The leopards within
There were a whole bunch of us going to Nasik, incidentally, and all traveling by rented A/C cab. Due to our numbers, I suggested to my assistant, MJ, that we reserve in advance.
“No, no, no, never necessary,” he said. “I will call one hour in advance and inform you the driver name at 7:30 AM only.”
I pressed the point.
He pressed back.
At 7 AM on Saturday, K dragged me out of bed and we got ready to leave. At 7:30, MJ called as promised.
“I am sorry to inform there are no more cars available.”
You don’t say.
MJ gave half-hourly updates with fluctuating departure times, until he finally found us a car.
“And the driver’s name, MJ?”
Pause.
“He is a server. He does not have a name.”
Right.
About forty-five minutes after our last update’s promised departure, a car careened into our parking lot, and a very elderly and frail nameless Sikh man jumped out and started screeching in Hindi at us something about how someone else had told him our building was somewhere else, which was evidently our fault. He stood by as K and I attempted to shoehorn our bags into the tiny, dented vehicle, aggressively demanding instant payment.
Having given up on finding seatbelts, K and I settled in to sleep. Seconds later, we were woken up by nails-on-blackboard ululation emerging from the battered tapedeck. I mimed “turning it down” to the driver, and he complied. For about ten minutes. Meanwhile, the cab was getting stiflingly hot. I was about to roll down the windows, when I remembered we’d paid for an A/C cab. I asked the driver to turn it on. Instead, he hopefully angled a small, filth-encrusted ceiling-mounted fan directly at my face, and turned it on, showering me with dust. When I protested, he shrugged, and angled it so it cooled his neck instead. Eventually, I got him to turn on the A/C. For about ten minutes.
The rest of the five-hour car trip went like this: Request A/C. Get offered fan. Get A/C for a brief period of time. Start to fall asleep. Wake up to the strangled cats singing Sikh prayer songs. Ask for the volume to be turned down. Try to get to sleep again to the melodious strains of our driver chanting at full volume to make up for the fact that the tape player is now emitting 140 decibels instead of 150. Repeat sequence again.
The car journey between Mumbai and Nasik is apparently rather perilous, and hence our driver’s abrupt stop in the middle of traffic, in the middle of the lane, atop a bridge, and his getting out and performing some sort of prayer ritual involving throwing things into the river below, while cars honked and (barely) zoomed around us. Then, too, when the terrain got treacherous and the car crawled along the mountain ledges in a de facto four-lane highway designed for two, our driver did his best to ensure our – or perhaps just his – security in the form of entry into Sikh heaven, by zealously clapping along with the chants. If I got upset because this required him to take both hands off the steering wheel, that was surely just me sweating the small stuff and losing the big picture of what’s truly important in the long run.
But we made it ok and before the opening ceremonies of the four-day seminar my team was hosting, even with the prayer stop, and even with that other time when our driver just pulled into a rest stop and wandered off for half an hour without a word to us, leaving us melting in the car, and another unscheduled stop which seemed to be due to his need to pay his bills. Naturally, when we reached our destination and as we tried to carve our bags free from the gummy hatchback interior, he stood around and started to demonstrate that most of the limited English words he knew were connected to asking for a tip.
“Tip?” I exploded. “Here’s a tip. Try using the A/C and driving with both…” but K gently hustled me into the hotel lobby before I could really work up a proper screed.
Thus ended the exogenous stresses to our relationship, and ushered in the ever-present endogenous ones.
At the risk of getting too personal, K and I do not normally share a bed. Or rather, we occupy two twins pushed together, due to the unfortunate mix of his twitchiness and my light sleeperliness, the fundamentally opposite and incompatible qualities being not at all a bad metaphor for our relationship. The separate-but-together solution works nicely for both of us, which is also not a bad metaphor for our relationship.
Our hotel room had just one double bed. In practice, this meant that I got up at about 1 AM and sort-of dozed while contorted onto the two-foot-long loveseat (I’m short, but I’m not that short), rousing myself about a dozen times and walking over to the bed and elbowing K in the ribs, which generally gets him to stop snoring. For about ten minutes. Curiously, he only snores when I’m not sleeping next to him (or perhaps I’ve just learned to elbow him in my sleep).
