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‘Ooh there’s a Cafechino! Do you want a coffee or one of those yummy spicy samosas?’ asked Leila, nodding her head towards a café near the entrance.
‘I’m not eating anything until I get home, I’m not tempting fate,’ said Minnie, shaking her head and pinching her lips tight shut.
At baggage security, Minnie was still sweating and scratching her arms furiously.
Leila handed her a tissue. ‘Don’t look so guilty, Minnie, or they’ll take you for a full cavity search,’ she hissed.
As Minnie’s bag went through the security scanner, the man sitting behind the screen eyed Minnie suspiciously. He had a neat brown moustache and dark hair combed into an arrow-straight side parting. His blue uniform was crisp and starched; his eyes darted between Minnie and the screen in front of him. He motioned to a colleague, pointed at the screen and then at Minnie.
‘Miss, is this your bag?’ said a tall, thinner man with old-fashioned spectacles and a more wrinkled uniform. He beckoned Minnie through to the other side of the conveyor belt.
‘Yes,’ Minnie said with a resigned little nod.
Of course someone had hidden drugs in her bag and now she was going to rot in an Indian prison for the next twenty years. It was all too predictable.
‘Please come, miss,’ said the taller man, beckoning her.
She followed him through to a small room, while the shorter man carried her black suitcase behind them. Minnie looked around for Leila who shook her head and held up her hands in an overblown shrug.
‘Can I search the bag?’ said the shorter man politely.
‘Sure,’ said Minnie, ‘be my guest.’
The taller man said something in Konkani. The shorter man neatly piled all of Minnie’s clothes on the bench and then pulled out an oblong box. It was Leila’s birthday present to Minnie, neatly wrapped for tomorrow. Leila had thrown it in Minnie’s bag at the last minute because her own was too stuffed full of pastel-coloured fisherman’s trousers, crochettops, and all the scented wooden ornaments she kept buying from the beach vendors.
‘What is in here?’ asked the shorter man, thrusting it towards her. The taller man frowned and picked up a clipboard. He started flicking through some sheets of paper.
‘I don’t know. It’s a present for my birthday.’
Minnie felt her stomach drop. Would Leila have bought her drugs? Surely not.
The two men exchanged a look. The taller man said something in Konkani and tapped his clipboard.
‘May I open it?’ said the shorter man.
‘Sure,’ said Minnie, shaking her head. Maybe it was some kind of bath-bomb that set the sensors off because it looked like explosives?
The shorter man carefully began to unwrap the parcel to reveal a long purple plastic box with ‘Rampant Rabbit’ written along the side in excitable lettering. A large phallic pink wand was visible through the plastic window. Minnie blushed puce; bloody Leila – this was mortifying.
‘What is this?’ asked the shorter man, his head cocked to one side.
‘Oh, er, it’s a joke, it’s a present from my friend.’
Both men looked at her blankly. Minnie rolled her hands into fists to stop herself from scratching. The taller man pointed to a Post-it note stuck onto the box. The shorter man started to read, ‘Hey babes, have an orgasmic birthday and a dickalicious New Year. Who needs men, hey?’ He pronounced the word orgasmic, ‘org-gas-mick’.
‘What is dickal ishus?’ asked the taller man.
‘Oh well, it’s hard to explain,’ said Minnie, covering her face with clammy hot hands. She was beginning to wish it had been drugs in her bag. Oh god, why couldn’t it have been lovely, simple, less embarrassing drugs?
‘This is a morally corrupting object,’ said the shorter man sternly. ‘You sell this in our country?’
‘Oh no, no, I’m not selling it. Why would I want to sell it?’
‘It is not OK to sell obscene objects in India,’ said the taller man, shaking his head and tapping his clipboard.
‘Really?’ Minnie said, genuinely surprised. ‘I didn’t know that, and as I said, it’s a present. I didn’t even know it was in there.’
‘You will have to wait here. Fill in this form,’ said the shorter man.
