In line I struck up a conversation with a fellow passenger, whom I ended up sitting next to for the flight. He turned out to be Parimargan Nagi, a professional chess player who recently reached the rank of international grandmaster at the youngest age ever – 12. He is still in high school and so has not fully launched his chess-playing career. We had a delightful conversation about Muslims in India; my copy of Diane’s dissertation serving as a conversation piece, and we also chatted about chess. I have not played much chess since high school.
The flight left Frankfurt about a half hour late and arrived in Delhi at 11:00 pm. I decided to hang out at the airport. By coincidence Diane D’Souza and her companion Art, whom I had just met in Amsterdam, were traveling to Delhi on another flight that arrived at 1:00 am on Saturday December 19, so we met up and chatted for the few hours until we checked into our respective onward flights. My flight to Guwahati, in the Northeast state of Assam, left at 8:45 and arrived at 11:00 am. I was the only non-Indian on the flight.
My friend Zovi had sent me an SMS that there was a state-wide protest strike scheduled in the neighboring state of Meghalaya, so I was not sure how to continue on to Shillong, the capital city of Meghalaya and my destination. There is no airport in Shillong, so the options were a three or four-hour bus or taxi or a thirty-minute helicopter service. I initially inquired about the helicopter, but it was fully booked. But a few minutes later, the ticket person came running after me to tell me that there were in fact seats available, because some passengers had cancelled their reservations due to the protest strike. So I got a ticket for the 12:30 flight to Shillong.
I began to get concerned about what I was getting myself into when I and another clueless non-local turned out to be the only passengers on the seven-seater helicopter. But the flight went as scheduled, and there proved to be nothing untoward going on in Shillong.
I took a local bus into the bus station, where my friend Zovi met me. She took me to the Presbyterian Church of India building, where she works, and we discussed lodging options. There was a guest room at the PCI building, but because there was no food available, she thought that the nearby Best Holiday Inn was a better option, so we went there and I checked in at 5:00. I spent the rest of that evening and night getting caught up on sleep.
The Presbyterian Church of India building in Shillong
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