As I walk towards the boarding gates, looking around for directions to Gate 12, I hear a feeble, trembling voice calling out from somewhere behind me, ‘Beta, are you Indian?’

‘Yes!’ I say as I turn back.

An old woman in her late seventies, a little stooped, dressed in a yellow phulkari cotton salwar kameez, is standing in front of me. Her face looks dry, as if she hasn’t applied any moisturizer in ages, and her salwar kameez has even more wrinkles than her face does. I can see that she’s very disturbed about something.

‘How can I help you?’ I ask her with genuine concern.

‘My flight to San Francisco is delayed, and I have a connecting flight to India from there. But I have a feeling that I will miss my connecting flight. I’ve been trying to explain this to the airline people, but I don’t know English that well.’

Hearing her talk in Hindi makes my heart flutter with joy, because I haven’t heard the sound of it in ages. And sometimes, my tongue aches for real when I have to speak in accented American English for an entire day. It just doesn’t come naturally to me.

‘Are you travelling alone?’ I ask the woman, forcing myself to focus on her.

‘Yes.’

I check her ticket and see that she’s indeed travelling alone, and on the same flight as me. Our flight’s been delayed by three hours, so she was correct in her assumption—she would surely miss her connecting flight to India.

I ask her to calm down, then I take her tickets and walk up to the airline’s customer service desk to seek help on her behalf. A middle-aged black woman, with a face like a robot, is the only person at the counter.

‘Can you please put this passenger on the next flight to New Delhi from New York?’ I politely ask her.

‘What?’ The woman looks up at me with surprise. She had been fiddling with her phone. It annoys me to see her poker face, and her magenta nail extensions make a noise that grates on my nerves.

‘There’s no way she can catch this connecting flight,’ I tell her, pushing the woman’s tickets across the counter.

‘The airline will change her connecting flight once she reaches SFO. She can stay the night at the airport lounge and take the new flight forward,’ she replies, unruffled.

‘She needs to go back home comfortably. She’s an elderly passenger and she’s unaccompanied. Just put her on a direct flight from here. I know you have the power to do this,’ I try to negotiate.

‘That’s not possible.’