I did this willingly, if not cheerfully, because K was giving a talk the next morning. However, that next night, when I hoped to catch up on my sleep prior to my own talk, K opted not to reciprocate taking up the couch, but instead left the room at 5 AM, letting the door slam, and, worse, taking the keys with him, thus breaking the room circuit and cutting off the A/C. It wasn’t one of the simpler contraptions, either, that accepts a Blockbuster card in the slot in lieu of a metal keychain, so it was a good sweltering pitch-black twenty minutes before I was able to find and jam a butterknife in there, by which time I was wide awake and baying for blood.
We more or less patched up, sort of, by the end of the trip, which was good, because my ward for the rest of the week was nothing if not high maintenance (damn novelists!). But, for my own benefit, and for the 2812th time: K and I do not travel well together.
My own talk went off fine, in the sense that the audience was quiet and attentive (unlike at some of the other talks), and only mildly dispiriting in that at the end, one student came up and shyly asked me what one of the really basic terms that my whole talk was predicated upon actually meant. Might have been why I had no questions, come to think of it.
At another point during the program, my staff threw me onstage and asked me to entertain the audience for about twenty minutes while they tracked down the car that accidentally drove off with our musicians’ instruments in the trunk.
I thought telling jokes was probably a bad idea. (“I just flew into Nasik, and boy… Hey, anyone here from Malagaon?...Is this thing on?”) But we did have a pile of baseball caps to give away, so, with K in the wings to make sure I actually got the answers correct, I launched into an impromptu trivia quiz. It was not a particularly international-news-oriented crowd (Q: “What animal is the symbol of the Democratic party of the U.S.?” A: “The dragon?”), so I ended up pitching ever-gentler lobs.
Q: "What is the second-largest U.S. state?” (The audience had attended a talk on Alaska earlier that morning.)
A: "Canada?"
On the other hand, and to be fair, I also used one of K’s scribbled questions, “What is the only state to contain the name of another country?” – looking, of course, for “New Mexico.”
A: "Indiana?”
Give the man in the third row a hat!
“No, no, no, never necessary,” he said. “I will call one hour in advance and inform you the driver name at 7:30 AM only.”
I pressed the point.
He pressed back.
At 7 AM on Saturday, K dragged me out of bed and we got ready to leave. At 7:30, MJ called as promised.
“I am sorry to inform there are no more cars available.”
You don’t say.
MJ gave half-hourly updates with fluctuating departure times, until he finally found us a car.
“And the driver’s name, MJ?”
Pause.
“He is a server. He does not have a name.”
Right.
About forty-five minutes after our last update’s promised departure, a car careened into our parking lot, and a very elderly and frail nameless Sikh man jumped out and started screeching in Hindi at us something about how someone else had told him our building was somewhere else, which was evidently our fault. He stood by as K and I attempted to shoehorn our bags into the tiny, dented vehicle, aggressively demanding instant payment.
Having given up on finding seatbelts, K and I settled in to sleep. Seconds later, we were woken up by nails-on-blackboard ululation emerging from the battered tapedeck. I mimed “turning it down” to the driver, and he complied. For about ten minutes. Meanwhile, the cab was getting stiflingly hot. I was about to roll down the windows, when I remembered we’d paid for an A/C cab. I asked the driver to turn it on. Instead, he hopefully angled a small, filth-encrusted ceiling-mounted fan directly at my face, and turned it on, showering me with dust. When I protested, he shrugged, and angled it so it cooled his neck instead. Eventually, I got him to turn on the A/C. For about ten minutes.
The rest of the five-hour car trip went like this: Request A/C. Get offered fan. Get A/C for a brief period of time. Start to fall asleep. Wake up to the strangled cats singing Sikh prayer songs. Ask for the volume to be turned down. Try to get to sleep again to the melodious strains of our driver chanting at full volume to make up for the fact that the tape player is now emitting 140 decibels instead of 150. Repeat sequence again.
