A few days ago someone offered me a job. It sounded like great fun, albeit not something I had ever done before, which is probably why it could have been that aforementioned great fun, I think. It had nice money attached, which sweetened the pie a bit. And it had the status that I, in my advanced stage of life, would have done well with tagging to my name. So are you interested, the friend who had set it all up asked me. Yes, I replied. Is the money what you want, he wanted to know. Yes, I replied. Did you like the idea, he demanded. Yes, I replied. Will you take it, he pushed. No, I replied.
My reasons for refusing were simple and in the singular. This new assignment would mandate my moving to Delhi, which I refused to do. I have done it once, survived and even enjoyed my almost-four years in the Indian capital, but the memories of my share of trauma in that city are more than enough to keep me going – going far away from it, that is. My time in Delhi had its high points and many very low ones. But the aspect that will always be something I can dine out on is the driving. The city is not friendly to those who do not know its roads. In fact, it hardly endeared itself to me when I first started driving its streets. It began traumatically – my first foray was from where I worked to where I lived. The normally 20-minute drive took almost three hours. And left me in tears, my family worried and my car’s clutch plate feeling the strain.
I took off when it was still light – a wise move, especially since it was winter, when the sun goes home early and astonishingly quickly. I had clear instructions, down to which right turn I needed to navigate and at what angle. But everyone giving me those instructions forgot that I was a Mumbaikar with Mumbai-ishtyle logic. Traffic being what it was, I was in the wrong lane and couldn’t quite make the right (as in correct) right (as in direction) turn. If I had been a native Delhi-ite, I would have swung across the three lanes that blocked me and turned right when I had been asked to, which would have made life incredibly easy for everyone involved in this little saga.
That done, I go into a stream of vehicles big and small and endless. I couldn’t turn around without breaking about 12 traffic laws and I was too nervous to even try. So I went on trucking and finally found a policeman directing cars around a cow taking a nap en route. When I stopped, honked and asked him how to get to where I wanted to go, sounding probably most pathetic and little-girl-lost-ish (genuine, not contrived), he raised his bushy eyebrows, stared incredulously at me and my car and spat copiously, mercifully in the opposite direction. “Madam, you are in wrong place only,” he said in his terribly fluent idiolect. “You must be going to wrong way.”
Well, yes, I realised that, I argued, but if he would be so good, he could tell me which the right place only was and how I could go not-wrong way to get there. More spitting ensued, and a long description of the lefts and rights I needed to get where I wanted to go. By which time I had no clue where that actually was. Still not yet daunted by the whole drama, I thanked the man in khaki and did a quick U and fled in the direction I had come from. Unfortunately for me and my Mumbaiyya logic, my place of origin seemed to have moved elsewhere by the time I got there, leaving me totally lost and not making good time, unlike Marvin the Paranoid Android who could hitchhike his way around the galaxy if only he had got the right instructions.
It took me about six months of tearfully winding around the circles and blundering about the streets of Delhi to figure out how to get anywhere. Suddenly, once day, it all came into place – the right place – sort of in the way telling time and skipping rope happened to me. Today, I can, without too much trauma to myself, my car and the general populace, find my way around the metropolis that was once home to me. And today, thank fate, I don’t need to!
No comments:
Post a Comment