Hyderabadi Taxi Part Two

The rain was subsiding as our city cab from City Cab arrived, an older model Tata Vista. It was white and as I indicated previously, the side windows had the blackout film on them. The driver was smiling and thanked the young man that helped get him to our place. It was about 20 minutes to six. OK, we’re about an hour later than I had planned. I was mentally going through the calculations, “25 minutes to Deb’s office, another 15 to Gachibowli, if all goes well we’d still be about 40 minutes before the play started. We’re still OK.”
We drive out of our parking garage underneath the apartments, turn onto the street and start our journey. Just as we turn left onto the street with the steep grade (at this point we’d be going down, fortunately) our driver stops in the middle of the road and takes out his note pad, writes down his mileage and time. I guessed that this started the clock ticking for the six hours we had contracted with City Cab for a city cab.
The back seat was damp. Deb contends she was sitting in a pool of water, but I could not confirm that when she moved to allow me to bail. The front windows were open and even going slowly, the moisture from the car was being sprayed into the back seat. Deb asked the driver if he could roll up the window as her carefully combed and styled hair, already falling from standing in the humid garage, was continuing to wilt from the heat and humidity in the car. The driver turned on the AC. Well, the light by the snowflake symbol lighted when he pushed the button. I contend that the car had AC. It has an 1172cc engine. With three passengers (and one consisting of about 2.5 of our driver), that engine was doing everything it could just to move forward. Most of the motor scooters have nearly that displacement and weigh a fifth of the curb weight of the Vista. So I do not fault the AC. We asked for an AC equipped vehicle and we got one.
I should have taken a clue from the way the driver said “GAAcheebowleee” when he asked, once again, where we were going. “Gachibowli, the Global Peace Auditorium,” I answered slowly as if saying it slowly would actually make him understand where we were going. I knew enough not to raise my voice to a loud volume as a means of making the location understandable. Off we went, down the steep hill, up the narrow street, past Apollo supply, and onto the road-with-no-name. Back on Road 12, the one everyone assumes we live on, we turn in an opposite direction than the one Ashraf normally takes Deb to her office, which is in the same direction as GAAcheebowleee. Deb panics, “He’s going the wrong way. We’re heading east.” Well, the driver did have a general idea of where to go, but we were taking a real roundabout way. I mean roundabout. I became suspicious that he was padding the mileage. We got an allotment of 50 kilometers along with our six hours. I had a sense that the most distance as the pigeons fly (really haven’t seen any crows, starlings, or ravens) is about 12 kilometers.
I have mentioned in previous posts on the necessity of using your horn while driving. Ashraf uses his liberally with what could be a code, but I haven’t deciphered it yet. But this cabbie was definitely “heavy thumbed”. In fact, I believe the tip of his left thumb was almost bulbous in shape and there was an indentation on the left-of-center in the steering wheel that neatly fit the outline of that strangely shaped digit. I must admit the Vista’s horn is particularly recognizable if not one of the most annoying. And believe me, I’ve heard so many variations of pitches, vibratos, and durations that I can fairly say the Vista horn dominates the “God, please make this hellacious noise stop before I stick a sharp object in my ears just to make the sound go away” category. But the driver had the horn inextricably integrated into his shift, clutch, brake, accelerator routine that I had to give in to the realization that this was what I asked for. Deb suggested as part of our continuous process improvement debrief after we got home: If Ashraf wants a day off, he is to make the necessary arrangements with appropriate directions if we need transportation.
I’ve been driven out to the Gachibowli area now about half-a-dozen times. Three for the University of Hyderabad events, one at the Indian School of Business (ISB), and two excursions looking for housing in mid-July. I’m now in the habit of marking landmarks when I go places. I looked up the Global Peace Auditorium on Google maps and had a general sense of where it was relative to the ISB: same road, different sides. After what seemed like a half-hour of driving, we came to a road with a fly over that was being constructed. I recognized it as well as the entrance to a beltway road named after a Nehru family member. The driver turned in what I thought was the right direction. We traveled past the soccer stadium which I had seen on my trips to UofH. But I didn’t have a good sense of which road to turn on for the IBS as it was a dark and rainy night when I took my first trip there. We went past the UofH entrance and I sensed we had gone too far. Our driver stopped at each successive bus stop and asked someone for directions. We had about 5 “I don’t knows” and two Möbius strip head bobs. Finally, a distinguished-looking man waiting for a bus was able to recognize what we were talking about and got us back on the road in the opposite direction with a better sense of destination.
Now, I will not ascribe my early actions to divine intervention, but as I was assembling all the items to take with us from a checklist of: umbrellas (VERY good choice), camera, ticket receipt, binoculars, etc., I thought I should drop my glasses in the bag. I have not been wearing glasses or contacts while here in India because someone else is always driving and frankly, from our balcony everything takes on a Renoir-like fuzziness that adds to the charm. As we were backtracking to the road which we should have turned on BEFORE the soccer stadium, I reached in my satchel and pulled out my glasses. The light was beginning to dim (remember, 6:30 is sundown) so I put them on. We turned onto the road which I now recognized from its boulevard lighting as leading to the ISB. OK, we’re going the right way. It was now about 6:24. The driver is briskly cruising down the road because there are no speed bumps when I chanced to glimpse a small sign posted on an electrical pole. The sign was a saffron color and the lettering was red. Not a great combo, but there was an arrow pointing to the left and I thought I recognized “Disa” as one of the words. I called for the driver to stop. He did, again in the middle of the road. I indicated that I thought that the road not too far behind us was where we wanted to turn. So he backs up about 500 meters. There were two policemen standing at the intersection and were not pleased by our driver’s maneuver. However, during the time he was chastising the driver, I noted that the sign did refer to our destination. The policemen told the driver to make a U-turn which was down the road right about where we originally stopped. Dutifully, he pulled ahead, made the turn around, drove back to the road we needed to be on and turned. Within a half-a-minute Deb saw the auditorium to the right. There was a short line of cars waiting to get through the gate. Once through the gate, there was a relatively short driveway that lead to the steps of the entrance. There were probably three hundred people milling around the entrance, but there was no distinct lines. Am I not surprised?
The auditorium has an impressive exterior in its whitewashed cement golden-tones around windows on the second floor and large brass doors. The detail on the doors reminded me of the doors to the Wizard’s palace in the movie version of the Wizard of Oz. The steps leading up to the entrances were marble and still wet from the deluge earlier. We stepped out of the cab and made sure the driver was going to stay. He was. We walked toward the steps. I could sense Deb was nervous when she saw the wet marble as a wave of bad memories caused her to grab my arm so tight that by the time we walked up the dozen steps my entire forearm was blue and I had lost all feeling below my elbow. Some of the doors were open and there were people milling about in the lobby.
We looked around for something that resembled a ticket office and finally sighted an open door with a circle of tables each with a number on top of a pole. That was the amount you paid for your ticket. We went over to the appropriate table. There I had to sign my receipt and another form (this high tech country really needs to wean itself from its paper, but the litter lobby would probably riot). We now have our tickets in hand. It is 6:35. We’ve missed the rush for tickets. We can get ourselves freshened up and ready for the play. I’ll talk about that in my next post.