Mumbai over; Murphy's law?

The last day in Mumbai was certainly one of great nostalgia plus quiet excitement for me.

I set off to see Ooky & Rivca. I managed to spend some quality time with Rivca in their lovely apartment, as Ooky was off on his "golf" round. I am so happy that I had some really wonderful moments with Rivca as she is so sensitive, direct and honest. She expresses her hopes and desires and also the pros and cons of life in such a manner that one can see what has been before and where she hopes for life will go tomorrow. She is so childlike!

I was hoping to see Suchita and Vijay, as they live in the same building, but Vijay was on his way to help out Mrs. Sethi (Viney's mom) as Viney and Purnima are away in Papua New Guinea and Australia. I shared a few words with him. I had not disturbed him since our last evening of the Reunion, and I had been right, as he told me that for the past three nights he had slept through each for 12 hours! I do not wonder!

Then it was on to Ubi's across the road to return the Old Boys' Association tie that he had kindly lent me for the Founders' Day Service and to say thank you to my wonderful friend. We shared a few thoughts and to my surprise he told me that my childhood friend, Ravi, whom I had blogged about just a couple of days ago, had been one of his closest friends when they were in Germany. What a small small world.



This visit also got me a snap of Ubi as he had not come to the Evening with the Findians and during his hosting of a party for Annikki and me, along with celebrating Meena Bhatt’s birthday, as I had not taken out my camera.

I rushed back to pick up Annikki and Mika and go to Pappa's (97, Peelukuttychayan, Mr. K. M. Philip, my mother’s elder brother) and Mummy’s (Chinnammakochamma) place for lunch. I had misunderstood the time as 13:30. Suresh (Peter Philip) had said 1 or 1:30.

On the way I saw my first mumbai example of traffic rage when two private car owners got within 10 mm of crashing. They shouted abuse at each other, waving fists through their car windows, but, luckily as all the cars were packed together like sardines, neither cold get out to become physically violent!

At Pappa’s house they were waiting for us, Pappa, Mummy, Suresh & Meera and Anna (daughter of my niece, Mammy (Thambachayan's daughter) & her husband, Anian (K. P. Philip) , who live in Belgium). Anna works for the Rolling stones magazine and seemed clued upon everything! Bright girl.

Mika ate like a horse as the food was delicious. I pecked at everything but ate the sweet heartily - something I should not do.



Pappa, at 97 and Mummy (90+) are both mentally as sharp as I have known them all my life. Pappa goes to play an hour or two of bridge every evening at the Willingdon Club - at 97!!!! He made me promise that we would see them before we left India for Finland, which i certainly shall on the 13th of December.

Then we went back to the Guest house to wait for our taxi. It arrived a few minutes late, but when we went down, there was panic. by some quirk the keys were locked inside the car and we could neither put our luggage in our get in to go to the airport.

The driver, Ramesh, acted quickly. he sprinted off somewhere. Five minutes later he returned with two boys carrying a long strong metal ruler. they inserted this between the window and the body of the car and tried to smash the lock open - but it did not work.

They sprinted off somewhere and were back in two minutes, this time with a very heavy screwdriver and a long strong copper rod. While one guy plied the door of the car open with the screwdriver, the other pushed in the copper rod and cleverly pulled the inside door handle lever and, presto, the car door was open.

An amazing feat in a place where we did not know there was such “talent”.





Later, I asked Ramesh where he had found these guys. He told me he had gone to the Traffic Control point and pleaded for some help from the policeman there. He was assured that help would come in a couple of minutes - and these two guys had appeared out of nowhere.

I wonder what the profession of these guys really is, but obviously the Police know them well and use them!!

We arrived at the Airport just in time to complete our formalities and board the aircraft.

The flight was delayed by about half an hour so we arrived in Ahmedabad about 8 pm and our apartment at 9 pm.

A nice clean apartment and they had very nice simple Gujarati vegetarian meal waiting for us.

We are going to enjoy our stay in Ahmedabad, that I am sure.