…is the devil at work. It took me about three hours to get to work one morning last week. Which, for a 45-minute drive on a good day, is a rather long commute, even by rush-hour Mumbai standards. The reason for this is very simple: It poured all the previous, all night and all morning and was dripping sadly on all the roofs of this vast office complex throughout the day. So parts of the city which are under normal circumstances fairly badly affected by changes in weather were badly hit, with potholes, puddles and pedestrians galore, all of them sadly soggy and stroppy with it.
So we started out at the usual time, and drove about five minutes down the road in driving rain. And, as we emerged from the small stretch of subway that connected our street with the one that led to the main highway, the driver said with a sudden urgency in his normally lazy tone, “Madam, the wiper has stopped working.” Having just had the entire mechanics of the windscreen wipers changed just a few days earlier, I was, justifiably rather panic stricken and told him to go back home. Father was on the phone – on what seemed to be an interminable conversation – and I called from my mobile, then from the intercom at the gate and then, if I could have stood there in the downpour and yelled, I would have, but I couldn’t, so I didn’t. Then the chappie in charge of the building came along and did a bit of a twiddle with the wiper, it started chugging away merrily and that, as the story ends, was that.
But lightning forgot the rule and struck again in the same place that evening. As we drove out of the office complex towards home, it was drizzling grouchily, enough to make me want to hurry home, but not enough to worry too much about flooding and the downside of being the monsoon season. We were diverted, however, from our usual route and sent the long way home, which was fine, since we knew that that road would not have too many puddles, potholes or pedestrians galore, all of them sadly soggy and stroppy with it. But, just as we completed the turnaround, Small Car’s little nose skewing valiantly towards its normal berth, far away as it may be, the driver said, “Madam, the wiper has stopped working.”
It was déjà vu. I was sure it was the vertigo (now developed into another story with another twist which shall be told another day) at work and I was hearing things from my not-so-distant past. I knew it was, in fact, since the words were the same and the situation, uncannily similar. Then I woke myself up and looked at what was going on. The wiper on the driver’s side was indeed stopped, caught under the other in a glorious tangle. Stop the car, I wearily instructed, get out and untangle the damn thing. Aforementioned driver did so. He got back in and restarted…no go. The wiper sat there, obdurate, a pout to its lower lip – if it could have a lower lip, that is. But home was a-calling and we drove on, praying for no rain, please god, no rain.
Someone somewhere was listening. There was no rain. By the time we got home, it was starting to grizzle, threatening to drizzle, but apart from one fat splash that could have been a tree shedding its extra burden of water from overloaded leaves, there was nothing to cause me more than a subtle hint of worry. Maybe a wave of blackness as the world spun, maybe a distinct feeling that my feet were leaving the ground they should have been resting on, maybe a gentle reminder that all was not completely well with my semi-circular canals. But no more, no rain, no need for a wiper to work. And, having scheduled for the driver to take the car in to be fixed so that it could be wiped while I hung on to Father for a day of rarely-demanded reassurance of stability and watched the world go around with the knowledge that I was still on it, worked for me, even though it all didn’t quite work that way in the end. No reassurance, no hanging on, no knowledge. And no rain.
Or maybe it was the rain gods who did that.
No comments:
Post a Comment