My terrible, no-good, non-stop, overfull Emirates flight

Photo credit: clipart.com.

By Haroon Moghul

All of what happened below is true.

Not all of it is the fault of Emirates Airlines.

But it is not true, unfortunately, that the U.S. Interstate Highway System was designed so military aircraft could take off or land nearly anywhere in our great country. Though it might be true that Dubai’s principal automotive arteries were designed with Airbus A380s in mind. Those are some epic highways—really, we’re still calling it Shaykh Zayed Road?—and those are some epic airplanes.

I know, because I was trapped on one for fourteen hours.

I’d extended my stopover from Islamabad to visit friends, take advantage of 75 degree weather, and not necessarily in that order. Bad idea when you’re running on empty, deprived of sleep and facing a 02:30 departure time. To make things worse, midnight came and went, my friends—were they really?—assuring me I had plenty of time to get through the airport. ‘Be there by 1:00,’ they advised. ‘But boarding’s at 1:40,’ I worried.

An international flight. To America. It was justifiable.

Except they were right. DXB was easy breezy. The airplane, on the other hand. Boarding a superjumbo in a part of the world where lines are only formed in the event of prayer is a dicey proposition; given that this was not prayer, standard Muslim traffic patterns apply: Every point of interest becomes the Ka’ba. We come at it from all sides and clamor to be closest, running over anyone and anything in our line of sight, like brief physical contact with X means enduring Prophetic company in level of heaven Y.

The only thing that kept me upright and awake during this migratory nightmare was the promise of what awaited in the mechanical cocoon.

On Delta, United, U.S. Airways, etc., by which I mean really any American airline, the passenger’s stuck like a sap staring at the back of the chair in front of her (bad), or maybe watching live daytime television (worse), or possibly asked to pay to watch one of six movies for roughly the amount she’d pay at a proper theatre. On a screen 1/100th the size. Headphones extra. Worst. Also: Eight peanuts, mildly salted, with anything more for more. Sometimes they only take credit card.  Other times they only take cash.

You can’t even get ripped off predictably.

On Persian Gulf airlines, however, one can measure flights by films, films upon films. In this case, since I hadn’t slept for nearly 36 hours, I anticipated fourteen hours to rest. Though I’d land at JFK early in the AM, I’d have the day open, shrugging off intercontinental travel squashed into a one-week span. Don’t put all your eggs in an aisle seat: I saw from the distance what no air traveler wishes to. A frazzled young mother in shocking pink shalwar qameez, a diminutive vested man I dearly hoped was her father, or at least a Hobbit, and (their) two young children, an adorably fat daughter maybe six months old, and an already impressively energetic three-ish year-old.

This ensured disaster. Comedy, too. Shortly after her son sneezed twice on me (‘we created all things in pairs’), which was only right after we’d sat down, the mother asked me to switch seats with her. The young boy frequently jumped up and down on the seatbacks ahead of us, so whoever was stuck in the middle two seats of a 3-4-3 configuration endured permanent non-natural turbulence. These were two children who’d make you think that, yeah, maybe the machines were onto something when they plugged in Morpheus and Trinity as batteries. They conducted themselves with a loudness near miraculous. Do you know how much sustained volume it takes to defeat the ambient noise in an airliner?

I’d not just give up the aisle, then, but be stuck between her and her unclear male relation, the(ir) two children passed back and forth over, across, under and through me. Which meant I politely declined.

We took off at 0300, and were meant to land at 0700 (Freedom Standard Time), but I didn’t get more than a few unsettled naps in. For one thing, the (grand)father’s preferred mode of engaging his (grand)son was to playfully scream at the child so emphatically that the whole plane sounded like a demented Urdu lesson from hell.  In that what’s worst about hell isn’t that you’re on fire but that you have no choice but to be on fire.

What are you doing. Nine more hours. Do you like this. No, beta, we are on a plane. What are you doing. No. No. No. Eight and a half more hours. Did you have to go to the bathroom? Are you done going to the bathroom?

What worsened the situation was the language barrier. Emirates proudly announces before every takeoff how many languages its crew speaks. All well and good, but 50% of the plane was desi, and probably always is, like the planet soon will be, bringing new meaning to Emirates’ slogan, ‘Hello Tomorrow.’ But apparently no Urdu- or Hindi-speaking staff was present in our subsection of this flying city. It took a full two minutes for the airhostess to ask if the man wanted chai, which should not even be a freaking question.

Maybe you can’t get every steward and –ess to learn every language you need, but hopefully key questions can be mastered—cultural competencies for the ease of your customers. How much more tea would you like? Should I bring tea hourly, or more frequently? No, we do not have a lota, but you’re free to improvise one, because someone already did based on what has happened to the aft restroom. Is that your child? Do you know where your child is? Please stop screaming. No, you, but also your child.

It did not help that, subsequent to this exchange, a young child stopped beside me and started vomiting. He missed me, but destroyed the carpet, and splattered regurgitated far more lamb tikka than I was served on the computer case of a Euro-American who had otherwise been spared the worst of this flight, thanks to his Bose noise-canceling headphones. Although I am not eager to make too many distinctions; within minutes of picking at breakfast, I knew I should not have. I have a stomach like the proverbial canary in the coal mine: I suppose my body is therefore the coal mine; I’m not sure what I’m doing underground, or where this is going analogically. Let alone theologically.

Thinking I’d get sick having a week of food to survive in Pakistan, it was the return trip to the United States that got me ill. God’s way of saying, check your stereotypes.Beta. That was the most I heard about Allah, however. On my last four Emirates flights, I did not hear the traveler’s prayer, the du’a as-safar, the Prophetic invocation every Muslim recites before commencing a journey. Four legs of a journey, quarters to the whole itinerary, as against zero mentions. Maybe, in a bid to become an even more global airline, we had to leave Emirati for anonymity. Maybe. Naturally, I queried Emirates, but received no answer, neither on Twitter, nor on e-mail.

I hope this isn’t the case. Everything else was the vagary of travel, the unavoidable randomness of globalization, the collision of generations and populations, the stupidity of scheduling a layover after barely sleeping for a few days. My faults. But I am tired of living in a world of extremes, where either we deny our Muslimness and flee from it, or we are forced to endure a religiosity so loud, so insistent, so omnipresent, that we do not have time to think. It’s like we can only live in one of two classes, although we are hurtled through space together, either down below in the noise, or up above in seclusion, all the while each pretending the other does not exist. Islam is a religion of the middle way, the economy plus I don’t believe is yet on offer.

Maybe tomorrow.

Editor’s Note: Haroon Moghul is the author of “The Order of Light” and “My First Police State.” His memoir, “How to be Muslim”, is due in 2016. He’s a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, formerly a Fellow at the New America Foundation and the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, and a member of the Multicultural Audience Development Initiative at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Connect with Haroon on twitter @hsmoghul. The views expressed here are his own.