Excerpt from the chapter Waiting in Vain
Thomas Manjila had been sitting at Gate C84 in Doha’s Hamad International Airport for more than two hours, anxiously looking at the WhatsApp chat window open on his mobile phone to see if there was any sign of Edathil Abbas responding to the numerous messages that he had sent.
“Abbas, I just landed from San Francisco and am on the bus to the terminal.”
“In half an hour or so, I’ll be at the gate for our flight to Kochi.”
“I’m sitting very close to Gate C84, near a coffee shop, easy to spot. We can have some coffee or tea once you get here.”
“I don’t know if you were able to log in to the airport Wi-Fi. They don’t make it easy to get connected here. I’m calling you directly, not sure if that would work though.”
“The phone rang, but no one picked up. Hope everything is fine with you.”
“There’s less than half an hour left, and the airline staff are making final boarding calls.”
“They haven’t mentioned your name as someone who has checked in but not yet boarded. It looks like you haven’t even checked in for this flight.”
Abbas told Thomas that he lived not very far from the Doha airport. So, there was no chance of a missed or delayed flight or train for him to get there. Thomas started worrying as he had exchanged messages with Abbas as late as the day before he headed out to San Francisco airport to catch his Qatar Airways flight to Doha enroute to his destination in Kochi, Kerala. There was a lot of coordination needed to be on the same flight with Abbas for Thomas’s onward trip from Doha to Kochi. After Abbas booked his ticket, Thomas used a travel agent to make sure that his trip from Doha to Kochi, a busy route used by migrant workers from Kerala working in Qatar, would be with Abbas. His ticket had to be booked on a specific flight from San Francisco that could reliably arrive in Doha in time for him to catch Abbas’s flight to Kochi and that ticket turned out to be a little expensive.