What's this!!" a loud and aggressive voice shouts. "Carrying a knife in your hand baggage?!!" Suddenly, I am surrounded by gun-toting commandos as passengers with whom I had been chatting pleasantly a moment ago scatter away from me like I'm an incarnation of the hermit of Tora Bora.

The guns nudge me towards a hidden room where several grim-faced gentlemen, all bearing an uncanny resemblance to a certain American president, await me. I'm strip-searched by a female, built like a Hercules battle tank, who proclaims me 'clean', just like in the movies, and orders me to sit.

The questions come thick and fast and my head reels. No, sir, I have never seen Osama. Yes, of course, I've heard about him. Yes, I'm from India; no, I'm not Muslim. No, I'm not Hindu either. Don't get funny with us, ma'am. If you're from India you got to be Hindu or Muslim. Well, actually, I'm Zoroastrian. Oh, yeah, and what's that? Well, we're sort of immigrants. Oh yeah, from where? Actually, from Persia, sir. Persia? Isn't that the old name for Iran? "She's Iranian!!!!" he bawls out, and I think, dear Ahura Mazda, I'm really in for it now....

Yes, all right, that was just a nightmare. But one that could easily have come true had I not finished with whatever travelling I am likely to do, in the comparatively saner atmosphere of the previous century. It was not I but my mother who actually did travel with a knife in her handbag - a genuine Swiss army knife, a compulsory item on tourist shopping lists in the days when Swiss knives did not flood every Indian mall and street corner. Security at Zurich airport detected the knife, told her that such items had to be confined to her checked-in luggage and had the offending article bagged and given to the stewardess to return to us when we disembarked. No one made an International Incident out of it, or accused her of being another Leila Khalid.

On another occasion, a small case I was carrying opened up just as I was deplaning at Heathrow and out tumbled stacks of tablets I had carried to tame my asthma. The flight attendant, who helped me stuff it all back in, grinned and said cheekily, "Carrying your whole year's supply with you, love?" If that happened today, I would have been hauled off in chains on the suspicion of carrying chemicals with which to poison London's water supply.