Six hours in a metal cage

Six hours in a metal cage
Shirish Koyal | TNN


Call me before leaving. I’ll tell you the traffic scene, said the wife, from her Bellary Road office. A few minutes later: “Take New BEL Road instead.’’ Makes sense on a political-rally day, I thought. It didn’t make sense at the end of the day. Nothing did; nothing could have.
Leaving home at 2.40 pm as usual, I was still on New BEL Road at 3.30. At the end of the road, I didn’t know which way my car would be herded by the cops. I was lucky to take the intended turn: to the left. That was the beginning of an ordeal. “Traffic isn’t even inching,” I messaged people in the office. Calls to the family assured them I was weary, but still in one piece.
The metallic demons all around me moved 20 metres every 15 minutes. There’s a brighter side to everything: we sometimes moved by 50 metres in the same time period. Some men returning from the venue had recognized someone big in the SUV ahead. I craned my neck and asked. The big man had left their party and turned saffron before the polls.
“Myself Rural Revanna, Sir,’’ volunteered the supplier of this information, his chest swelling with the importance I had given him.
A commotion ensued. Some not-so-amiable party workers had cornered the exminister. The SUV in front was being buffetted; some blows landed on my car too. I got out and urged them to take it easy.
Mercifully, they were convinced I was no party colleague, chamcha or relative. They pulled out the burly figure and took him away. The significance of his victory sign and cheery waving still eludes me.
A call from the office: “Seems you will be attending the rally and coming.’’ I must have looked like that when I finally reached office: kicked by biryani, booze and fatigue. The twilight hour arrived; it felt like mine too. Music kept me alive. Some activists asked me for water. Give me some, I pleaded.
The traffic started inching. I was at Mehkri Circle at 7 — after over 3 hours on CV Raman Avenue. A call came from a colleague who had worked in Mumbai. He was horrified to hear I had been caught in traffic for four hours: “I never thought Bangalore could be so bad.’’
Then we started moving. Squeezing between cars and buses, avoiding Dhoom boys overtaking from the left, asking harried cops and equally clueless drivers, I made it to M G Road at 8.30.
When I hobbled in 10 minutes later, I got an ovation for finally making it. The sense of irony wasn’t lost on me: I was five hours late.
shirish.koyal@timesgroup.com