and an overly wet one!

Yesterday I had my first monsoon experience. The ground is already waterlogged, and the 41mm that fell in 24 hours, brought Delhi and Gurgaon pretty much to a halt. I was out buying groceries at a basement supermarket. There was no sign of rain when I went in to the shop, but when I came out forty five minutes later, it was raining quite heavily, and they'd already started pumping the water out of the sub-basement of the building. I waded through this, getting as wet from the surface water sloshing through my sandals as I did from the rain falling from the sky! Raju, our driver, helped me get all the getting wetter shopping into the back of the car, and we started off back home, a journey that should only take 10 to 15 minutes. Well, should have and does are different. Rains earlier this season have washed away the road surface at many of the junctions, leaving some enormous potholes. Add to this standing water, really quite a lot of standing water, and it takes us 50 minutes to get home. Rod was supposed to be travelling up to Delhi for a meeting, and Raju was supposed to pick him up at 1.30. At 1.30, Raju and I are almost at home, and on a good day, Rod's office is a 20 minute drive away. This obviously only counts as a good day for ducks (and the cows, who are looking a lot cleaner!). Rod calls to check his meeting is still on, to find that the people he was supposed to meet were also stuck in traffic, and not expecting to get to their destination in time for the meeting after his, let alone the one he was supposed to attend. So he decides to come home and phones to say he's on his way, and we'll go to another local shopping centre to sort out my mobile phone. Fifteen minutes later, he's coming through the front gate. I couldn't work out how he managed that, because he has to come down Golf Course Road, the best road in Gurgaon, the road it took Raju and I so long to creep down with water sloshing above the door seals! It turns out Raju, one of the more road rule abiding Indians, decided to drive Rod down the wrong side of Golf Course Road. When Rod queried why they were driving down the wrong side of the road, with traffic coming at them, Raju points to the stationary traffic on the correct side of the road and says "50 minutes. This side, 5 minutes". Bizarrely, logic like that seems to work over here. The cars on the correct side of the road just move over. We lost our number plate in a pothole, somewhere!