The Untoward Incident

(Please scroll down to the very end and start reading from the last blog if you want to make any sense of what I'm writing. Inconvenience deeply regretted!!)

The rain had become a constant companion. And I liked the rain very much because when it rained too much I could take an off from work. I could afford to take offs since I was new to the job and hardly had any responsibilities. Life was wet and beautiful.


It was the 6th of July, 2006.
I must include here that the 5th of July, 2006 was a significant day for us grads. We had succesfully completed one month in the corporate office and still had smiles on our faces and no dark circles under our eyes (mission impossible). My Borivali friend who had come to say at our little flat (cause the highway was water-logged and she couldn't go back home- ref. previous blog), my room-mates and I had celebrated by going out for lunch in the downpour.

Now that she had gone back to Borivali, and Office had an off (yippee), there were just 4 of us left for each other.


We thought since we had an off, we should settle all pending chores. The most important being, filling gas in the cooking cylinder. You know, one of those portable ones that have a stove over the cylinder.

Three out of the four of us set out with the empty cylinder towards the market.

To get to the market, we had to walk by the Andheri-Vikhroli Link road. Thats a huge two laned highway and usually a busy one during peak hours. Today, at 11 a.m., there weren't too many cars. Just lots of water.


It was drizzling so we had our jackets and umbrellas. I looked the funniest though. I had my trousers rolled up and a baggy jacket on me. In my left hand I held the empty cylinder and the right one had the umbrella. But the cylinder was bulky and awkward, so, I wasn't too sure whether I should have held it in the other hand. So I kept switching the cylinder from one hand to the other. The umbrella kept wobbling above my head. So my glasses got little spots of rain water on them. So now I couldn't see too clearly.


One of the more feminine of my roomies began chattering with the depressed one about some chap she met at the NDA Ball. Undulating voices kept falling on my ears occasionally, but my concentration was on the awkward cylinder.


Lost in their conversation, the two girls walked ahead while I ambled behind, still unable to decide which hand should get to hold the cylinder.


Suddenly, while fumbling, I walked straight into my roomie!

"Watch it!!" I yelled irritatingly. The umbrella wobbled dangerously above my head.

But my roomie didn't respond. I followed her gaze. Squinting through the water spots on my glasses, I saw a white Alto, racing at top speed towards us from the distance.


He kept switching lanes like a snake, except he was too fast.

As he reached a break in the road divider near us, an old Esteem turned into our side of the highway for a U-turn.


The rest was a blur.


The two cars rammed into each other with such velocity, that, the Alto swung out from the left lane and started spinning towards us. The depressed one froze in her tracks. The feminine one and I began to run backwards, eyes still gaping open at the spinning Alto. Before we could react properly, the Alto spun into a row of rickshaws! Two rickshaws toppled over into the ditch by the road side. But the impact set off all the other rickshaws into motion! The third rickshaw hit the fourth, the fourth smashed into the fifth and .... HOLY F***.... !!!!!!


The fifth rickshaw was where the feminine one and I had reached in our retreat! And for that fraction of a second, I cursed myself for running. The fifth rickshaw ran over the feminine ones foot and crashed straight into my right forearm... which was now holding the cylinder.


The Alto spun to a screeching halt. The rickshaws stopped trembling. I stopped trembling. Suddenly, there was pin-drop silence. Nothing stirred...

"Yeeeeeaaaaaooooowwww!!!" the feminine one decided to break the silence. "Maaaaaaaayyyyyy toooooooeeeeeeeee........!!!!"
Her toe? What?
Tapri wallas and rickshaw wallas came a-runnin.
"Kya hua mai-dum? (What's wrong ma'am?)" a vada-walla asked her.
"Mera toe bleed ho raha hai! (My toe is bleeding)" she cried.
I looked at her toe. It had a bright red speck gathering on the surface.
"Aap log hospital chale jao mai-dum. Kuch toota hoga to baandh denge na voh."
(You ought to go the Hospital ma'am. If anything's broken, they'll fix it up)
I didn't want to go to hospital for God's sake! Nothing was wrong. I didn't feel anything.

"Arre! Yeh mai-dum ke haath se cylinder nikaalo koi!" somebody yelled.
Suddenly, everybody ambushed me from all sides and started tugging at my cylinder.
"Chor! Chor! (Thief)" I started yelling.
"Chor nahi mai-dum, cylinder de do. Aapka haath theek hai na? (Not a thief ma'am. Is your hand alright?)" A policeman asked.

I looked at my arm for the first time. It felt alright. Actually, I felt nothing. The cylinder was still hanging from my fingers. "Theek hai. (Its ok)" I replied.

"Toot gaya hai lagta hai (I think it's broken)!" Someone said.
"Of course it's not broken! I'm alright!" I said vehemently. Last thing I wanted was a plaster.

The policemen went to the Alto owner, who now stepped out of his car with a huge cell phone at his ear.
"Kuch nahi kuch nahi!" he bellowed into the phone. "Everyone is alive."
'ALIVE??' I thought.

"I'll talk to the police and see if I can settle it." he said and cut the phone.

His car was smashed from the side. The front wheel had twisted out of its place. The headlights were shattered and the door had broken off.
The Esteem's bonnet had crumpled up. The Esteem owner was fuming. I thought I saw smoke coming out of his ears. The police called for a tow-van for the two cars and took the whole scene to the police station.

Well, luckily, I hadn't broken anything. We went ahead to the market and finished our chores as planned. Funniest thing was, the depressed one escaped it all, simply because she didn't react!

