Monsoon Fretting

Delhi, I will never pooh-pooh your monsoon season again. The rain started off yesterday afternoon as a trickle while I was by work, resigning myself to the fact that I wouldn't be able to purchase a cheap mattress until Tuesday market. So I hailed a rickshaw and hopped in. Halfway home (to my new apartment with Pri), I thought I saw a mattress store, so I sacrificed the rickshaw to go check it out, but they only had pillows.

By then the rain was getting really heavy. I found a tree to wait under, but the sky didn't look as if it was about to let up any time soon. So I darted to another tree, which was a mistake. By this time I felt/looked like a drowned cat. Finally, another rickshaw guy came by, and we had an experience that I imagine is what the Wicked Witch of the East felt riding her bike through that twister. I let him drop me at the end of the street rather than in front of the house because I was so wet anyway, but this rather quickly seemed like a fatal error--the sky looked like a war was going on and the giant trees were not holding up well.

So I made a dash for it, and finally made it to the new sanctuary. So I thought. It was actually pretty good that I didn't wait the rain out anywhere else, because I came in to find a trickle of water coming in two of the windows. This trickle very quickly evolved into two gushing waterfalls, which a pair of my pants didn't do too effective a job of plugging.

Finally I remembered that you can call your landlord for this kind of thing, and that ours lives downstairs and is nice so far. I'm not sure if he'd ever seen a more pathetic sight than a soaking foreigner sitting on the floor of an unfurnished apartment eating half-rotten bananas (he later sent up drinking water, which I was indeed panicking about not having).

The evening made up for itself when Pri came over with her boyfriend. Well, before that, a random man wandered into the apartment as if he was supposed to be there. After I'd had enough of him purposefully walking around without talking to me, I asked, "Are you with Pri?" He nodded. "Are you her boyfriend?" He nodded. "I'm Annie! Nice to meet you." We shook hands. Then he left. Then Pri arrived with her boyfriend.

I expressed my concern to her that this man would come back to kill us, but we saw him a few minutes later looking at the electricity meter on the stairs. Horror movie scenario averted. Then I thought we were going out for quick sandwiches, but got whisked away to Pri's boyfriend's apartment (he has a CAR) for wine and delivery Chinese food. Pri's boyfriend's friend came over too. They've all known each other for years, and are all corporate lawyers, as Pri just left the organization we met at. This was yet another evening of excellent debates and discussion. And it turns out Indian wine is really good.