HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE. The case of the missing case

To recap: Last week , I described how I ran all the way from Barcelona to Boston, by air, only to discover when I landed: OH DEAR. My suitcase got left behind.

I didn’t even have to go to baggage reclaim. The moment I turned my cell phone on after landing in Boston, I got a text message from the airline: “We deeply regret that your suitcase containing all your most precious and beloved possessions, packed so thoughtfully in separate plastic bags for each different category of item, including smaller bags for socks and larger bags for pants, has not travelled with you.”

I was in no mood to get annoyed. I’d had such a pleasant time in Spain! “Dearie me,” I thought, “how very boring.” I waited for gloom to descend. But it didn’t. I simply could not summon the energy to fling trolleys at other passengers or vomit onto the sniffer dogs or do whatever is considered appropriate to the loss of luggage. Instead, I went over to the young woman at the baggage reclaim counter and calmly reported the non-arrival. She gave me a form to fill and a number to call if I wanted to speak to Swissport, the baggage handling company at Boston’s Logan Airport. She told me that FedEx would deliver the bags to me at the address I’d written on the form.

Then I leapt onto a couple of buses and returned to Elsewhere feeling quite lightheaded with good humour. It’s a wonderful thing to discover that one can thwart the goblins of misfortune by simply refusing to feel distraught! I was particularly pleased that, by some quirk of intuition, I had decided to keep all my undies with me. Bras these days are marvels of engineering. Mine, for instance, are made of reinforced concrete and sturdy enough to survive an atomic blast. So I carried them with me, along with my laptop, iPad, two cell phones, a dozen chargers and electric toothbrush, in my backpack.

The next day I called the Swissport number, to ask if they’d had any news. No response. All day long. The next day was a Sunday. I went out for lunch with friends, had a lovely time, returned home at three. At four I received a call from a local number. “Uhhh ...” said an unfamiliar woman, “are you by any chance missing A SUITCASE?” She told me there was a small purple bag with my name on it, in the hallway of the condominium where she lived. No idea how the thing had got there. The building is next door to the address I wrote on the form.

I raced up the hill. Entered the building. Saw my bag in the corner, looking sad and lonely. No one in sight. It had begun to rain. I left a “Thank you!” note. Raced back down the hill. Got home drenched. The bag and its contents were intact. Life is weird. In a cool way.

Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

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