For the next 3 days, I was sporting a swollen, black n blue forearm.

Dekho baarish ho rahi hai.. Its raining, its raining, its raaaaaaaiiiiiiininnnnnnng!!!

Bombay rains are so famous. If I write anything about the rains it'll be a 'seen it-heard about it' kind of thing. It's started raining in Pune and I miss the Bombay rains.. so I'm going to write about them anyway!

When we were staying at the hotel (that was sometime in June last year), I enjoyed the rains. You see, the window of the hotel room had a ledge outside it, that, was wide enough for a person to sit on (provided your legs were dangling off it).
So every evening, when it would start to rain, my hotel mates and I would dangle our legs off the ledge and look at cars passing by on the flyover yonder. He he... yonder matlab... must have been some 600-700 metres away.
The rain would wet our feet and the breeze on the 3rd floor was just mind blowing (not literally).

By the time we had shifted out of the hotel into our tiny flat, the rains had gotten worse.

It's just like in the movies. One minute you're walking dry, the next minute you're soaking wet! I remember, one Friday, a friend of mine and I were walking to a bus stop on the highway nearby. We had to go to Borivali. And while walking, I felt a drop on my face. My friend felt a drop or two as well. Then we were wet.
There's no point in carrying an umbrella. By the time you've opened it the rain's done its job!

At office, everybody used to talk about 26th July. The day when Bombay got flooded with rain water so bad, thousands of people died. Everyone talked about it like it was the Holocaust or something. I guess they're justified. The stories about people flowing away, children drowning before their parents, electrocutions...
And people at office talked about how, inspite of the adversity, everyone managed to complete deadlines and deliveries as scheduled.

This July, it started flooding again.
Everyday News channels used to telecast gory stories about water levels rising and roads being closed down. And News channels like to put an ounce of mirch-masala to the story na, so my parents went crazy.
"You come back home! Why you have to go to office?" Mumma used to keep yelling over the phone. I never listened anyway.
"Ata meech tithe yete!! (Now I'll only come there!!)"
Arre baap-re!!!
"Nako!!!! Please ithe yeu nako! (DONT come here!)"
"Ka?? Ka nahi yeycha? (Why cant I come?)"
"Are you can't swim nah! How will you reach my place?"
That would quieten her down a bit. But only a bit. Next day she'd call again.

My dad was a little calmer. He told me to buy a bottle of Dettol and some Crocin. You see the rains are likely to carry water-borne diseases with it. And these can affect your feet if you're lucky! So it's always better to keep disinfectants.
He he, the most innovative thing he told me was, "Buy a bottle of aftershave."
"Haan???"
"Aftershave is a good disinfectant. Everytime you get your feet wet, come home and put aftershave on your feet. It'll keep them from getting sore."
To tell you it actually worked! Where people were complaining about smelly feet and cracks, my feet smelled amazing! And they stayed soft throughout the monsoon! Awesome!

Once, the water levels rose waist-high on the highway near Marol. A friend of mine had to walk in waist-high water to get to office.
And the guy strolled in happily onto the carpetted floor of the office, wet shoes, drenched shirt and all!
That evening, another friend of mine couldn't go back home to Borivali. So she came to stay with us for a night. There were 5 of us in the flat now and having a blast!
Next day, it was still raining. So she couldn't go home.

The 5 of us had lunch at a restaurant nearby. Water here was only ankle deep, so we could walk.
After lunch, when we stepped out in the rain, I felt so good I wanted to go for a walk in the rain. Everyone shot the idea down with a rifle ofcourse... But my Borivali friend thought I was a genius!!!

Luck is wonderful, because I found a small park opposite the restaurant that made my eyes sparkle! So my friend and I went to the park for a walk in the rain and the others went home thinking we had lost it.

I'll tell you something honestly... there's nothing like losing it once in a while.

It was a walk to remember...

Shelter at last...

When classroom training ended 2 weeks later, we went onto hands on training. We were allotted to temporary teams to see how people work, what the work environment is like, what the general attitude across the floor is...

We went through the hands-on for a week or so, after which there was a combination of classroom and hands-on. I felt like I was back in college doing practicals.

But there were bigger matters to worry about. Our 3 weeks at the hotel were nearly up and we still didn't have a place to live. We'd been roaming around in the vicinity of the office for a few days, but nothing fit the bill. It's like they say, if you're meant to get something, you'll get alright, but only at the time you're supposed to. No matter how hard you try before that, you just wont get it.
After numerous afternoons travelling from one corner of Andheri to another, we finally got a flat. And how!
An uncle of one of the girls I was staying with at the hotel, practically handed it to us on a platter. And we loved it! It was a decent place... more importantly... the money and the location were perfect.

When we finalised it, only two of us were supposed to live in it. But a few days after getting possession, suddenly, there were four!
Bombay is all about adjusting, they say. So we adjusted.

Office and flat became a new world for me, and very soon, flat became home. Initially, we had a congenial atmosphere in the flat. In the coming months, that changed.

For the first time in my life, I learnt how difficult it is to live with three other people, who are nothing, even remotely, like you. I wasn't used to this sort of living. They had some experience of hostels and PGs. Inspite of the experience, things started to darken between us.

The fun we'd had at the hotel, stopped. One misunderstanding led to another. One was too sensitive, the other too blatant, another, too depressed, and another, too idealistic. But none willing to see from the other's point of view. Things began to crumble.

And I just wanted to go back home.