Madeleine’s Travel Blog

Sunday, January 17th 2010

I got hit by a car today.
I’d figured it would probably happen at some point, given the traffic conditions here and my tendency to drift off into space at inopportune times, but I hadn’t expected it to happen quite the way it did. It really had nothing to do with me at all, which in some ways is almost worse.

I suppose I should start somewhere near the beginning.
I’ve been spending the past four days on the back of a motorcycle, on a relatively fruitless mission throughout the city of Bangalore. I have visited more ‘Reliance Mobile’ stores than I care to know of, and dealt with more inept and unhelpful service representatives than I thought possible. I thought it was annoying to deal with inept outsourced service representatives on the phone from Canada – this was far and beyond the irritation of simply waiting for hours on hold. And all this simply because I’d been hoping to acquire a wireless USB device for my computer.

The problems? Where to start.
India is not Mac literate. Windows literate, yes, but when my newly purchased USB neglected to function correctly on my Mac, for all it’s box proclaiming otherwise, the blame started getting shifted. ‘Call our helpline’, ‘Call our technical company’, ‘We’re just a franchise, we have no responsibility toward our product because you chose to buy it through our online store’. The excuses were endless, and those who did attempt to help would prod vainly at the mousepad, with no knowledge of how to so much as double click on an icon, let alone have any idea of why the software might not be registering.

And so phone call after phone call was made, and from Reliance store to Reliance store we went. We, in this case, being myself and Johnson. Johnson is one of the newest and youngest teachers at Shanti Bhavan, who was coerced into helping me out of the goodness of his heart. The discovery of a purported gift-inclusion of a trip to Goa (home to his girlfriend), as long as we subscribed to my USB via online-purchase, made it a reasonably worthwhile endeavour for him too, which I was pleased about. Unfortunately we’ve both ended up paying dearly for the prospect of said trip.

The first day, meant to be a half day, there was a novelty factor to the whole expedition. I clambered on to the back of the motorcycle, my third time ever riding on one. The wind in my face was pleasant, but I realized rapidly that I would have a hair-style much a la Bridget Jones on her way to the countryside, should I not do something about my headgear. Johnson had a helmet, but there didn’t appear to be a guest-helmet.

Helmets not being particularly used in India, I decided to suck up my Canadian safety issues – When in Rome, right?! In terms of hair, I did have a scarf, which I carefully tied around my head, and promptly felt very local. Two kids, a sack of groceries, sitting side-saddle with a cell phone to my ear, and then I’d really have fit in. I was glad to be minus the accoutrements, however, my hands being fully occupied with gripping the back handle for dear life.

Fast forward 3 days later, and I was for a third day sitting on the back of Johnson’s motorcycle. I’d ended up having to get left behind in Bangalore by the other volunteers from Shanti Bhavan, so that Johnson and I might continue on for another 8 hr stint of ‘how do we get these useless employees to do something about their non-functioning product’.

My computer was manhandled by everyone from the semi-knowledgeable lone female employee at one store, through to the one guy in that fateful moment at another outlet, where out of eight plainly aimless dudes behind the counter, our guy was interrupted mid-in-depth-nose-picking session by a superior, and finally, unwillingly deigned to drag himself out, only to do nothing productive whatsoever.

The most ironic was probably the guy who smirked throughout his conversation with us, plainly not going to bother doing anything, particularly because, as he kept telling us, it was Sunday. This all the while wearing a shirt which read (in blazing letters) ‘Available 24/7’. I could have hit him. By this point I’d missed four key events at the school that I’d wished to be in on. Nothing story-destructive, but galling nevertheless. I was not happy.

My computer battery was dying, I was feeling guilty for the troubles I was putting Johnson to (I’d ended up spending a night in his father’s guest room just so we might continue our mission the following day), and my nerves were fraying. My biggest wish was to be able to return to Shanti Bhavan, missions accomplished, and not have to come out to Bangalore again any time soon.

As the bike wove through traffic, I’d drifted into my own thoughts, now reasonably comfortable with motorcycle riding. Fortunately I have a habit of keeping stuff in my hands, with a reasonably firm grip – this time I unconsciously continued to grip the back handle. This meant that when the red car tried to turn right, and smashed into my left leg and Johnson’s pedal, I didn’t fall off. It happened before I knew what had happened, as I’d been looking the other way and hadn’t so much as seen it coming. I was definitely a little shocked, and Johnson felt horrible about the situation.

Luckily for me, my leg just felt bruised, there was only the tiniest of scrapes on my knee, and after five minutes or so it felt ok to walk on and move. So all in all not as bad as it could have been.

I would’ve liked to have had a helmet after that, having realized that though perhaps in Rome, I am most definitely not a true Roman. Unfortunately, however, placed as we were in the middle of a dirty thoroughfare under a highway overpass, I didn’t know quite how to go about procuring one. And so Johnson beat his pedal back into a semblance of order with a rock, I wiggled my leg into action and retied my scarf, and we carried on.