India Journal: Can You Give Me a Lift?

Can we say tight squeeze when they all decide to leave?

The photo to the left shows the--shall we call it street?--leading to our house. In fact, it's part street, part parking lot, part junkyard (more on that in another post), and part bazaar. Since it runs next to the zoo and museum, it's a very popular place for lots and lots of tour buses. The problem is, it gets a bit crowded. 

The other day, as our driver turned down the street to complete the remainder of the drive to take the Guru and I home, we encountered a number of buses wanting to leave. This creates a situation of slow-motion pandemonium, with vehicles trying to go in and out of the narrow passage way. Remember: auto rickshaws and motorcycles fill any available gap in any traffic snarl, leaving no unoccupied space. 
  
We faced a looming bus and moved to the left (another vestige of the Brits). We inched and the bus inched, until, finally, we could inch no further. Then bus inched some more. I looked out the window of our nice but very small car to find I could just about stick my tongue out the window and lick the side of the bus. However, I had no desire to do so; quite the opposite. In fact, I began feeling claustrophobic. I suggested to C that we exit; she agreed. We did so and then began the convocation. 

Any attempt to maneuver a car, or almost any other public action, draws a crowd (of men) in India. Indeed, our driver had earlier tried to follow the crowd-sourcing advice only to find our car now lodged under the wheel well of the much higher bus. How the hell, I thought, are we going to get out of this without a lot of metal on metal scraping? Then, before my despair could sink in, and with a flood of cascading syllables that mark the Malayalam language, a group of men literally lifted the rear-end of our car and moved it the the left (even further), far enough to get it out from under the wheel well and allow the bus to pass. Well, continue to inch forward into the next jam.  

The Guru and I got back in, and completed the remainder of the ride to our building, to which we could have walked and saved ourselves 10 minutes, but we would have missed the new meaning of "Hey, can you give me a lift?".