Stealing Air Bags in the Air

PIA officially means ‘Pakistan International Airlines’, unofficially, it means ‘Pain In Air’. And there are lesser names attached to it. Let me relate a few incidences.

Long time back when I was only a bubbling teenager (13 something), I did something that would later shame my parents and impress the airport customs men. I had known from the very start of my conscious life that there is some sort of an interesting air bag down there beneath every passenger’s seat. And I had also known that it is used when by some misfortune the plane decides to land on water rather on land. You can inflate it, as the airhostess shows you every time you fly, and then jump in the water. This time, I wanted those interesting air bags, after all I had paid my fare to PIA and I deserved something more than water and biryani. So, when the plane took off, I went underground to investigate the possible theft. Besides me was my father and I told him my evil intentions. I must have looked a mouse to him, out there checking some cheese underground. I read the instructions that you find in the seat’s pocket placed with the vomiting bag. The instructions were clear and pictorial: pull the string and you shall have the bag. Something to that effect. And I pulled the string only to find that something had fallen with a bang. With a swift hand I pulled the bag up, looked at it with an eye of a keen ornithologist and went down again, this time to attack the bag under my father’s seat. Now, I had two of them. Lovely bags sealed with a not-so-clear plastic cover. I dare not open that in front of ever suspecting woman what we call airhostess. After some thorough pondering and some insightful thinking, I went down again to calculate the possibility of attacking the other two bags, this time of the front seat. I was sure that I could. But my father objected to it. He told me quite matter-of-factly that two were more than enough, and in any case I was not going in water. I did not like that nagging, determined I dived and pull two more strings and came up with my prize. Now, there was another, more glaring problem, that of safe passage for the four bags. And it was going to be tough. PIA is known for everything from violence to head on collision. I did not want any. I wanted my bags. This flight was soon to land in Islamabad. The dilemma was overwhelming. With the cunning reserved for foxes, and with planning of shrewd spider, I finally was able to pack those bags and walk off the aircraft without any trouble i.e. without any detection.

Once in my cosy hotel, I soon had another, greater problem at hand: how will I manage to take these four bags back to Karachi on my return flight. That wasn’t going to be easy. I packed these four bags as nicely as spider wraps silk around its prey. The modern detection machines are too good for that, but lets try, I would have told myself at that burly, strange hour.

At the airport, I found my bags caught with blue uniformed men approaching me like sharks do when they find something to eat. One of the men asked me that he had detected some pipes in my bag. Amused and confused, I told him that I had no pipes. Infuriated, he nevertheless ordered me to open my bag. My father knew that trouble was ensuing. The flight could get late, or worst we might be detained. Bad things have a way of their own. And bad dreams can appear at airports.

I opened my bags and told the men in blue that these were the bags that I had got from the airplane in my previous flight. There are four of them, I told him as if this was the most natural thing in the whole world. Horrified beyond anything, I was reprimanded from stealing from national airlines. I was starting to feel like a monkey who had just gulped down four big bananas from a fruit walla, and who had been caught red handed, as it were. The heat was killing me, and the looks in the eyes of to-be-fellow passengers was too much to bear. You don’t want to get insulated at Islamabad airport, there are better places for that.

When it was inevitable that something bad would happen, my father, as if he was some djin from Baghdad, split opened his wallet and out came a card that would have looked a certain fossil to Darwin at British Columbia. That card had a name of certain gentleman who was something very very important. I judged this by the face expressions of the men in blue, who were soon in their boots when they read and re-read the name. All the honesty vanished. Now, the only demand and that too negotiable was that I would be allowed to take only two of the four air bags with me. Mind you, they were all stolen. And, I could have charged at them but for the time which had passed like anything. We were getting late.

With two air bags gone my baggage looked a bit odd – and light. I wasn’t frustrated. I had expected worse treatment. I had got a better deal. My father, later, reminded me that the card saved the day. Had there been no card, we would certainly have been lingering in the airport of Islamabad for hours at end. In the end, I was glad to find be at home in Karachi, but not before I had attacked the PIA bathroom and picked everything I possibly could