Posh Avenues-1

The voice on the phone could easily induce any man who hadn’t known happiness in years, there was also the prospect of meeting someone whom I knew and had used as a character in one of the stories. I was in a friend’s car trapped among tens of sedans occupying a narrow but long stretch of road in one of Delhi’s supposedly posh areas. There was no policeman to man the traffic of honking cars, instead a woman in white shalwaar stood at the intersection point of the road holding a Honda car key in one hand while the another directed the cars.

By sheer chance a gap emerged and it allowed the car to turn left. With unexpected respite it rolled on between decades-old building blocks which had been discoloured and reduced to virtually dilapidated state by cheap architecture and inferior construction materials. The colour bleached by the scorching sun of Delhi must have been reclaimed, but the cheap paints wouldn’t stand the rains and dampness, and when it was almost washed out, then the dust, which concealed everything and hung thick in the air, would blow at their faces and thus a new colour was created.

This wouldn’t bother much to the residents as long as people pointed their fingers to their places as “this posh and that posh” and had their emaciated maids, paid a few hundreds each month, shuffling about. They are so cheap that even the owner of the world’s cheapest car can afford a driver. So these areas were the places which had been courted by commercial achievements ,and they had been grateful. But hearing any constructive opinion from anyone from somewhere, where positive changes had occurred several centuries back, would make them ballistic for bearing a contradictory opinion.

Soon the car was on a road filled up with vehicles bearing diplomat license plates. People behaved themselves and there was a cop in neat uniform doing his job consciously. No soul strayed onto the road, and there were footpaths on either side of the tarmac-topped road, it was a high-security zone. We were at a gate manned by guards in uniform. The road was impeccably clean and the area behind the gate was green because of the watered grass and the imported trees which had grown quick. The force behind the speed was conscious that some parts of the world would be watching the place during the sporting events approved by the British monarch. The guards looked at the car, and then they saw a disheveled-looking man like me with beard and messy hair, startled though they were, but not a word was uttered since I was in a car which will take them generations to afford one.

To be continued................