A Series of Unfortunate Events - Day 1

Sometimes, you take a journey, maybe a weekend trip or maybe even a business trip which turns out to be something much more than what you had planned. It starts out as a usual trip or even mundane sort of a jaunt, but becomes something totally else, something that certainly does not merit the adjectives used earlier.

And what should have been a memorable trip, becomes just that, but for a totally unimagined reason. I recently had the (mis)fortune (for I certainly ‘mis’sed the fortune part of it) of being part of such a trip. What started off as a long weekend drive trip, quickly degenerated into an unraveling of human nature and a showcase for the dark side of human ethos.

But let me not jump the gun here, lest it become a Quentin Tarantino story. I’ll start from the beginning; it’s simpler to build it up that way. (Never quite understood why people like out of order stories!J)

It was a Labor Day weekend in America and was one of those “long weekends” that every working person in USA looks forward to, for they are so rare. I left work a little early in gleeful anticipation of the plans for the weekend. For, you see, I had planned this out about two weeks in advance and managed to get myself a ticket for the US Open played in Flushing, New York. As a child, tennis was one sport after cricket that I loved watching and the grand slams were my favorite. Never had I imagined then that I would get a chance to one day see it live in person right there in the Arthur Ashe stadium. So when I realized that the 3^rd round was going to be on the Labor Day weekend, I somehow managed to get a Saturday evening session tickets at the Arthur Ashe (the counterpart of Wimbledon’s Center Court). My roommate too had booked his tickets, but due to a mix up, he had booked it for the Sunday evening session. (in retrospect, this seems to be the starting point of the series of unfortunate events that played itself out over the weekend. Wow! Hindsight is 20:20!!)

And then it began. It started with a storm front generated in the heats of the tropics marching on resolutely towards the North Eastern Atlantic coast. For the first time in 19 years, a storm had climbed slowly and painstakingly towards New York. So my roommate and I who were supposed to hit the road late night on Friday, found ourselves staring into a sky that had turned an ominous shade of deep gray. With winds howling like wolves, we decided to push our plans a little to next day morning. Now, I personally don’t like to leave home extremely early in the morning for a trip, but as my roommate was all for it, I decided to go on with the plan. So next day morning, I woke up at 5:30 AM, and we hit the road by 6:30 AM, a personal record for getting ready, I might add. But much to our chagrin, the wind was still howling like last night, except that it had now become hoarse (must be due to the howling all night), and the sky had taken on a gloomy, brooding color of black clouds and the rain had given it company through the night and continued to do so.

Getting gloomy by the hour, we drove on. All through the way, we never saw a single moment of happy sunshine, or any scenic beauty for everything had become as frustrated as we were becoming. Still, we managed to reach New York on time.

Now, the first time I had been to NY, my memories had been really pleasant ones, for although I had little money, and had slept in a corner in some friend’s friend’s apartment, I had the pleasure of being in NY for the Christmas-New Year season. With such fond memories I was visiting NY again, and this time, I could even afford to live a good environment. But my disillusionment of that city began as soon as we reached there. The friend at whose place we were supposed to stay, had no place for us anymore. He had got new roommates who had tons and tons of baggage strewn about all over the place. Meaning absolutely no disrespect to him, the apartment was much smaller and definitely a lot dingier than most hovels in Mumbai. While I resented staying there overnight, I decided to keep quiet for the while. We left for lunch from there to an Indian restaurant. The locality it seemed was exclusively Indian/Pakistani. So much so that, I could not find one shop that sold American goods or was owned by American people. There were grocery stores, music stores blaring out Himesh Reshamiyya songs, just like they do in any street in Mumbai. Even the street was named: Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Avenue!! J

The rain had literally followed us all the way to NY and had now put up camp with his howling friend, the storm wind right above the New Jersey, New York area. My tickets were for the evening 7 o’clock session and after finishing my lunch at 2 pm, I decided to visit my cousin in Queens. He had come to US for his Masters’ just last week and was literally still living out of a suitcase looking for an apartment to rent and an on-campus job to live. Since he was new to the place, I decided to show him Manhattan, the heart of NY. But, fortune had a different plan in mind, so that when we reached Manhattan, we found the whole Times Square area drenched in cold, chilly rain with gusts of wind bordering on a gale. It was so bad that I could not even take out my camera to shoot a picture with my cousin. I made a brave attempt at walking about Times Square but it just kept getting worse by the minute. We finally decided to call it quits and took a subway back to Queens.

All this while, when the weather twisted and tortured my plans, my thoughts had started becoming gloomier and morose by the hour. Hence, when I arrived at the US Open stadium, it was with a certain sense of foreboding that accompanies such situations. Needless to say, the rain was now a heavy torrent. The area surrounding the stadium is open for miles around and there was nothing to stop the wind which here was seriously bad. I mean, I could see people’s umbrella’s turning inside out, cars shaking on the freeway due to the strong gusts and people like me who had come wearing a rain jacket shaking like leaves in the cold wind. There was a long queue at the stadium with a big question mark on every face. Agassi was scheduled to play in that session, and everyone had come there with a dream of seeing it all happen live.

Now that I look back at it all, I think I had a tryst with destiny that evening. Everything it seemed was conspiring against me, while I stood in that open cold rain drenched and windy front lawn of the stadium for the game. As the minutes ticked slowly by, all my excitement for the game died a cruel death. I remember distinctly, that towards the end, I was literally hoping that they would tell us the bad news of the game being cancelled quickly now, just so that I could walk away from it all. Finally, the guard walked past us holding a megaphone to his mouth declaring the evening session cancelled.

With a heavy heart, cold feet, wet clothes and a dejected spirit, I walked back to the subway station. It had all been for nothing. In a desparate bid to make the day amount to something atleast remotely related to fun, I decided to go for a movie. So I took a thirty minute train ride to Times Square and entered the theater. I had coordinated with my friends who also were watching the same movie. As the movie ended, my cold, wet clothes had dried on my body in the cold of the theater. I was miserable, and terribly hungry because I hadn’t had food all day.

One of the friends volunteered to take us to his aunt’s house to sleep for the night. So we all went all the way to New Jersey where the car was parked and drove back to Queens to the friend’s aunt place. The idea was to park the car at the aunt’s place and then go eat. But it seems, destiny had only shown me half the movie yet. Post interval, was the more frustrating part. After taking a few wrong turns, we finally reached Queens to realize that the aunt’s apartment complex had no parking spot. So we started driving around on the streets looking for a parking space. What began as a search soon became a exasperated hunt for a piece of land big enough to keep our vehicle. But none was to be found. We drove around for an hour and a half but to no avail. Hunger had taken monstrous proportions within me, and with the unquenched fire in the stomach came its trusted companion – the headache. What began as a mild pain became an agonizing throbbing pretty quickly, but yet no parking space was in sight. The events of that day – each more frustrating than the previous – took their toll, and I seriously regretted my decision to come to NY. A thought came unbidden to my mind, (to be frank, when the thought came, I was surprised to note that I still had a working mind at that point of time) that the two experiences I had about New York, the one last year and the one were so singularly different.

Finally, we found parking at 2 am in the wee hours of the morning, somebody managed to get a Pizza at 3 am, we devoured it like hungry wolves and crashed on the floor at 3:30 am.