Wednesday, 23 February 2022 | Krishan Kalra | Dehradun
It was a great holiday. All three of us – wife, 8 year old son and I – enjoyed the visit to Disney-World and APCOT Centre at Orlando, Sea World at St Antonio, the amazing underground caverns near Houston, sunlit vistas, cherry blossoms, musea and beautiful monuments at Washington… and of course all the sights of London. A perfectly relaxing break from the routine back home. And it would have ended like that, but for the massager!
While window shopping in Washington, my wife spotted a cute little battery operated muscle massager at Brookstones, that swanky store specialising in new gizmos that are priced at ten times of what they’d fetch two months later in the market. It seems our hosts noticed that she really wanted it but didn’t say so because of my ‘No Shopping’ precondition for the trip. Quietly they bought one and gave it to her before we left Washington; quietly my wife packed it in one of the suitcases. Alas, its journey back home wasn’t all that quiet.
One of the suitcases was packed up finally in the US so we could leave it at London airport and not lug it around all over the place. At the end of the trip we collected it from the cloakroom at Heathrow and checked it in along with our other bags. We were to change flights at Frankfurt but the luggage was booked straight to Delhi. Everything went like clock work – typical German efficiency – and finally we boarded the Lufthansa jumbo at Frankfurt and settled comfortably in our Business Class seats.
Suddenly, I was approached by a crew member and asked to come down because the police wanted to speak with me. I was mortified. A million thoughts crossed my mind. What could the police want from me? Was I being framed? What would they do? I was perspiring in the cool comfort of Lufthansa’s upper deck. The Dom-Perignon suddenly tasted bitter. My wife and eight-year-old son were equally alarmed and this added to my anxiety. Somehow, I got hold of myself and went down the steps. There were two hefty uniformed Germans. One of them rudely pointed to a suitcase about 100 yards away and asked if it was mine. Yes indeed it was, I said. “What have you got in it?” was his second bark, “My personal belongings of course,” I managed to say, feeling a little composed by now. “Any electronic devices, tape recorders, radios?” The questioning went on. By now we had walked up to the cause of all the commotion. I told them I would open it and check. I went down on my knees and unzipped the bulging bag. Half the things spilled out. Anyone else would have laughed at my discomfiture – socks, underwear, cosmetics…. a million knick-knacks were all over the place – but these guys were different, they were after something more sinister. “Go on,” said the bigger bully, “something in there was making an awful racket on our detectors.” I was furiously rummaging through the untidy pile of dirty clothes and cheap merchandise when suddenly I came across a small gift-wrapped box – little bigger than the hand-held cellular phones of those days. The moment I picked it up, it started throbbing so strongly that I just dropped it. The smaller bully made a grab for it, but he let go it even quicker than me. “Is there a bomb in there?”, this time his question was decidedly menacing and – I must admit – unnerving. I was at my wits’ end. Like trained commandos they moved back quickly and shoved me too. At the same time he barked some rude orders into his walkie-talkie.
All this time my wife and son were nervously watching the whole drama from the plane window. The moment she saw this little packet being tossed around, she charged down the stairs and literally ran up to where I was facing the Gestapo interrogation. Before they could stop her, she had reached the suitcase, picked up the offending package and authoritatively announced: “That’s my massager; you‘ve probably broken it already.” All of a sudden it hit me. The riddle was solved. In her anxiety to pack the gift without me getting wind of it, she had not removed the batteries. Now this min-massager does not have a separate switch. You just press it on to your body and it starts vibrating. In the overstuffed loose top suitcase, it must’ve got pressed in certain positions and every time that happened on the inspection belt, the instruments would jump. By now the guys had peeled open the wrapping and seen the damned thing for themselves. Thankfully, they were smiling and even helped me repack the stuff minus of course the batteries. Back in the plane, we had to face dirty looks from our co-passengers. While my wife sat sulking, the young fellow – our son had a smirk on his face and kept rubbing it in that, at the Heathrow luggage room - as he sat on top of the suitcase he had told me about some “vibration” in the there and I had rubbished his comment as a child’s imagination!
(A veteran of the corporate world, the author now does only voluntary work in various spheres)
