How I boarded the wrong plane and had to do a walk of shame

Landing in the wrong country? No big deal. I’m more terrified at the prospect of explaining to the librarian upon my return home that I’ve lost my borrowed copy of George Orwell’s Burmese Days. I can picture her now, peering over the rim of her glasses as I attempt to justify my wrongdoing: “You did what?” she will say.

This story is so fantastical she will be hard-pressed to believe it. It starts in a business lounge at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, where I’m whiling away a five-hour layover. I get chatting to a woman who works in Malaysia’s health ministry. She’s headed to Manila, I’m on my way to Yangon. As my flight departure time approaches with no display board update, I make inquiries at the lounge’s reception desk.

Credit: Jamie Brown

“Relax,” I’m told. “The plane isn’t leaving yet.”

“Relaxing” is not in my flight-adjacent vocabulary. Pathologically afraid of skidding in at the last minute, I allow myself to relax only when I’m buckled in and the wheels have lifted off the tarmac. I gather my possessions, bid the health ministry woman adieu, and head off to my gate.

Before I’ve reached it, I hear my name being called over the PA.

“Your flight is ready to depart,” comes the cry.

My heart rate accelerates, blood rushes to my face; this is beyond mortifying. And it’s about to get worse. I race through the additional ring of security, swipe my boarding pass as instructed, fly down the airbridge. But wait – there’s a queue, and it’s dawdling. Why the urgency? Eventually, I board the plane, remove Burmese Days from my backpack and place it in my seat pocket.

Why have I just boarded her flight to Manila when I’m headed to Yangon?Credit: Getty Images

Now my name is being called again, this time by a flight attendant whose face I can’t see for all the passengers streaming onto the aircraft.

“Come!” she implores.

My heart is positively defibrillating now; it’s the only thing saving me from cardiac arrest. I grab my backpack from the overhead cabin, squeeze through the oncoming traffic, and disembark beside the harried flight attendant. Incoming passengers are still queuing along the airbridge. I see among them the woman from the health ministry; she casts me a quizzical – nay, a positively startled – glance. There’s no time to explain; even if there were, I couldn’t. Why have I just boarded her flight to Manila when I’m headed to Yangon?

Lightning-fast, the flight attendant frogmarches me back into the security area, through an opposite gate, along a second, empty, airbridge and up to the door of a plane where a stone-faced flight attendant awaits. The door closes behind me with an almighty thud. The walk of shame is interminable; down the aisle I go, all eyes upon me. I don’t need to check my seat number: mine is the only one empty. Slumping into it, I’m jolted by a sudden realisation: snug in its seat pocket, Burmese Days is on its way to Manila without me.

The aircraft’s tyres part ways with the tarmac, but there’s no relaxing for me. I’m marginally soothed by the bootlegged copy of Burmese Days I find in a Yangon market the next day for a dollar or two, but the pages come clean off as I turn them. Later that week, I find a more robust version for sale on a boat cruising up the Irrawaddy River. It costs a small fortune. Back home, I present my costly offering to the librarian.

“I left my book on a plane,” I say. “Will this one suffice as a replacement?”

The librarian sighs, peruses me over the rim of her glasses, checks the ISBN on her computer.

“I suppose it will do,” she says.