Bangalore Barrage

For the past two days, I've been wandering around enjoying getting to know Bangalore at a lazy, summer hot day pace. Today, it hit me; smacked me in the face. A rush hour barrage upon the senses --horns, holes in the road, rickshaws and motorcycles roaring toward me onto the slim pickings of the sidewalk -- a journey home fraught with potentially deadly intersection crossings. 

I wasn't fully sure where I was going, since I'd just moved places and lost my bearings I'd so carefully established in my weekend wanderings. So I just walked up the main road following directions from my new co-worker, and figured I'd recognize the intersection where I turn from seeing it in the morning. Block upon block of jam-packed shops with a constant cacophony of horns passed by me and I kept going, not knowing when I'd see anything familiar. 

At a particularly large intersection, I paused, overwhelmed and unsure of how I would ever cross it alive. The heat hit me and I wondered idly if I might faint. I stopped and got a bottle of water. I crossed the street, sprinting for the other side. Continuing on in the wrong direction, a rat ran out from under the sidewalk. It unnerved me and for the first time in my sweaty feet day I wished my shoes were not quite so open to the world. 

As I reached the end of the block, I realized I was was lost. I was supposed to have taken a left turn somewhere but instead the street I was on came to an end merging into an even larger, more chaotic thoroughfare. I stopped, feeling my senses rise. I checked myself, reaching for my map to guide me out of the mess. Here, a map is not so much useful for following roads as it is for helping me annotate the landmarks by which everyone here navigates. "Wipro signal" my scrawled note from last night read, and I sighed and turned to a store clerk. No one really speaks English, but that's why the landmarks are useful. He pointed me back where I came from. 

I went back up the street, past the rat whose tail I could still see under a hole in the pavement, back to the intersection where I'd bought the water. I turned right. The intersection was unrecognizable from its 9 am self. A relative placid lake then, it now teamed with people, and surged this way and that. I felt like a dingy in a mid-ocean storm. No wonder I had missed the turn the first time. The city was fundamentally transformed by the 6 o'clock rush homeward.