Someone slaps the plane with a heavy hand: thump, thump. The steward yanks open the door. Two men in medical white waft in with a gust of hot air. They go down the aisle distributing printed forms. We busy ourselves filling in the answers: Where did you spend the last ten days? Nine days? Yesterday? One man takes a canister out of his pocket and strides up the aisle spraying us with hospital smell. We can disembark.

We file out. Near the base of the ramp attached to the first class exit stands an enormous grey Rolls-Royce bearing the President’s three-faced lion insignia on its numberplate. Beside the car, stand the President’s ADC and an orderly with an armful of flowers. Behind them are half-a-dozen photographers with cameras raised to their noses. A white woman carrying a fur coat on one arm and a hat-box in the other comes down the steps. Flash bulbs explode. The ADC clicks his heels and salutes. He takes the white woman’s fur coat and hat-box and hands them to the orderly. He garlands the woman, presents her with the bouquets and salutes her again. She flashes her teeth at him. They get into the Rolls-Royce. The Rolls-Royce purrs away into the dark.

Who is she?

We are herded together and directed to follow an Air-India official. We shade our eyes against the glare of airport lights and showers of moths. We skirt past long-snouted bandicoots skating on their bellies and enter a door marked ‘International.’ A large poster with a picture of Pandit Nehru bids us Welcome to India.

A police sergeant scrutinizes our health forms and stacks them in the ‘out’ basket on his table. A sub-inspector inspects our passports, stamps them and hands them back to us. A customs officer gives us sheafs of forms to fill in triplicate. Three each for what we have bought abroad; three each for what we have in foreign currency. We spend half-an-hour filling them. Customs men eye us to see if our expressions betray undeclared items. We look bored; our expressions betray nothing.

Forty minutes later trollies rattle into the customs shed. Coolies offload cases on the floor. I locate my valise and grab a customs inspector. I have bought nothing and have no foreign currency. He does not believe me. He examines my declaration forms and my passport. He opens my valise and fires a stream of questions as he digs into my clothes.

‘Any whisky-shisky?’

‘No.’

‘No tape recorder?’

‘No.’

‘Transistor-shranzistor?’

‘No.’

‘ Camera-shamera?’

‘No.’

‘Watch-shotch?’

‘No.’

He grabs my hand and examines the shiny new Vulcan alarm watch on my wrist. I bought it at Beirut’s duty-free shop in the airport store for thirty-five pounds.

‘How much?’

I produce a receipt for the watch I bought for my cook which is tucked in my hip-pocket. ‘Seven pounds.’