May 1998
Dear India Watchers,
My wife and I played in a raging sewer today and enjoyed ourselves entirely. We did that by simply taking a walk during a tremendous downpour. We see heavy rains everyday, now that we’re in the monsoon season. My understanding of the word monsoon, before now, was that it is a severe tropical rainstorm, sort of like a hurricane. The word, as used (and experienced) by us here, is much more synonymous with the words winter or spring. It’s a season.
The first big rains hit yesterday, though it has been raining off and on for a week or so now. We had gone to the Oberoi, one of the nice 5 star hotels in town, to get our hair cut. My wife went to the beauty shop on the ladies’ side, and I visited the barber. When we were finished it was really raining hard. Our driver drove us home in the ferocious storm. As we went up the hill to where we live, the rain came down even harder, causing the water rushing down the street toward us to get heavier by the minute. We reached the ridge and drove on the down-hill road, at best a narrow two-lane alley, that takes us to the street where we live. Driving down that way with the car lashed by wind-blown torrential rains, we were increasingly alarmed by the magnitude of the storm. Waterfalls poured out of gutters and openings in the walls along the road, and raging creeks streamed from the mouths of the side streets we passed. Is this sounding like Noah yet: “The windows of the firmament opened and the fountains of the deep sprang forth…”?
As we drove further and further down the road, the water grew deeper and ran faster and faster. We had to swerve around many stalled cars. When we reached the bottom, we were stopped by a back-up of stalled cars, or cars that could not get through the several feet of water with several inches of gravel (shoddily laid blacktop and rocks) that filled the intersection at the bottom of the road. Somehow, our driver miraculously turned the van around in the middle of the road. He had to go back and forth only a few feet at a time or else we would have been stuck in the deep trenches on either side. When we were perpendicular to the road, across its center, we could look back up. It truly felt like the van was in the middle of a raging mountain stream. The water wasn’t really too deep, just six inches or so, but the speed of the water alarmed me. Hasmukh got us going back up the hill in spite of a fuel line problem the van has right now causing the engine to idle every few minutes. About a block or two back up the road we asked our driver to stop at an apartment building where another officer, my boss’s boss, and his wife lives and knocked on the door. Being the very nice people they are, they warmly welcomed us in and said the “trauma” of the drive was a good excuse to open a bottle of medicinal wine! After a half hour or so, Hasmukh came to the door and told us the water was down and we could go home. What an adventure!
We experienced another rain adventure, demonstrating again how great our driver is, last night. Nita and I went to a 5:30 movie that was over around 8:00 or so. We got out to the lobby and discovered another torrential downpour in progress, causing the theater’s lobby and front steps under the large overhanging marquee to be packed solid with people. We wondered where our van and driver would be and how we could possibly find it and him in the crush and pouring rain. Still, we forged our way to the front of the crowd only to find the van parked right in front of the theater. We continued down the steps, wondering where Hasmukh was when suddenly, he magically appeared with a smile and our two giant golf umbrellas. We dashed to the car, he opened and shut the door for us as usual, and he drove away. He then brilliantly got us home, dodging water filled intersections, stalled cars, heavy traffic, and who knows what else. He is off duty at 6:00 and we were home by 8:30. He gets 40 rupees an hour for overtime, and so I should have given him about 100. We were so pleased and impressed with his great feats, I gave him 200 rupees, the equivalent of $5.00. We had thought about going out to eat, but didn’t, and with a wife and two kids, any extra income probably comes in handy. Besides, he earned it.
Today during another downpour, not quite like yesterday afternoon, but still big, we went out and watched. The water raging down our street actually sounded like a roaring mountain stream. We took pictures of it all, then we played in the water itself. Are you wondering why, at the beginning of this letter, I called it a raging sewer? Because any Bombay street, to one degree or another, functions as a sewer. Hopefully, by the time we got there, most of the worst had washed away, though you can be sure we showered well after we were done.
Much (glug, glug) love (gurgle, gurgle),
Me
