My mother has frequently joked that I’ve looked 32 since I was 12. (When I turned 24, I joked that by my mother’s own logic I was now 64 and the oldest member of our family. One of my sisters objected that I was misunderstanding: I stagnated at 32 at the age of 12, she said, and therefore was still 32.)
At the age of 14, I lived in Buffalo with my mother’s parents and my family lived in Hyderabad, India. I naturally visited them once or twice, traveling as an unaccompanied minor. Though this was only a trip I made once as a round trip, and then once more as a one-way trip to join my family, it was never unremarkable.
The preferred route in those days between Hyderabad and Buffalo was Buffalo -> JFK in New York -> London -> Doha or Dubai -> Hyderabad. I always ended up having long layovers, and it was excruciating. The only place where I didn’t mind being stuck for awhile was JFK, where there was a play room of sorts for unaccompanied minors: there were puzzles, a TV equipped with a playstation, various games and a few books. So of course, JFK was the only airport where I never spent any particularly long amount of time waiting between flights.
In London, I once missed my flight out of Heathrow due to a delay, and they rebooked everyone for a different flight that departed the next day and put them up in hotels for the night. But much to their distress, this was not an option for me. (Apparently it’s against policy to put an unaccompanied minor into a hotel.) They eventually settled on putting me on a different flight that left several hours later out of Gatwick. After a long, traffic-heavy trip in an airline-owned car to Gatwick with a flight attendant, I was handed off to a different flight attendant. Still, I had several hours to wait for my flight. The flight attendant explained apologetically to me that policy dictated that I had to stay with her, but they had only a tiny staff kitchen where I could sit for those hours. She told me that she would trust me to go out into the airport and come back by a designated time, and let me leave the area. I wandered around the small airport until I got bored, then spent the rest of the layover in that staff kitchen reading. (And wishing they would have just let me stay in a hotel like all the other people.)
International flights to and from Doha now principally go to and from Hamad International Airport, but at the time Doha International Airport was the default airport. This was a relatively tiny airport. Like Gatwick, they did not have a room for us unaccompanied minors. Unlike Gatwick, they didn’t even have a staff room.
I and a boy a few years younger than me, obsessed with drawing dragons in his sketchbook, were sat on the floor behind a desk at a gate while the flight attendant charged with our care manned the desk. (To be clear, neither of us was taking this flight. We sat on the floor behind the gate until a flight attendant from our connecting flight came to collect one of us and take us to our gate.)
Adding to all of this, nearly every time I was handed from one flight attendant to the next, they’d eye me strangely and ask, “You’re a minor? Really?” To which I or the previous flight attendant would say that I was fourteen and be met with shock.
To put it simply, I was not happy that I had to travel as an unaccompanied minor. Since it was a service that my parents had to request, the first time when it was a round trip, I begged them not to request it on the return trip.
“I look plenty old enough,” I argued. “I’ll be fine.”
They begged to differ, and I was again an unaccompanied minor.
On the one-way trip to India, I again begged them not to request the service, and again they decided that it was necessary. As usual, flight attendants were incredulous to hear that I was an unaccompanied minor.
From London to Doha, I was flying with 3 other, much younger children as unaccompanied minors. We were put on the plane early, and then told to wait at the front of the plane without disembarking after it landed. I did as I was told. The other children disembarked one by one as their parents showed up accompanied by flight attendants.
I stood there, waiting to be led to my connecting flight. The flight attendants kept eyeing me in a way that seemed a lot like annoyance. After the last child left and I found myself still locked in a staring match with a flight attendant, I realized that they did not remember that I had been one of the unaccompanied minors handed over to them. They were waiting for me to disembark, no doubt wondering why I’d been idly standing near the children.
I didn’t say a word and disembarked.
I revelled in getting to walk around Doha airport, going where I pleased and sitting in actual chairs, wherever I wanted.
When I arrived in Hyderabad, my father was surprised when I emerged without any escort. I explained that the airline had forgotten that I was an unaccompanied minor in Doha, but everything worked out, see? This was why there was no point sending me as an unaccompanied minor.
It was a moot point by then, but they never sent me as an unaccompanied minor again.