The Day I almost Drowned in a Bombay Cab.

It's so easy for me to sit here and reminisce on the lovely monsoon season back home (see July 25th posting) but the situation back home is not as fresh and pretty as one would imagine. So many parts of the Indian subcontinent are flooding, marooning thousands of people and killing hundreds… and I thought only Bombay had flooding issues.
This would be a good time to tell my story:

Many years ago I was traveling to Bombay to get my American student visa. So there I was, on the 7:15 a.m. Deccan Queen train (best chicken cutlets ever) from Pune to Mumbai, documents all neatly arranged for the 50th time after my mom had asked for the 88th time if I had remembered to carry my passport. Anyway we were chugging along and were half an hour away from our destination when the train stopped suddenly. I looked outside and the tracks were completely flooded. The rain was pounding down hard by this time and I could see people wading alongside the tracks in knee-deep water. We were told the train could not proceed and so we just sat there and waited.

After 2 whole hours of waiting, I was done waiting. A lot of brave people had ventured out and decided to walk to the next station and when the guy sitting next to me got up to leave I was like “I’m coming with you” and so off we went. Getting off the train was like stepping into a muddy swimming pool.

The water was brown and murky as one would imagine but nice and warm (I won’t even think about why). Anyway we (I was with these two train buddies I had acquired that morning) made it the next station, took a rickshaw from there which completely flooded up so then took a cab…mind you rickshaws and cabs were incredibly hard to find and were charging exorbitant amounts of money. It was sheer luck and joy that one of my ‘new friends’ was on an expense account. Love those things.

We were so glad when we finally got into a comfy, dry cab but little did we know what was in store for us. The nincompoop of a driver made one wrong turn 10 minutes into our bumpy but still dry cab ride and as we turned into this lane, I thought it looked pretty well flooded. To confirm my doubts, I observed a bus in front of us-at least half of which was under water…so there I am thinking, ok a bus is about 3 times the height of this cab at the very least…too late sister. Our driver was clearly either blind, a risk-loving livin' on the edge kinda guy or plain stupid.
I started screaming but our cab was clearly floating. Murky black water gushing into our back seat from the boot, the doors, through the windows and my umbrella which I had kept on the floor, floating mockingly in my face. Meanwhile I was pressing my visa papers in the plastic case (thank the lord for plastic) up to the cab ceiling shouting “bachao” “bachao” which if you read my blogs, you should know means 'help' (in an excruciatingly anguished pitch and tone) in Hindi and yes I say it often.

The thing I don’t get to this day is how calm my 'new friends' and the cab driver were. They were, in fact, highly amused by my high-pitch yelling. How resigned to fate the cab driver was, who basically responded to ruining his entire means of livelihood in under 3 seconds with an “arrey baaprey” ("oh dear")
So while I screamed and we continued to drown, a hoard of slum-dwellers ran towards the cab and with great effort pushed us out of the flooded lane…like a tow boat. This is the only case in favor of over-population I have to date.

Our bedraggled saviors laughed hysterically at my panicked shrieks. Clearly I was a newbie to the Bombay flooding 'scene'.
10 minutes later it was over. My papers were dry and that was the good news. I have never been so scared in my life. The story goes on but that was the best part. Let’s just say I got home about 6 hours later. I basically walked most of the way home drenched to the bone (ooh rhyme)and often in waist-deep water.

I love the rain but floods traumatize me.
You have to have been in one to know how horrible and scary this experience can be.