The Return

You know you’re in trouble when your Uber driver starts hitting himself in the head and repeating “So sorry Ma’am.” He drives a little farther, then stops, hits himself with both hands and says, ”All my fault, Ma’am.” It’s particularly alarming when he was driving you to the airport to catch your flight and suddenly turned down a small dirt side road past people chopping the heads off fish and chickens. (Animal chopping seems to be a theme for me in Kolkata.) At some point he realizes he’s lost and he’s waaay off his Uber gps and doesn’t know if we will get there in time. Fan-fucking-tastic, Einstein, that’s why you have a gps.

In short, he asked a lot of people, got some consensus, then turned down a few more roads. “Taking you to back of the airport. Short cut.” Pretty sure airports don’t have back doors like Indian Railways. Pretty damn sure you need to go in the front door and past security. Sure enough, we end up behind all the runways at a big fence lined with garbage and men pissing and have to drive all the way around the airport. When we got to the domestic departures entrance our Uber bill was massive since we were billed for all the time we were driving around lost. The driver panicked again and to avoid watching him give himself a concussion we paid him the amount it had taken to get to our guest house from the airport. He was extremely grateful and kept repeating, “my fault, Ma’am.” Finally I said, “yes, all your fault,” and we were off.

We checked in with enough time for G & K to locate some $8 veggie chips and me to get fried veg momos au gratin. That’s the cheesy Tibetan equivalent to a deep-fried Mars bar. A serious gilding of the momo lily and it was glorious.

Everyone made her flight and I was back on my way to Delhi. Simple enough, take the metro from the airport to the New Delhi Railway, walk to Pahar Ganj and get my bags from A. before heading back for my flight home. Except, unlike the airport, the New Delhi Railway has a back door. That’s where the metro lets you off and it’s a long way from Pahar Ganj and an even longer way from the part of Pahar Ganj I know. Have I mentioned I don’t have a phone? So, no phone to call A., and no address so I can take a rickshaw. I just started walking down a street ‘cause why not? It didn’t take long, maybe a km or 2 to realize there were no other women and no foreigners around. A rickshaw driver pulled up and told me that I was in a dangerous part of town. Hmm, I thought and walked another km or so until the street ended and then I turned around and walked back to the railway station. No one seemed to speak English in this part of town so I looked at the location of the sun, thought about what I knew of the map of the city, picked a direction and walked. When I walked over the railway bridge I saw where I had gotten fucked up but I still had no idea how to get to my part of town. So I walked, and walked and looked at the sun and walked and thought about landmarks I might know and how fucking stupid I was. I knew that I only needed to find the overhead metro and follow it to the Ramakrishna stop and I would be fine. A few hours and 12km later I was in front of A.’s shop. Maybe I wasn’t the person to sneer at our Uber driver.

Everything went smoothly after that. I wandered some more, had dinner at A.’s and headed to the airport. His driver actually knew where it was. I had a pleasant seatmate to Toronto and an easy transit back to Ottawa. Someone somewhere certainly looks after the fools of the world.