swept it away.
Enticing legends along that last stretch welcomed travellers “to the Business of living” and reminded the uninformed that “there’s a reason they call it Business Class.” But that reason we were not allowed to glimpse on Dubai’s hallowed ground. Nor in those three hours or so did we set eyes on a soul we could connect visibly with the airline. Had they discarded those hats and gone into purdah? Were they avoiding us? Had Business Class been abolished? We boarded another plane in an agony of uncertainty and recognised with immediate surging relief the saucy little pillbox hat thumbing its nose at the sedate hijab. We were home. But why had we been so cruelly abandoned? No one bothered to explain, let alone apologise.
