The Chronicle of Horrible Experiences- Part I.

I was planning to write a story about a foiled suicide attempt and its consequences- but you know how it is with muses- she is silent, and the fountain of inspiration is dry right now, creative juices all clogged up, so to say.

Anyway, inspired or not, I will tell a story- substituting one uninspired tale for another.

This happened a year ago.

I had gone to a State Government Office with my lawyer-friend, Sudalai. One of his clients had asked for a favour of him, and we went searching for the proper Department to make enquiries about the pending claim.

Now, my friend Sudalai is a diabetic, he has hypertension, and he is overweight. On top of all that, he had a bad case of filaria. If he kept standing or sat down for some time, his feet would swell up with fluid, and it would look all puffy and painful too. The first thing he would do, is to wrap a tight bandage around his ankles. Thanks to his waistline, he needed someone to help him do that, and most of the times, that would be me.

All this has nothing to do with this story. I am just adding these details to give you the kind of background that might help you place him in your memory so that my friend Sudalai gets an individuality, and you find him interesting enought to come along with me in this sorry story.

So, my friend Sudalai is a brave man, being a lawyer, but given the circumstances of his health condition, he is cautious. So cautious, he asks me to drive him over to wherever he has to go. But that is not often, and he gets me a generous lunch at Palmgrove Hotel over at Nungambakkam Road, so I am usually more than willing to drive him around.

Okay, on that particular day, it was so hot we decided to drink some coconut water. My friend Sudalai is a villager, so he picked up the right coconut that yielded plenty of water. It was sweet too, we had one more.

I told him, right after drinking that, "Sir, my stomach is full. We should go to the Hotel only after two o'clock"

He weighed this option, and then suggested, "Sir, I have diabetes. My medicine will not wait for lunch. I have to take the pills- so why don't we eat an hour before that?"

That sounded reasonable, so I told him, "Yes, sir. Much of this will evaporate as sweat anyway. For what remains, we will find a toilet..."

But the thing is, when we went to the State Government office, we clean forgot all that.

We had to spend a long time, waiting for the person in charge of the claim to come back to his seat. And then he went searching for the file, and so on. The long and short of it is, we had a dreadful time there.

And then after we had come to a gentleman's agreement with that government official, we got down from that third floor office (I should have told that earlier in passing, sorry I forgot to do that- now I spring this clumsily), in a lift. Soon after we had started to climb down, the power went, and the generator seemed to have some problem- the door of the lift kept opening and closing. We were just three feet above the second floor, but we couldn't get down.

Not that we didn't try. My friend Sudalai went all sweaty and nervous, and made to jump out past the manic lift door, but I was not sure he could time his jump. So, I clamped his shoulder and restrained him from what would have been a mad act.

And then to make things worse, the power went totally. The door shut tight with a final thud, and we were in the dark. Not a sound anywhere, except for the heavy breathing of my friend, and sure enough, he croaked, "I think I am going to faint now".

I didn't know what to do- I kept talking to him, told him a joke or two, tried to sound casual about it (I am a bit claustrophobic myself)- but believe me, those five minutes were like hell to me- I literally kept him alive with my talking.

Now, if there is any justice in this world, what should have happened is that once the electricity was restored, and we got down safely, I should have walked out of the lift looking brave and mighty, and he clinging to my shoulders like a damsel in distress.

But unfortunately, to my eternal shame, mortification, and chagrin, daylight revealed nothing of my courage under fire- all it showed was the evidence of my involuntary micturition, its stain and odour causing people in the corridor to turn and look at me with disgust.

And then, my friend Sudalai laughed- the ungrateful wretch!