A surprising villain’s revealed in the final reel

Choose your villains wisely. King Con, more often than not, is someone you least expect it to be. A bit like the avuncular Ashok Kumar in Jewel Thief. While travelling is a great learning experience, this pearl of wisdom dawned on me by the better half’s inability to do so. 

Last Dec, I called my credit card concierge to use my stockpiled points, for booking a domestic air ticket for her. A helpful person on the other end of the line gave us some flight options, and we chose one. But when the airline we had selected saw mass flight cancellations that month, we cancelled her Dec 7 ticket, two days before she was to travel, and started seeking a refund of what I had paid for the ticket, plus reversal of the credit card points I had used. For months, the card helpline played a recorded message, saying that if the call was about refunds for cancelled flights of x airline, the same would reflect shortly. 

As annus horribilis 2026 unfolded and the West Asia war started on Feb 28, chasing this refund fell low on my priority list. Until I teased a senior official of the multi-billion-and-strengthening-dollar airline, about withholding a few thousand of my free-fall rupee. Saying this simply wasn’t possible, the very next day the official sent me a factsheet of how the airline had issued the refund to an online travel agency (OTA), used by the card company to make the booking, on Dec 5 itself – the day we made the cancellation! Shocked, I contacted the OTA, which sheepishly admitted that, yes, it had been just sitting on my money, interest-free for nearly six months. 

Wondering how many more PLUs were out there, with pending refunds that the OTA was hoping we would forget about, so that it could pocket the same, I excitedly broke the good news to my better half. That was a tactical error. 

“So, have you got the money,” she asked. “No, but now I at least know who has it,” I replied, putting on a brave face. When the OTA finally refunded my money, I felt bad for the airline. It had suffered like Jameel Jamali in Dhurandhar, who, at the movie’s very end, turns out not to have been the villain we had assumed him to be. And to the revealed villain, I say, “Et tu, OTA!” 

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