Just Imagine

Just imagine this: you're sitting in your assigned plane seat. It was an exhausting business trip. You're glad to be returning home. These business trips are a right royal pain in the backside, but you've got a job to do and travel is a big part of what you do as a business executive. You're thinking how good it will be to get home, see your wife and children, feel comfortable, even though you're jet-lagged. But business is business and it takes you all over the world; in this particular instance, to India. And back again.

You don't even want to think about what your jetting about is doing to the environment, since you do have a conscience, after all. You're sick of eating food you're not all that familiar with; it's not even remotely close to the kind of Indian food you've been accustomed to eating back home in London. You're fed up with having to remind yourself continually of what you can safely eat or drink, and what you may not - not being so dreadfully fond of prolonged and rather painful stays in the loo.

And although India is such a booming place offering opportunities to conduct business on a scale not even remotely similar to what you experienced a mere two years earlier, you're fed up with viewing all those indicators of obvious wealth juxtaposed with children begging on the streets. Heaven knows, no country stands out as a beacon of righteousness when it comes to looking after its most vulnerable, but what you've seen and heard of while in India makes you glad to leave it. Until the next visit.

You're just about ready to nod off to sleep. You're in business class, you thank your lucky business-affiliated plenitude, plus the fact that there are empty seats, one in fact right beside your own, affording you the additional pleasure of a sprawl. And then suddenly, there are two stewards, ferrying a passenger down the aisle and before you know it, the elderly emaciated-looking woman is seated directly beside you. Good thing you gathered yourself back into your own seat as they were proceeding down the aisle.

The woman doesn't look well. And little wonder. It appears she has succumbed to that very same life-long disease that imperils us all. You turn half-sympathetically to the now-departing stewards, who, having seen the woman safely to her seat are withdrawing their presence wordlessly. You kind of wonder why, in mid-flight, the seat has suddenly been claimed. So you kind of 'ahem' to their departing backs, causing them to turn back toward you, in a strange unison. That's when they half-whisper that she is dead.

That's when the shock sets in. That's when you are informed by the sweat-browed steward who has remained beside you, speaking in a confidentially-low voice that the woman just suddenly expired, and the cabin crew, sensitive to the situation, wanted to place her somewhere where the rest of her family could grieve around her, in some semblance of privacy. You protest that you are a sensitive human being too, that you have some rights of privacy too, don't you? Why beside you?

The seat, sir. The empty seat. But seats were found for the other family members, you protest weakly, why couldn't one of them be seated beside you? That's how it goes, sir. We have problems like this infrequently, but we have to deal with them, when passengers expire in flight. Be reasonable, sir, we cannot, after all, place the deceased in the galley, can we? Or blocking an aisle, or the exits, now can we?

Sorry for the inconvenience, sir. Be a good sort and just lie back, try to sleep.

You vow never to fly British Airways again.