We were booked to travel to Hong Kong by Air-India flight number 316. We had flown before in Boeing 707s and 737s. This was the first time we would travel in a jumbo jet. As we got into the aircraft, it seemed impossible to see how such a huge plane would actually lift itself off the ground. ‘Good God! Such a lot of people!’ Lalmohan Babu exclaimed, looking around. ‘All these passengers in the economy class alone would fill the Netaji Indoor Stadium!’ This struck me as an exaggeration, but certainly there were enough people to fill the balcony of a medium-sized cinema hall. Feluda had already cabled Purnendu Pal. We were scheduled to reach Hong Kong the next morning at 7.45 a.m. It was normal practice with Feluda to get some reading done about any new place he was going to visit. He had gone to a bookshop yesterday and bought a book on Hong Kong. I had leafed through it briefly, but what I saw in the glossy photos was enough to convince me that there could be few cities as lively and colourful as Hong Kong. Lalmohan Babu was bursting with excitement, but appeared to know very little about what to expect. ‘Will we get to see the Wall of China?’ he asked innocently. ‘The Wall of China,’ Feluda had to explain, ‘is in the People’s Republic of China, near Peking. Hong Kong is at least a thousand miles from Peking.’ Our plane took off on time. I noticed how smoothly it flew, especially since the weather outside was good. It reached Bangkok at midnight; but passengers to Hong Kong weren’t allowed to get off the plane. So I promptly went back to sleep. When I woke in the morning, I saw that we were flying over the sea. Gradually, little islands in the water became visible, standing out like the backs of giant turtles. As the plane began losing height, these grew larger and larger, and I realized many of them were really the tops of mountains submerged in water. Soon, we were flying over real mountains. There were white dots among the green foliage on the mountains which, later, turned out to be massive highrise buildings, all built close to the hills. They glittered in the sun. I had heard that landing an aeroplane at the Hong Kong airport called for special skill. The runway seemed to be stretched out on the water. Even a slight mistake could result in either a loud splash in the sea or a big crash in the mountains. Luckily, neither of these things happened. The plane landed where it was supposed to, and then stopped before a terminal building. Two chutes on wheels came out and fitted perfectly with the two main exits of the plane. We could, therefore, walk through these and go straight into the terminal

without having to go down a flight of stairs. Lalmohan Babu was completely round-eyed. ‘This isn’t exclusive to Hong Kong, Lalmohan