Monsoon in Chennai

The word monsoon brings to mind, for me, life-threatening storms with torrential rain and winds. Turns out it's just an extended period of regular and, yes, heavy rains. But not so windy and definitely not life-threatening.

We are in the midst of monsoon and seeing lots of rain just about every day. We had an epic car journey yesterday when we got stuck for an hour approaching a flooded portion of road on the way to my office. By the time we got through the jam and the flooded area it was so late we just turned around and went back home. 2.25 hours totally wasted on the road. Except that we got some great photos!

The lesson we took away from this yesterday: when you are driving and the rain comes down so heavily that you can't see four cars ahead of you, there will be an impassable road ahead and you might as well turn back. When we moved here the other expats told us to get an SUV exactly for this reason. And we proved them right when Ramesh drove through the deepest lanes of the road to get around other cars.

Speaking of Ramesh, our driver was in a motorcycle accident yesterday and broke his arm. He spent the night in the hospital and was going to have surgery today to have the bone set. We went to the hospital (more of a clinic with rooms) to see him this morning. His whole family was there, including his very scared, young wife. With his arm in a cast we think he will not be able to drive his motorcycle to work. 

The whole thing was weird. On the one hand, we feel bad that Ramesh was hurt and are concerned about his family. We have no idea what kind, if any, of health or short-term disability insurance he has. But on the other hand we do not want to get too involved in his business (we've heard horror stories from other expats) and now we have to deal with finding and training a substitute driver. It's a very weird position to be in and our reaction to it made us both uncomfortable.

Another weird thing today. A co-worker's (here in India) 3.5 year old son succumbed to cancer yesterday. I got an email this morning informing me of this and telling us the cremation was to be today, plus the co-worker's home address and phone number. Of course we have no idea what the etiquette is here, but I wanted to express my sympathy. So we set our substitute driver to find the address. This is no small task in India. The little streets are very numerous, pretty much impossible to find on maps, and house numbering makes absolutely no sense. By starting on the outskirts of the town and asking lots of people directions, somehow we found the right house. We knew we were near when we saw the flower petals along the street. (Here bodies are covered in flowers and taken down the street to the crematorium with people casting the flower petals on the street.) They had plastic chairs on the street outside their house, and the inside was full of people. The poor father was devastated and his young wife could barely sit up. He brought us coffee and spoke to us. But then I started to feel like he felt he had to stay and talk to us since I am a manager at the office. (There is this uncomfortable vibe most places because managers and foreign visitors are esteemed, so we get the impression that people feel they have to go out of their way for us.) So we left very shortly after we arrived. So we have no idea if we did the right thing or not, but at least we stopped in to let him know how sorry we were.

So two sad, life-event situations here in one day in which we had no idea how to behave. We decided that the basic rules apply everywhere: attend to people, visit them when they are in need, be kind. But the specifics are where you can really screw up, aren't they? Did we stay too long? Not enough? Were we supposed to bring something? Was there something we were supposed to say? We did the best we could and hope we are forgiven if we broke some rules.