It’s officially monsoon. It basically hasn’t rained at all since I arrived in Delhi but no worries, global warming hasn’t screwed with the rainy season too much because I got caught in an epic (for the little American, ordinary for Delhiites) downpour on my way home in an auto today. Riding in an autorickshaw is always an adventure because they are tiny, rickety three wheeled motorcycles that sputter and fart exhaust and are only higher on the Delhi road food chain than pedestrians and cyclists. Everything can be and seems to be life-threatening when there are no seat belts and no doors.
Autos in the monsoon aren’t necessarily life-threatening but they are also (literally) no joy ride. So very low on the pecking order, everything splashes you through the nonexistent doors with the sewage laden brown muck that passes as rainwater in Delhi. Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, the auto will have a plastic sack hanging over one of the door openings to help deflect 1/76th of the rain. I wasn’t so lucky today. So I ought to be fair and admit that I was already soaked before the engine flooded and I was forced out of the auto onto the sidewalk while the autowalla tried valiantly, for 20 minutes, to get it restarted. Once he did, he drove me another 500 meters before refusing to go down either road that would take me home. Before you bemoan the innate laziness of the heathen Indian, I should point out that there was at least 2 feet of standing water on each road. So this brown kid played a little urban Survivor which included, among other things, performing a long-jump over a murky river of sewage (to general applause from the men who had by then gathered to watch), climbing onto people’s fences and swinging across tree limbs like Tarzan. Really, all I was missing was the loin cloth. I wish I could tell you how successful I was and that I made it home without dipping my feet in the toxic sludge but I was thwarted just feet from the house by, as my pal Coleridge put it, “water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” (For real, touch it and grow an extra leperous limb, never mind what might happen if you swallowed) This, I suppose, is real life in India. Jai Hind indeed.
