A week before tomorrow…

This space was actually reserved for cribbing about the likes of Airtel and other people who had been giving me a hard time over the last month or so. More than them, my so called bad attitude as well… but then as luck would have it I’ve got some better tales to tell which started
off from a week before tomorrow!

Well I guess it was pretty much a normal day, sitting in office for the usual drudgery. Of course there was something unique about it since as soon as I walked in, there was all sorts of preparations going. Got me wondering… What the heck is up?! 20 mins and a couple of emails had me also sitting there getting ready for a conference call. Won’t go into details about what was happening, but the outcome of it was that I was informed that I was now to lead a team.
Time goes on and it makes you wonder how quickly the weather changes. What started out as a sunny day was now really dark with cloud cover and rain lashing down, making you wonder if Mumbai had been engulfed by the ‘dark side’! The rain just kept coming and kind of made one feel that someone up in heaven had left the water running…

Another email later and we were rounding up people to go to Andheri station where we were hoping against hope that we’d get a train. It was to later turn out that this would remain what we thought it would, just a hope!

Everyone was ready to go and we descended the stairs of the building… I saw the waves in the basement hitting the stairs and I thought, “Well perhaps things will be better out on the road.” Wrong again mate! Getting to the road itself involved hiking through water that was flowing and hitting us just below the knees. And once we were out the gate of our complex, it got even worse. We suddenly found ourselves making it to the middle of the road, just to get out of what was now well above knee deep water.

It’s a times like this that people want to have some fun, and I had colleagues constantly trying to pull my umbrella away that I was grasping onto with dear life. Not that it mattered really, since I was anyway already wet from head to toe. That way it probably made sense to close the umbrella, but then I didn’t want my bag getting any wetter than it had to, especially since I had decided to put my phone in it…

Knee deep went to waist deep. People were just sitting in their cars… Made me wonder, will they even reach home today, cause the water wasn’t receding and the cars weren’t moving. It was kind of fun going through the rain, but then we didn’t really know the seriousness of the situation till we hit the highway. That was when we saw it all. Sometimes you wonder what havoc is and trust me, what I saw at the flyover was havoc. People shouting, asking questions, roads to the station being blocked off due to too much water flowing down them, and of course people being carried off from various places. To add to it you had the drops of water pelting down from the sky along with the honking of all the vehicles around…

The group split here. Some needed to head off towards the north, the rest further into Andheri. So we split, those headed north decided to keep to the highway with a hope of getting some transport later on. The rest of us started our way into Andheri. This however, took one detour, since one person wanted to go to Vile Parle, so me and another guy decided to accompany her there and then get back to Andheri since we live fairly nearby to the station. At the second highway junction, the one that went to the west end of Andheri, we bid adieu to two guys and then went on our journey into Vile Parle.

Now, Vile Parle was kind of interesting… empty in-roads and jam packed roads leading to the highway… Hmmm… I wonder why?! Well we walked and walked and walked, oh and did I mention that we walked? J Kept going through all sorts of lanes, not knowing what was lying below the flowing water ahead of us. Was kind of scary actually, especially when your companions decide to tell stories about people getting sucked down open manholes…

So finally we reached the destination and dropped off the person that needed to be dropped off and then started to figure our way back to the highway, which basically just meant following the same roads, but then you know how that is… Oh yeah, and we were like really cold and needed to really needed to answer nature’s howls and pleas to us… I’m not going into any details, but it was relief to have that howling out of my head!

So it was through the gray skies and drops of water that we kept going until we were on the flyover that connects east with west. Again had to go through patches of knee deep water, which, by now was normal. But what I saw from the flyover really amazed me. I just looked down at the railway tracks and there were hordes of people just walking along them, like some exodus. Was amazing, how nothing could kill people’s spirits out there. It was like just keep walking until you reach home!

Upon reaching the west it was now time for me and my friend to go our own ways. I had a simple walk home, but my friend I was to later learn had some adventures which I’m sure he’ll remember forever! Reaching home wasn’t the most enlightening thing, especially since there was no light. Well no light as in no electricity, there were candles and one lamp on… Was a real dampner at that point. Was cold and hungry and it didn’t look like I was going to get a hot shower for some time.

So in the end, there I was sitting at home in the dark, with just a cell phone, that while working, couldn’t call anyone else since no one else’s phone was working. I just had to sit there wondering, what everyone was up to and of course whether me getting into being a team lead had anything to do with the rains! ;-) As for the others, well, whatever adventures they were going to have, I did come to know of them later, but then that’s another story and shall be told another time. For now, this post is already too long and if your still here reading well then… KOOL!

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going”