An unofficial guide to the Indian Airport and the curious habits of the travellers who pass through it

“Give me a lever long enough and a trolley wide enough, and I shall block the entire security line” – Archimedes (if he was ever stuck at Terminal 3 of Delhi’s International Airport)

I once watched a man argue with a check-in counter executive about excess baggage the way Indian men argue about cricket selection, with total conviction and zero facts. His suitcase was four kilos over. He knew this. The airline knew this. And, yet for a full six minutes, he built a legal case involving his frequent flyer status, a cousin who worked “in aviation”, and the general injustice of the modern world, before finally paying the fine with the wounded dignity of a man who has just been personally betrayed.

This is the emotional register of the Indian airport at all times: everyone slightly aggrieved, nobody entirely sure why.

I have spent an unreasonable amount of my adult life inside these buildings, mostly because trains take too long. And somewhere between the missed flight and the overpriced sandwich, I began to suspect that the Indian airport is not really a piece of transport infrastructure. It is a stage. A very brightly lit, over-air-conditioned stage on which the entire national character performs multiple matinee shows daily, gate numbers subject to change.

It starts before you’ve even reached the terminal, somewhere on the approach road, where three generations of a family have arrived to drop off one man going to a new city for a week. The car has barely stopped moving before doors fly open and someone starts unloading a suitcase that could comfortably house a second suitcase. There is a tearful hug happening near the trolley bay that would suggest a decade-long war posting, not a Tuesday morning IndiGo flight with a return ticket already booked. Somewhere in the suitcase, wrapped in multiple layers of newspaper, sits enough thepla and achaar to feed a small wedding. Uncles who have no functional relationship to the traveller beyond a shared surname are suspiciously there to say their goodbyes.

Inside, the terminal runs on a very specific kind of confidence: the confidence of people who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing but refuse, on principle, to look like it. You’ll see a man study the departure board with the intensity of someone reading a will, then walk purposefully in the wrong direction. Security is where this confidence briefly, beautifully collapses. A woman is asked to take a sip from her own water bottle to prove it isn’t liquid explosive, and does so with the resigned grace of someone who has made peace with the absurdity of it all.

There is always one man who has forgotten he is wearing a belt substantial enough to restrain a small elephant. Coins appear from impossible pockets. A power bank materialises from somewhere. The security tray begins as a neat arrangement of wallet, phone and watch and slowly evolves into an archaeological dig.

And then, thirty seconds later, at the boarding gate, all that meekness evaporates and the very same people start jostling for position the moment “Zone 1” is announced, as though the aircraft might simply get bored of waiting and take off without them, luggage and all. I have watched a man in a blazer elbow past a pregnant woman to board a flight that was, at that point, delayed by fifty minutes. The plane was not going anywhere. He simply could not bear the humiliation of being seated last.

Then there are the characters, and Indian airports have a full cast. The ‘Nervous Flyer’ clutches a printed boarding pass like a legal document even after checking in online and asks the security staff three separate times which gate is correct. The ‘Frequent Flyer’, by contrast, moves through the terminal with the loose, contemptuous ease of someone who has stopped being impressed by aeroplanes altogether, card already out for the lounge, boarding pass unglanced-at on the phone screen. The ‘Trolley Warrior’, who has stacked three bags, a laptop case, and a duty-free shopping bag onto a single trolley and now steers this tower through the terminal with the confidence of a man who has never once considered the physics involved.

And somewhere near the boarding gate sits the ‘Well-Dressed One’, the passenger in the crisp linen shirt who appears entirely unbothered by delays, whose presence alone has caused at least four people nearby to sit up slightly straighter and check their own reflection in a phone screen. Finally, there is the ‘Airport Influencer’, who treats every airport like a film set and every delay as an opportunity for more content. Somewhere nearby, a patient friend has now taken forty three nearly identical photographs, each rejected because the mokobara trolley “doesn’t look candid enough”.

And then, of course, the announcements. Nowhere does the English language suffer more nobly than over an Indian airport PA system, garbled through a speaker that has clearly seen better decades, informing passengers that flight 6E-whatever to somewhere is “delayed by some time,” a phrase so devoid of information it borders on the philosophical. Some time. Not a number. Not a reason. Just the vague, Vedic assurance that time, in some form, will indeed pass, and that the flight, in some form, will indeed happen, eventually, inshallah, subject to weather in a city nobody in the terminal has ever visited.

Then you’re airborne, and for exactly the duration of the flight, India briefly agrees to sit quietly in tidy rows and mind its own business. The seatbelt sign turns off and it’s back on: someone reclines their seat into your knees without a glance behind them and a toddler discovers the tray table has a hinge.

Landing is its own genre. The plane is still taxiing, wheels barely settled, when half the cabin unclips their seatbelts in perfect, illegal unison, standing hunched under the overhead bins like sprinters in the blocks, waiting for a green light that is, technically, not supposed to exist yet. And then, the real endurance event: baggage claim, that great leveller where business class dignity dissolves into pure animal vigilance, everyone crowding the belt close enough to headbutt the luggage as it emerges, because clearly the bag that has just travelled two hours in a pressurised hold is now, without warning, a flight risk of its own.

Lest this read as a complaint, it is not meant as one. What I find oddly moving, underneath all the chaos, is how much unguarded emotion the Indian airport is still permitted to hold. Nobody at an Indian airport is pretending to be calm. People here are anxious about flying, sad about leaving, thrilled about arriving, or simply exhausted, and none of it is hidden the way it might be elsewhere.

Maybe that is what the Indian airport actually does. It is one of the last public spaces in urban India where a grown man is permitted to cry without apology while leaving his family for a job overseas, where a stranger’s grief or joy is met with quiet, practised indifference rather than curiosity. Amid the trolleys and the tea that costs more than it should, that seems worth noticing.

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