This is the exact same thing that happened to my mom.
One time my mom and I were travelling from Singapore to India, if I’m not wrong in a Tiger Airways flight. We were both sitting side to side, with me taking the window seat. We were trying to sleep peacefully. Key word: trying.
And then shit happened. This demonic spawn of a child, according to my mom at least, started kicking on the back of her seat. At this point, I must tell you something. My mother has back injuries, for which she has been in and out of surgery. And then this kid – who wasn’t really a kid actually, she was about 10 years old – was kicking on the exact same spot of her injury. What the hell?
At first, my mom tried to be nice and turned around to ask the kid to stop. The kid stopped. For about 3 seconds. Then she started kicking again. My mom asked again, this time letting in some red, hot chilli into her tone. Did the “kid” listen? God no.
After this happened a few more times, with me trying to calm down my mom in between, my mom turned around exasperated. “Can you stop? How would you feel if I was kicking on your back?” When no response came from the child, my mom turned to the child’s mother, who was pretending that nothing was going on. When mom asked that woman to control her child, this woman rolled her eyes and put her hand on her child. And guess what? The child continued doing what she was doing.
My mom’s anger turned into full blown rage by then. And I too couldn’t take it anymore. So I turned to the child’s mom and said, “Excuse me, my mom isn’t feeling very well right now actually. Can you come here and take her seat? My mom will take my seat and I will move back. We can’t stand it anymore.” That woman, a bit shocked, said okay. If she didn’t say that, my mom would probably have broken her nose. I guess she realized that, and she complied.
And so the two angry Indian ladies were sitting at the front, with me and the devilish kid behind.
If this ever happens to you, at this point you can either plug in your earphones, like what I did, or entertain that child with stories and books, if you are kind enough.
Or you can ask the air hostess to help you.
P. S. We were actually in a connecting flight – from Singapore to Malaysia and then from Malaysia to India. The incident happened in the flight from Malaysia to India. Most of the air hostesses there spoke Malay fluently and we didn’t know Malay. So we actually had trouble before that when we had to ask the air hostess to go to the toilet. The air hostess would speak in Malay to another passenger who would translate it into English or Tamil for us. So since we didn’t know Malay, and we didn’t want to bother others, we didn’t call the air hostess for help, in case you’re wondering why.