The Day after Tomorrow

Okay.. I was planning to have some food and go to sleep, but an old friends call kept me awake. I am thinking, and while I am thinking, I thought I might as well make good use of the time to tell you all about the rest of the happenings. The 27 hours of grit were over, but the next few were about to start now.

As i entered home on Wednesday evening, I realised there was some more real Reel life stuff happening. the first one seemed to be a scene from a thriller or a horror flick. as soon as they open the door for me at home, i see a single solitary candle flickering in the middle of the room, and there were all the guys and girls sitting around the candle on the couch. it seemed they had all come together for some kinda black magic, or like one of those ceremonies they talked of in The Da Vinci Code.

Prabh, Siddharth, Sachin and Anshuman (my flatmates!) were all there already. all of them had reached at different points of time, and all had their offices closer to home than i did. Also there were Sonali and Supriya, next door neighbours and the owners of the solitary candle. All the talk was about the same stuff that seemed to have engross all of India for the past day or so.

No candles in the market, and we supposedly had the last 3 bottles of bottled water from our neighborhood store. The candle burned out, and we were left groping in the dark. The night seemed endless with only a torch-cum-FM reciever to help you make it through the night. The rains were slowing down but the red skies made us believe it would be going on full throttle again. And we took some good piece of advice.

All of us managed to eat something to survive. The water was too contaminated to even think of cooking Maggi in it, and there was no way we were going to order food from a restaurant.

It was one of those times when talking each other out was the only way out. Being one of those ground floor residents, we took adequate caution. Just incase we were about to float, we'd be ready to run. And the run would come easy when we had our most precious belongings on us. So, the iPod joined the mobile phone(s) and the laptop and other important documents in the bag that held me in good stead in these testing times!

I took calls from home on mobiles offered to me,with full charge from the office of people who were lucky to have them nearby. They were the only ones updated on me. I did not want to spend precious charge on others waiting to hear from me, who all were, i never even knew as of now.

Dropping off to sleep in a windy and dark night, I prayed to God that He'd see me through this. And he did. Next morning was clean, but the power supply was still cut off. I did not have to go to work, and hence, I carried on in bed. Woke up around noon, and by late afternoon electricity was restored.

Maggi seemed to be survival strategy. To get some cash, I walked to the nearest ATM .. which was predicabaly shut down. All of them around home were. My legs were killing me but cash, or the lack of it might have posed problems ahead. So, I took the bus to the station and hunted for a working ATM there. Lucky for me Citi had got its ATMs up and going, but the silly problem was there was not enough cash in there. It showed the grand amount as funds in waiting. So, gingerly I had to fish out another ATM card and withdraw cash from the bank, give them some service charges too! After all, they were the only ones holding me in good stead in times of need!