It was 1985..or was it ’86? We were four to five young working professionals sharing a fantastic pad in Juhu, Mumbai. Each of us had moved into our second jobs, were flush with funds, were not spendthrifts, loved to cook our dinners at home, preferred to sit at home with friends and drink, instead of hanging around in either seedy or expensive pubs, and loved to leave the city on weekends. It was always the same - we would come back from work tired on a Friday night, sit around with a drink in hand, chatting, and suddenly one of us would have a bright idea.
“Bore ho raha hai yaar, lets go somewhere.” So the next 30-minutes would be spent discussing options, and finally the guy with the loudest and firmest voice that night would get his way. Ganeshpuri, Vajreshwari, Lonavla-Khandala, Igatpuri, Mahabaleshwar-Panchgani, Nashik, Goa, Ratnagiri-Chiplun, Murud-Janjira, and a dozen other trips always happened that way.
So it was that Friday night too. “Alibagh” proclaimed Ramesh. It was 9pm already. We This time we ditched our bikes for the trusted Premier Padmini that Ramesh had “permanently borrowed” from his boss. After a brief stop at Panvel for dinner around 11pm, we reached Alibagh probably well past midnight. We walked into the first hotel to check in, and the guy at the counter turned us back “Sorry, rooms naahi, full aahe”. So we knocked at the next, and the next, and the next…. by 2am we knew we were out of luck. A quick side-of-the-road conference later, we decided to stick it out instead of heading back to the city. We drove around town aimlessly for a while, and finally found a quiet spot where we could park and catch some sleep. It was surprisingly windy, and the sound of distant waves made it alluring. There was a wooden park bench close by that Mathew agreed to sleep on. Ramesh, Dinesh, Surdy, and I flopped our tired bodies into our car seats, and pretty much crashed out instantaneously.
It must have been 4am when I woke up with a start, feeling a gentle rocking. There was a swish sound too. Without waking the others up, I opened the car door and stepped out…into nearly knee-deep water!!! There was even some water in the floorboard of the car that we had not noticed. Mathew was fast asleep on the bench, completely oblivious that his one hand was hanging down, elbow-deep in water. Now really worried, I quickly woke the rest up. Ramesh who was behind the wheel, started the engine, and turned the headlights on. There was water everywhere, as far as the eye could see. We quickly realized that we had parked in the dark on a short beach when the tide was low. The tide had since come in, and we were probably minutes away from being dragged deeper into the sea. Rudely jolted by this stupid realization, we somehow managed to get the car out of the water. Relieved, we drove around a bit looking for a safer spot to spend the rest of the night. This time, we found this large empty piece of land with shuttered shops nearby. We parked the car in the middle of this vacant land, and just plonked off the sleep.
We must have slept for eternity. We were jolted out of our slumber by the harsh sun stinging our faces, and cacophony outside. What was a large empty ground when we parked a few hours back, was now a bustling bazaar. Hundreds of people were milling around, shopping for groceries and vegetables from dozens and dozens of vendors who had set up their carts all around us. Every inch of the vast ground had been taken up. And the strange look on people’s faces as they peered into us through the glass window told us the rest of the story - they wondered why a bunch of jokers would park their car inside the biggest bazaar in town in broad daylight. Dazed and embarassed in equal measure, we honked and wiggled our way out of the ground. We stopped at a nearby streetside store, brushed our teeth, washed our face, and dunked a couple of glasses of hot tea and some buns. And then drove off to begin the second part of our weekend vacation at Alibagh!!
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