Soliloquy

Heavy torrential rains brought the state of Telangana to its knees last week. The districts of Warangal, Hanamkonda, Mulugu and Khammam had the worst of the deluge; capital Hyderabad did not miss out either. One of the fiercest ordeals in the downpour was experienced by my father, who is posted in the city of Warangal and found himself up to his knees in water, quite literally.

Waking up last Thursday in the single-storied house he has rented, my father found his feet almost completely submerged in water as he tried to sit up in bed. Frightened out of his wits, he looked down to see his water bottle floating towards the door, along with his shoes and backpack, which until the night before, were stationed on the floor.

The said door came into view with a gap of about an inch and a half, which, of course, was not much but enough to let water gush in through the drawing area (which abuts the landing) and flood the house. Man’s first thoughts turn towards family in times of peril, and within minutes, my father had made his mind up that he had to come home to us in Hyderabad come what may.

His resolve strengthened intrinsically by the onset of adrenaline to combat this crisis, my father, quite naturally, felt himself a different man. Picking his way about in the flooded house and changing into a raincoat, he managed to somehow cross the landing and walk through the overflowing streets to the entrance of the colony.

The rain, of course, had no intention of letting up and despite wearing a couple of layers, had soaked him to the skin already. Walking for miles in search of public transport without a single soul in sight -water up to his knees and the rain beating continuously on his back- my father cut a lonely figure. There appeared to be little hope as most of Warangal was flooded, with manholes overflowing and roads caving in on more than one occasion.

A rather considerate auto-rickshaw driver offered to drop him at the Hanamkonda bus stand but upon finding out that bus services were discontinued in eastern Telangana, turned his vehicle around and dropped my father at the Warangal railway station instead. The Indian Railways, it was supposed, could always be trusted.

Unfortunately, the rains had deluged most of the tracks in the South Central Railways’ buffer zone, which meant that trains were running late. All trains on the Warangal-Hyderabad route were suspended. Mulling about for an hour or so at the station in the hope of a miracle, it appeared as if the Gods had finally responded to my father’s prayers.

The Garib Rath express that runs from Visakhapatnam to Hyderabad chugged in at the station about six hours later than its supposed arrival, and quite fortuitously, my father managed to get a seat on it. Relaxing for the first time in this terrible trial, he found himself arriving at the Secunderabad railway station in about three hours, where my mother and I were, of course, present to pick him up.

It took all we had, along with the biryani from Alpha, to cheer him up and bring his heightened state of mind back to normal. It helped, of course, that he was home for the weekend!

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