Searching for space

(Again, I cheat - though I promise not to make a habit of it. My paper published this today, but spelled my name wrong. Which, in a strange way, makes it new and unused, right!)

I spent a few days between drivers driving myself between work and home and discovered that perhaps the best thing about being driven, rather than driving, is to have someone else to worry about the parking. Which my new driver does, admirably. He managed to find a nicely shaded spot in the middle of very crowded Kemps Corner with no difficulty, making friendly conversation with the traffic policeman, chuffing the traffic warden and endearing himself to the other drivers jostling for space all the while – I saw them all give him friendly waves and grin at him as we drove off a couple of hours later.

Today, that is nothing short of a small miracle. I remember the days when I had just started to drive myself around town. I was a South Mumbai brat then, and tooled about in my own little car, one that could be nicely squeezed into the smallest spaces that scorned the egress of larger and much-coveted cars like the then-new Mercedes or one of Bhogilal’s antique treasures that occasionally cruised down Scandal Point and Walkeshwar. I also had a pet policeman in Breach Candy, one who beamed fondly at me when I drove past him on the home-college route, one who always managed to find me a parking space right outside Amarsons without my having to do innumerable passes and U-turns and the eventual automobile quick-step to get in almost before someone got out and before someone else got in.

But those days are long gone. Today, finding space outside, say, Crawford Market, is well-nigh impossible. A few weeks ago, I had to do just that, just there. I wanted to do some essential shopping at the vast complex within the rotunda and needed to have the car close by since I had a lot to carry out. The driver dropped me off, was instructed where to be waiting for me and I trotted in. a short while later, I trotted out again, burdened with broccoli, beans, baskets and more and did a little chukker of the parking lot. No car; no driver. Rather irate and sweaty, I traipsed around the lot again. No sign of chariot or navigator. Standing stewing in the sun, I waited. Sure enough, the car arrived, the driver apologetic. He was on his seventh pass of the circle, unable to find space to stop, pushed on by the vigilante policemen on the make and with no way to let me know what was going on.

The situation is no better in an office complex of any sort these days. Where I work, if you drive in after about noon, you need to double or triple or even, in some instances, quadruple park, in a kind of tier effect, where no car except that in the first row can move without causing a lemming-like disturbance of all the others. Which means that drivers need to be in constant attendance, know how to drive various makes and models in order to save time and adjust space, and owners have to control their language, blood pressure and choler when they find themselves hemmed in with no way to get out but like a Harrier taking off from a battleship platform.

And it is almost the same in apartment buildings, too. Where I live, people tend to accumulate vehicles, owning two or three or four cars, one for each member of the family. Which means that the one-per-flat-plus-a-few-spare-for-visitors parking allotment is inevitably full long before everyone who lives there has bedded their autos for the night. An enterprising home-owner in the complex has a solution to this problem, one that he read about or saw on television, we are not quite sure which. Get the parking lifts, he suggests, one for each parking space. Which means that when one car is in, it is lofted up high, and the next parked underneath. What happens when the topmost car is needed first? Or if the struts collapse and the whole shebang comes down in a pile of mangled metal? I wonder what my friendly policeman in Breach Candy thinks of the idea!