Someone said travel broadens the mind. Funny he should say that. It’s done precious little for mine. For some reason, brief proximity to fellow journeymen appears to bring out the bigot in people.

Take my last flight to Mumbai. The man who sank into the seat next to mine seemed blameless enough, but I tend to view people who share my travel space with suspicion, apprehension of body odour and God-knows-what-other gaseous emanations and general dislike. We inspected each other over the tops of our newspapers and then looked shyly away. That is, I did.

“Hell-,” said a voice in my ear. It was the pest next to me. “What do you think of the Muslim question?” Just like that.

Muslim question? I wondered to myself in panic. What Muslim question? No Muslim, as far back as I could think, had ever posed me a question I should remember and ponder over ? and certainly not with a perfect stranger.

“You know,” he persisted. “All this talk about those people not getting a fair deal, and rubbish like that. And that, too, after we’ve let them become Presidents and stuff like that. Ever heard of a Hindu President in Pakistan?”

“I don’t know a soul in Pakistan,” I said coldly, “so I wouldn’t know”.

“Well, I’m telling you. They don’t. Don’t you follow the newspapers? What work do you do, madam?”

“I don’t read the papers,” I responded with dignity. “I’m a journalist.”

“And now, if you’d let me return to the crossword puzzle,” I continued. You’d think that would have sorted him out. But no. All the way to the touchdown in Mumbai ? and for a while at the airport itself ?I got the ranting of my life.

It’s always been that way, everywhere. An unwashed tourist guide with a serious case of halitosis (whom I had not engaged) told me in the metro in Paris that I should beware of ‘the gypsies’. “They’re dirty and they’re thieves,” he confided. Several Indian motel-owners across the States volunteered the information that they would never engage ‘blacks’ on their staff (“they’re not true Americans”). Oh, and yes, that woman on the train to Ajmer years ago, who advised me to take my son out of the boarding school where I was going to visit him. (“All you big, big people like to place your boys in that school,” she spat at me. “But I’ve heard they take in Muslims.”

To return to the charmer on the flight to Chhatrapati Shivaji. As we parted at the carousel, he politely asked me if I was being met. “Yes,” I told him, “My son’s meeting me”. “Ah,” he persisted. “And what is his good name?”

I told him. He recoiled. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.