Am I dreaming?

Since planning this trip, as much as we were looking forward to experiencing watching the world cup in India, there was one other thing we couldn't wait to see. Even though we were going to miss Nagpur, knowing we were going onto Kerala - 'Gods own country' next made it a lot easier.
We got dropped off to the airport and as we were having our luggage screened we noticed a unique blue, plastic case with something printed on it. On closer inspection, we realised the printed text read 'Board of Control for Cricket in India - Mahendra Singh Dhoni'
'OMG That's Dhoni's luggage' I said to Chigs before a failed attempt at sneaking a pic of it. 'Are the Indian players flying out today?'. 'Is Dhoni flying somewhere on his own?' - 'No he can't be going elsewhere in the middle of the tournament'. 'Is his luggage flying separately?' Were some of the thoughts going through our head.
We quickly scanned the flights flying out from Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Airport and there was no flight out to Chennai (location of India's next game). Not knowing whether he'd be there or not, we crossed our fingers and completed all necessary security checks.
As we were waiting to board the plane, two young kids along with a familiar face appear. The face belonged to Gary Kirsten, we quickly shot up out of our seats, pulled out the camera and asked him if we could have a quick snap, he happily obliged. As we were taking pics with him, others saw and within seconds there was a crowd around him. Gary was patient and happily took pictures with everyone who approached him. This made our hopes of being on the same flight as the Indian team increase, but the pessimist in me didn't allow the hopes to get too high. We decided to wait around till the last moment, just in case they do turn up after everyone else has boarded. We waited and waited til there was nobody else left and then had to go. As we were boarding the plane I asked the air hostess if MS Dhoni was on the flight and she answered in the affirmative. For some reason my doubts were not fully removed, maybe from my experience in India I've found Indians rarely say no to anything.
So we took our seats and noticed the front of the plane was empty. And then it happened, one by one they entered the plane. There was Munaf Patel, Virat Kohli, MS Dhoni, Piyush Chawla, Yusuf Pathan, Ashish Nehra, Suresh Raina, Ravichandran Ashwin, Harbhajan Singh and Sreesanth. We later found out the other players were leaving on the following day. People started to get up to collect autographs and pictures, but were told to remain seated as we were about to lift off. We decided as soon as it was safe to walk down after lift off we'd head to the front; when that moment came, we went only to find out all bar Virat Kohli had gone to sleep, who was playing darts on his iPad. What a disappointment. They remained asleep through the whole flight which was just over an hour long. As were seated at the back of the plane, we got off from the back exit, while the players exited from the front exit. We got out just in time to see them all and take pictures, though security didn't allow us to get too close to them, but I was happy with the pics we got.
We had a 6 hour wait for our connecting flight to Kerala, enough time to tell everyone about what had just happened

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5