"For God's Sake! Please dress and behave decently tomorrow! I've told my parents that my boss is coming home for dinner!": warned Pragati on Thursday afternoon. Boss? Me? Uh...Since when? I felt like responding in typical Robert De Niro style: "You talking to me?" And what about the decency part? As I was always fond of telling Sundar C Narayanaswamy, I consider myself the epitome of decency. "I don't want you turning up in one of your orange or yellow garbs, and please put away your Australian jerseys", she continued. Ah! so that was it! "Don't worry", I assured her: "I'll be on my best behaviour tomorrow". Knowing me, she looked a bit skeptic, as if I'd just told her the Martians had landed on the ITPL grounds. For me, all this meant a little bit of unpacking, since I needed to take out all those flashy T-shirts I had actually lined up for the trip.
It was my first trip to New Delhi - and it came like a bolt out of the blue (pun unintended, as events later would clarify), courtesy the travel desk in our company, who informed us at the last possible moment that we needed to personally visit the Hungarian Embassy, if we wanted our Budapest trip to materialize. Neither am I allowed to slander about them in public, nor do I consider it my moral right to abuse anyone, so i'll let that pass. Anyway, a little bit of travel never harmed me, and abiding with Pragati's wishes, I turned up in full black - backpack and all - at the office the next day. I further managed to infuriate her ("show-off" was her comment), when I showed her the tie I carried in the bag, "in case I needed it the next day". We had opted for an evening flight from Bangalore to Delhi, which meant that we had to leave directly from the office. We had to take a detour to her house so that she could also pick up all her tax papers (on my insistence). By the time we reached the airport, the sweltering heat had almost drained us - the cab driver had refused to put on the AC claiming that this was "non-AC duty"!
No sooner had we cleared the security checks that Pragati found a seat, crawled into a foetal position and went to sleep. I found a copy of Mid-Day, and got myself busy figuring out the various crosswords(it even had a "Bollywood" crossword! Yuck!) in the paper, all the time trying my best to bug Pragati. To her credit, she managed to stay asleep until the flight was announced. We were in for a surprise when we boarded it - what looked like another teeny-weeny aircraft, actually looked impressive inside. Even though we had non-reclineable seats, they had enough leg space, and not to mention, they even had inflight entertainment capsules. I soon immersed myself into a couple of documentaries ("Some of his quiz stuff", as Pragati would later inform our friends). Food came and went and I gobbled it up with glee. For the starved soul, anything to eat is like manna from heaven - though Pragati seemed to disagree. It seemed like an uneventful flight, until we reached Delhi. Then all the hell broke loose... (...for me. Pragati slept through the whole thing). First came the announcement that we were 15th in the landing sequence at Delhi. Then came the turbulence. The aircraft was being tossed around like a rubber ball. I confessed to Pragati that I was indeed scared. She was quick to point out that a woman was piloting the flight and hence it was no surprise. By the time we landed in Delhi, it was well past 10:00 and we had got a free ride to Jaipur and back. And the biggest surprise of all? It was raining cats and dogs in Delhi.
Since it was my first time in Delhi, I decided to follow the leader and promptly followed her into the pouring rain. By the time we got into her car, we were fully drenched, and I was cursing myself for not carrying the one thing that a Mallu-born-and-brought-up person would never forget to have - the umbrella. It was another half an hour ride to her home, and yes, I did manage to surprise her with my nice manners - I let her do the talking :) The dinner prepared at her home was extremely delicious and mouth watering. By the time I reached the SAP guest house I was half asleep. I do not exactly recollect what happened next, except that I collapsed on the bed, anticipating a long sleep. When I woke up, the day had lit up. But to my utter surprise I saw that the time was only 5:30. Huh? In Bangalore I never get to see the sun until I get out of the house at 7:00. Anyway, since I was awake, I decided to take a tour of the guesthouse. It was a sprawling mansion in itself with magnificently arranged rooms. The room overlooked an elegant park. The cloudy sky gave hopes that perhaps we would get a respite from the heat. Switching on the TV, i found that all the news channels were busy reporting the rains in Delhi. So far so good. After a quick shower, I went down for a breakfast of parathas. Sathish was already there at the table. He related his tale of woes as to how he reached the guest house only at 1:30 in the morning.
Pragati arrived at 9:00 and the three of us left for the embassy in her car. The roads of Delhi are superb, and the absence of traffic jams like the ones we find in Bangalore amazed me. The embassy proved to be another surprise. Before I left for Delhi, me and my cousin had joked about it that perhaps they would be employing people to queue up before the embassy to give an impression that Hungary was also a destination for Indians. Hence it amused me to no extent to actually find a small queue outside the visa counter. The woman at the visa counter proved to be a trifle too much. There were barely 10 people ahead of us in the queue, but this lady was taking almost half an hour to check each visa document. An exasperated Pragati promptly declared that she could no longer stand in the queue, sat down on the ground, and started cursing the country of Hungary. By the time our turn came around, it was also clear that we had to PAY cash to submit our visa documents - a fact that was conveniently forgotten by our travel desk. My expert advice that "we wait and see whether we actually need to pay" meant that Pragati had to go hunting for an ATM as me and Sathish waited at the counter. The lady at the counter dropped another bomb when she informed us that we need to be back in Delhi to collect the passports and possibly for an interview too. So far it had been a day of surprises.
After a whirlwind tour of what's-there-to-see-in-Delhi, Pragati took us out for lunch (that's just a way of speaking - it was not her treat) at United Coffee House in Connaught Place. It was supposedly a place steeped in tradition, since it was in existence since the times of the British Raj. The ambience of the place was good - a jazz joint, with huge chandeliers, it appealed to me immediately. Pragati's sister Manvi also joined us for lunch, and they had a tussle to decide what to order. Finally they agreed on murgh changezi, and I was left wondering how the chicken was related to the Great Khan (Genghis, not Shah Rukh). The highlight of the lunch was, however, a drunk lady who was sitting a table behind us. Perhaps she did not have enough cash to pay for a bottle of beer, so she started a shouting match with the authorities. To drown the whole affair, the volume of the worldspace radio (which was until then murmuring something) was cranked up, but somehow, the lady kept winning. Pragati immediatley declared that she'd lost her appetite. So it was left to me to finish off the chicken, which I didn't.
They dropped me off at the guest house and I immediately went to sleep in the cool surroundings of my room. I was woken up by the buzz of the cab river, who was supposed to take me to the airport. Take me he did, to the International Airport ("Are you so stupid?" asked Pragati, once she was back in office) where I learned that the domestic airport was a further twenty to thirty minutes away from there. I hassled with an auto driver and finally got to my destination, to find that it was across the big runway. Maybe they should just allow people like me to run across the tarmac to reach the other side. As the day ended, there were no more surprises left for me in Delhi. The flight was late, and Jet Airways was no longer like the vision we had on the previous day - just another one of those drab dark blue flights, where I had to entertain myself with the sad songs I had on my iPod. But nature seemed to have something up her sleeve for me....
It was raining when I landed in Bangalore.
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