Home, but they want to return soon

Suddenly, the 48-hour warning came. She packed her bags, made her way through the thick of Asians at Kuwait Airport and managed to get a seat on board the special Air India flight. All this in 24 hours. Antao reached Mumbai on Thursday with her luggage in transit and a husband choosing to wait and watch.

The first flight touched Mumbai at about 7 am, followed by another at 9.30 am and the third at 7 pm, each three hours behind the scheduled arrival. ‘‘Getting airspace clearance was no problem. It was the conveyor belt at the Kuwait airport which caused a delay. It broke down,’’ says the pilot of the second A—I flight, Virendra Goel.

Director of Public Relations, Air India, Jitendra Bhargava says: ‘‘One more flight will reach Kochin by 7 pm today. We will operate flights as long as the airports remain open.’’ But AI-806, a Jeddah-Kuwait-Mumbai flight set to arrive on Friday, has been rescheduled to fly directly from Jeddah to Mumbai. I-A’s special flight from Kuwait to Mumbai (Flight IC-1576) will arrive in Mumbai at 6 am on Friday.

Among those returning home, there was considerable talk of the scene at Kuwait Airport on Wednesday night. ‘‘Crowds grew by the minute, queues for security check-up wound down to the roads and the flight information flap boards began listing delayed/ curtailed flights,’’ says J. Chandrika (35), who works as domestic help in Kuwait. She’s on her way to Thiruvananthapuram. She couldn’t get an Air India ticket, so she took an Emirates flight. Her luggage, too, hasn’t arrived.

Antao works as a secretary in a company that markets tiles. She has lived in Kuwait for five years and has never seen so much of US military presence there as in the past three months. ‘‘Shopping arcades that generally remain open till 10.30 pm began downing their shutters by 7 pm,’’ she says.

The first flight mostly carried employees of S.K. Engineering, a Korean company that takes contracts for Kuwait National Petrochemicals. ‘‘We were working on a project that involved rebuilding the oil refineries damaged during Gulf war,’’ says a foreman Malcolm Lopez. The company stopped operations on Tuesday.