Reports about the unusually heavy rains in Dubai when even limousines appeared to be floating on flooded roads brought back memories of an embarrassing rainy night that I had experienced in the early days of my life in India.
I was on a month's vacation to my maternal uncle's place. It was the month of monsoon. The city was having almost incessant heavy rains for the past some days. We had finished our dinner and were discussing the cloudburst and the havoc it had played in the city.
Just then the phone rang. A relation told my eldest maternal uncle that he was going out of the city with his family. Only his wife's younger sister would stay behind. He requested my uncle to send someone to his house - about 1.5 kms away - for the night as a reassurance to the young lady left alone.
My uncle asked his youngest brother and me to do the needful. As such, at about 9 pm we set out on foot carrying an umbrella. We had hardly reached the main road when it again started raining cats and dogs. The first bad experience I had was that the umbrella failed to protect me. The reason was that my companion (my younger maternal uncle) who held it was a foot taller than me. Only one of us could have benefitted due to the height differential.
The low-level road also got quickly flooded. We faced the second hurdle when we had to wade through ankle and then knee-deep water. Our third worry was the black umbrella which sent shivers down our spine whenever clouds roared and there was lightening.
We had been told in our childhood that lightening strikes black objects like umbrella. Also, there is a widely held belief based on mythology that any two persons related as maternal uncle and nephew were prone to lightening. So, they should not move together. This factor was also disturbing us.
Heavy odds
Braving heavy odds, we somehow straddled our way to our destination. Even as it was raining heavily and noisily to the accompaniment of lightening and roaring we knocked at the door. We came across the fourth odd when the girl inside the house refused to respond to the knocks.
Obviously, she had got scared and did not want to take any risk. We, on our part, were wondering about what would happen to us if she did not open the door. There being no other option, we persisted with knocking. But there was no response. Finally, she half-opened a window and asked who we were.
Mercifully, she was convinced about our being the same persons whose services had been requisitioned to provide her security. Apologetically, she told us that we should not have taken all the trouble of coming to her house in such a downpour.
She was honest enough to say that she was not expecting us in such an inclement weather. We, however, felt cheated. I was wondering whether all our effort, initiative and labour had gone down the drain along with the rain water. Despite her pleadings that we sleep in the hall, we insisted on spending the night in the open verandah on a big old-fashioned cot. We were fully drenched below the waist. But there was little we could do about it.
Apparently, the young lady was moved by our plight. She was too keen to help us out of our predicament. But we felt that like us there was little that she could do. Nevertheless, she proved us wrong. A few minutes later she brought clothes to be slipped into for the night.
We were almost dumbfounded when she apologetically said, "Sorry, I have only these to offer you - this sari for you (my tall maternal uncle) and this salwar for you (that is, me)."
Lalit Raizada is a journalist based in India.
