The flight time is 2 hours 15 minutes and I am seated beside a bespectacled man and two mosquitoes who have found a faster way to fly to their holiday destination. The gentleman, with multiple rings on his fingers perhaps corresponding to cosmic prescriptions, attempts murdering the mosquitoes.

Unfortunately, he smacks me on the head in his endeavours. Even more unfortunately, he decides that giving me a bump on the head that may or may not require icing is the ideal ice-breaker. Meanwhile, a young couple in the row next to us, unable to pick between the fight or flight mode, are involved in a quarrel loud enough to serve as an inflight announcement.

There seems to be a tarmac delay and in order to both stave off making polite conversation and escape the reality of this claustrophobic metal tube, I pull out my phone. Ironically, the first thing that pops up is an article about a Mumbai-based diamond trader who has been sentenced to life imprisonment after making a hoax hijack threat. Birju Salla, the first person booked under the stringent Anti-Hijacking Act, left a note in the toilet of a Jet Airways flight stating that the Plane had 12 hijackers on board and should be flown straight to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The Delhi-bound flight was then compelled to make an emergency landing in Ahmedabad. The married man with two children pleaded in court that it was a hoax and he had done it out of love. Not love for Pakistan as it turned out, but love for his girlfriend, a Jet Airways employee. The diamond trader hoped that due to the threat, the airline would be forced to close its Delhi operations and his girlfriend would move back to Mumbai. If only he had paid heed to the adage — All good things come to those who wait and left it up to both God and good old Naresh Goyal, his wishes would have been fulfilled, as not just the Mumbai-Delhi sector but the whole airline came to a grinding halt soon after his love-sick prank.

He is not the only one to have used an airplane as a means to placate a desperate heart. A hijacker with a fake suicide belt took over an EgyptAir plane three years ago and forced it to land in Cyprus in a bizarre bid to get a letter to his ex-wife. Then there was also poor graphic designer Hikmet Komur. Broke and desperate to see his girlfriend, he crawled into the landing gear bay of a British Airways plane in Istanbul and tragically died on the journey after being exposed to temperatures of -60C.

I put my phone away only to have my seatmate immediately begin a debate over the virtues of Android versus iOS. Meanwhile, the warring couple now seems to have let down their weapons and is making up with a passion that may just lead them to the mile-high Club. For the uninitiated, let me make it clear that the mile-high club is not a frequent flyer program like Air India’s Maharaja Club but alludes to people engaging in sexual intercourse on board an aircraft. The act usually occurs in the confines of a minuscule, bacteria-laden aircraft toilet. This piece of information may have been useful to a young man who recently confessed on an online chat that when he was propositioned by an attractive passenger to join the mile-high club, instead of admitting that he was unfamiliar with the term, he whispered back, ‘I really don’t travel enough to make that worthwhile.’

Perhaps he should have just watched Koffee with Karan, where Sidharth Malhotra didn’t just acknowledge being a member of the mile-high club but let on that his favourite plane to get frisky on was the Airbus A380.

The fasten-your-seatbelt sign finally flashes and my seatmate, who hasn’t paused for breath, decides to take that as a signal to lean further into my seat, hog the armrest and explain the intricacies of A10 chips which I gather have as much in common with Lay’s chips as I have with Bill Gates.
A study by HSBC bank suggests that 1 in 50 airplane passengers meet the love of their life on board an aircraft. The rest, I assume, like me are probably severely tempted to emulate Salla and leave threatening letters in the toilet so we can force emergency landings of our own.

Come to think of it, I, too, had a grandiose aeronautical plan once that ended in disaster. I recall scribbling a small message, folding the sheet into rectangles and triangles till I had a splendid paper plane soaring through the air towards my heartthrob’s desk. The plane — due to a certain miscalculation of geo-positioning coordinates — landed on another boy’s desk. I was then stuck with a malodorous twelve-year-old with a penchant for wearing the same socks for weeks on end. He followed me for the next six months, like I was Mary and he my stinky lamb.

A calamitous outcome, but it still beats dying or being covered in fecal droplets by romping inside the airplane lavatory or well, going off to jail for life like Salla.

Birju ji’s bizarre case does bring to light a certain overlooked fact. A Ram Gopal Varma produced movie that starred yours truly had predicted the future even more clearly than the greatest seers. All the way back in 2001, the movie’s title song had prescient lyrics that went, ‘Arre Love Ke Liye Salla Kuchh Bhi Karega!’ Now beat that Nostradamus.