From Calcutta we brought a plane-load of mosquitoes to New Delhi, though the ones straying within my reach were dead on arrival. The Indian passengers seemed unaware of this plague and looked uneasily in my direction as I grabbed spasmodically at the air around me.
Like the internal airlines of several countries, Indian Airlines provide "free-seating". This magic phrase, with all its happy connotations and associations, means only that they will not go to the trouble of allocating seats on a seating-plan, and that the passengers must race each other across the airfield unless, content to accept the least popular seats - the middle ones of sets of three. During the day, the aisle seats allow the bored traveller easy access to the main aisle where he can wander up and down, chat with the hostesses and beguile some of the monotonous minutes. On a long night flight, the window seat offers the hope of a little sleep. The man in the aisle seat has the two inner-passengers kicking his kneecaps as they periodically clamber over him, and has his shoulder and head banged and buffeted by passengers blundering along the darkened aisle.
I had not been prepared to queue for half an hour by the departure gate and was left behind in the race for "free-seating", so that I was the middle of three; on my right a gentleman who had apparently, as the start of a lifetime addiction, imbibed garlic with his mother's milk, and on my left an Indian lady with a large-eyed, bare-bottomed little boy on her lap. In the intervals of mosquito catching, I smiled and winked at him. He rewarded me eventually by jetting a bright arching stream over me. His mother hastily, if pointlessly carried him off to the toilets. Across the aisle, a small English boy stared at me and then, in a loud, clear voice announced: "Mummy! That man's wet himself!"
New Delhi, the seat of Government except during the hottest months, is a spacious and well-planned city with many fine buildings. It is also a convenient jumping-off point for many tourist attractions, including the most famous of them all the Taj Mahal. For me, unfortunately, through shortage of time, it was merely the jumping-off point for Bombay.