I have no proof, of course, but I've come to suspect that the Wife secretly pays some bomoh to hex me whenever I have to fly without her.
Because practically every single flight I take on my own turns out to be some Conradian experience, where I stumble from the plane muttering, 'The horror, the horror.'
Just last week, I had to make a very brief, unscheduled trip back to Singapore.
'Oh no,' I grimaced at the Wife. 'You're not going to hex me again, are you?'
'I neither confirm nor deny your allegation,' she replied, taking a very deliberate bite out of her apple.
My mind raced back to previous solo flight fiascos, all with chillingly consistent features.
The first is that my fellow passengers will invariably include the contestants of Colicky Baby Idol, whose challenge is to perform the greatest hits of Black Sabbath whenever I fall asleep.
The second will be that the seat next to mine will inevitably be occupied by someone I can only describe as a freakazoid.
There was the time I sat next to an American redneck teenager who'd never been on a plane before, and thought he'd died and gone to heaven when the flight attendants started serving alcohol, or 'free licker', as he described it.
'Dang,' he gushed in awe at the perks of air travel, 'they even give y'all a baggie to puke it up in later!' (I regret to inform you that he availed himself of this particular amenity several times during the flight.)
Then there was the sizeable gentleman from India, who, feeling constrained by the seat, preferred to stand in the aisle next to me for the bulk of the journey, with his posterior cheeks wobbling perilously close to my anterior ones.
He'd ordered the vegetarian meal, and I was praying it didn't include chickpeas.
I will also never forget the Japanese shoujo who entered the plane like an extra from Mobile Suit Gundam, with knee-high boots sporting 30cm-long protruding rubber spikes that, while not painful, would nevertheless keep making 'poit' sounds whenever they poked my calves. Which was often.
Possibly the most uncomfortable encounter of all was with a 7-foot tall gangling African youth, who kept crumpling over in his seat and extending his elbows and knees into my space, and shaking like a violent ice kacang machine. It was like being seated next to a cross between an Osim massage chair and an Iron Maiden.
So I was feeling understandably queasy about the flight to come. Unable to afford Singapore Airlines, I was relegated to an American carrier that had to make two stopovers en route home.
The flight began inauspiciously when the first leg got delayed for an hour, after a passenger tried to stuff his golf bag into the overhead storage compartment, breaking its door in the process.
Things didn't improve after takeoff. Like most American domestic flights nowadays, meals are no longer provided.
A small blessing, some might say, but if you didn't have the foresight to pack your own snack, you might wind up paying US$5 for a box containing tortilla chips, Oreos and a can of tuna that resembles cat food. Which also means you could find yourself in agony, as I did, when the freakazoid beside me unwrapped her bucket of fried chicken, its smells permeating the whole cabin, and worse, never offered to share.
The initial delay led to knock-on delays, such that I was deprived of my traditional stopover ritual at Tokyo's Narita Airport, consisting of a hot shower and a comforting bowl of ramen. Instead, I barely made my connecting flight to Singapore, after a mad dash through security screening.
By the time I nestled into my seat, I was a nervous wreck. But at least this flight had personal video screens, I consoled myself, which meant no longer having to watch movies half-obscured by the tops of people's heads. Of course, my particular screen then chose to conk out.
So, when the Chinese man next to me, who resembled nothing so much as a soon hock fish on legs, began making staccato sucking sounds through his teeth and tapping his feet loudly, I nearly broke down in tears.
'It's only fair you pay some penance,' said the Wife when I recounted my ordeal. 'After all, I'm suffering here in New York, deprived of all the Hokkien mee and nasi lemak you'll no doubt be whacking.'
True, but that didn't ameliorate my shuddering at the thought of the ineluctable torments awaiting me on my return flight.
Guess I'll just have to double the amounts of Hokkien mee and nasi lemak I plan to eat. Hawkers, you've been warned.
This article was first published in The Sunday Times on Dec 14, 2008.
