My uncle got out of the car and said he would be back in a minute.
With all the windows rolled up, I opened up the music app on my phone (because the car stereo stopped working years ago) and put my playlist on random.
The first track to come on was Bryan Adams’ ‘Summer of 69’. I groaned audibly as soon as I recognised it, but did nothing to change it.
The street outside the clinic was one I had little experience with before. The last time I remember walking down this street was two summers ago, on my way to the start of a biryani crawl with a friend.
She lives a little way off from my house and we decided to spend that summer trying out every biryani joint in Koramangala and crowning one as ‘The Best Biryani in Koramangala’. We only managed to cover two biryani joints that summer, but it was a mammoth task to begin with as a new ‘Authentic/Special/Original/Super/New Ambur Biryani Palace/Point/Spot’ seems to pop up everyday
Right opposite from my parking spot is a big board that reads ESEL INC.
I have no idea what ESEL stands for and the rest of the sign does nothing to satisfy my curiosity, mostly because the rest of it is in Kannada.
My phone now begins to play ‘I Love a Rainy Night’ by Eddie Rabbit. I am a little disappointed that it was neither raining nor at night at the moment, but rather a sticky-kinda-humid evening.
There’s a woman outside ESEL INC. with a cart full of fruits. A pile of melons at one end that reached up to her chest and a stack of papayas on the other are the most visible from where I was sitting. She was making surprisingly good business with everyone walking by stopping to stare at her melons and striking up a bargain for them.
At one point she even got into an argument with a young-looking fellow with a barely visible moustache, short hair that curves up to a point above his forehead and a laptop bag slung across his chest. This isn’t much of a description as almost every other software-company employee looks like this, and since almost every other person in Koramangala is a software-company employee, almost everyone in Koramangala looks like this.
From what I could tell he wasn’t happy with the price of her wares and would not settle for anything less than what he quoted as fair. The fruit lady was losing it at this point and told the man to sod off and find his fruit elsewhere (I know this because she said it loud enough for everyone on the street to hear). The young man sheepishly walked away as Mr Rabbit expressed his love for rain on his face and the taste on his lips.
Since it was dusk I could see no end of people making their way back home from work. An office bus stops at the end of the road and a woman walks by carrying a backpack almost as big as her. She had curly hair which was swooped up by the sides and pinned up behind her head and thick kajal around her eyes, making her look like she was wearing a domino mask.
Her dupatta hung clumsily across her chest, half sticking out because of how she was wearing her backpack.
She walked past a couple of men sitting by the side of the road. One was sitting on the footpath smoking a cigarette while the other was resting against a black Bullet motorcycle having just finished his cigarette.
His head follows the woman as she walks past him, doing a full 180′, and his face crumples up into a smile with his eyebrows shifting up closer to his receding hairline and lips parting to reveal a pair of uncannily white teeth.
He looks over to his friend and elbows him just as he took a drag of his cigarette, making him almost stick the lit cigarette up his own nose. The friend looked visibly displeased but soon forgot this displeasure when he looked where Mr. Pearly Whites was gesturing.
The woman looked visibly frightened and folded her hands up tight against her chest while walking away as fast as her one inch heels would allow her to.
It was at this point that I looked to my right and saw the grill of an Ethios about 2 inches away from my window. He was trying to turn onto this road from a perpendicular one and took a turn so wide he almost t-boned my car.
I rolled (well technically I pushed a button, but rolled sounds cooler) down my window and gave the drives of this taxi the universal signal for ‘The fuck are you doing?’ which involves an open hand with your palm facing upward and your fingers curled like a fan with the little finger curled closest to the palm and index finger on the same line as the palm.
He gives me the universal symbol for ‘sorry, give me a second to fix my stupidity’ which is another open hand gesture with the palm facing the victim of said stupidity and a curt nod of the head.
He reverses his car and finally makes the turn he was trying to make in the first place. Although he did have to put up with various curses in various languages from the various people he had inconvenienced, while Hozier sings about going to church in the background.
comicsanslogic 