The car journey between Mumbai and Nasik is apparently rather perilous, and hence our driver’s abrupt stop in the middle of traffic, in the middle of the lane, atop a bridge, and his getting out and performing some sort of prayer ritual involving throwing things into the river below, while cars honked and (barely) zoomed around us. Then, too, when the terrain got treacherous and the car crawled along the mountain ledges in a de facto four-lane highway designed for two, our driver did his best to ensure our – or perhaps just his – security in the form of entry into Sikh heaven, by zealously clapping along with the chants. If I got upset because this required him to take both hands off the steering wheel, that was surely just me sweating the small stuff and losing the big picture of what’s truly important in the long run.
But we made it ok and before the opening ceremonies of the four-day seminar my team was hosting, even with the prayer stop, and even with that other time when our driver just pulled into a rest stop and wandered off for half an hour without a word to us, leaving us melting in the car, and another unscheduled stop which seemed to be due to his need to pay his bills. Naturally, when we reached our destination and as we tried to carve our bags free from the gummy hatchback interior, he stood around and started to demonstrate that most of the limited English words he knew were connected to asking for a tip.
“Tip?” I exploded. “Here’s a tip. Try using the A/C and driving with both…” but K gently hustled me into the hotel lobby before I could really work up a proper screed.
Thus ended the exogenous stresses to our relationship, and ushered in the ever-present endogenous ones.
At the risk of getting too personal, K and I do not normally share a bed. Or rather, we occupy two twins pushed together, due to the unfortunate mix of his twitchiness and my light sleeperliness, the fundamentally opposite and incompatible qualities being not at all a bad metaphor for our relationship. The separate-but-together solution works nicely for both of us, which is also not a bad metaphor for our relationship.
Our hotel room had just one double bed. In practice, this meant that I got up at about 1 AM and sort-of dozed while contorted onto the two-foot-long loveseat (I’m short, but I’m not that short), rousing myself about a dozen times and walking over to the bed and elbowing K in the ribs, which generally gets him to stop snoring. For about ten minutes. Curiously, he only snores when I’m not sleeping next to him (or perhaps I’ve just learned to elbow him in my sleep).
I did this willingly, if not cheerfully, because K was giving a talk the next morning. However, that next night, when I hoped to catch up on my sleep prior to my own talk, K opted not to reciprocate taking up the couch, but instead left the room at 5 AM, letting the door slam, and, worse, taking the keys with him, thus breaking the room circuit and cutting off the A/C. It wasn’t one of the simpler contraptions, either, that accepts a Blockbuster card in the slot in lieu of a metal keychain, so it was a good sweltering pitch-black twenty minutes before I was able to find and jam a butterknife in there, by which time I was wide awake and baying for blood.
We more or less patched up, sort of, by the end of the trip, which was good, because my ward for the rest of the week was nothing if not high maintenance (damn novelists!). But, for my own benefit, and for the 2812th time: K and I do not travel well together.
My own talk went off fine, in the sense that the audience was quiet and attentive (unlike at some of the other talks), and only mildly dispiriting in that at the end, one student came up and shyly asked me what one of the really basic terms that my whole talk was predicated upon actually meant. Might have been why I had no questions, come to think of it.
At another point during the program, my staff threw me onstage and asked me to entertain the audience for about twenty minutes while they tracked down the car that accidentally drove off with our musicians’ instruments in the trunk.
I thought telling jokes was probably a bad idea. (“I just flew into Nasik, and boy… Hey, anyone here from Malagaon?...Is this thing on?”) But we did have a pile of baseball caps to give away, so, with K in the wings to make sure I actually got the answers correct, I launched into an impromptu trivia quiz. It was not a particularly international-news-oriented crowd (Q: “What animal is the symbol of the Democratic party of the U.S.?” A: “The dragon?”), so I ended up pitching ever-gentler lobs.
Q: "What is the second-largest U.S. state?” (The audience had attended a talk on Alaska earlier that morning.)
A: "Canada?"
On the other hand, and to be fair, I also used one of K’s scribbled questions, “What is the only state to contain the name of another country?” – looking, of course, for “New Mexico.”
A: "Indiana?”
Give the man in the third row a hat!
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