Sagarika Ghose, the well-known TV anchor, is often seen on CNN-IBN these days. Recently, while watching one of her programmes, I suddenly remembered an incident some years ago, when she was beaten up by an envoy’s wife in Delhi over a minor parking fracas. This in turn reminded me of my own skirmish with a member of the diplomatic tribe more than 30 years ago.
I was then a young Bank Officer on temporary duty at Karanprayag, the confluence of the Pindar and Alaknanda rivers in what is now Uttaranchal. One evening, my Rest House chowkidar handed over a telegram, which he informed me with cheerful insouciance, had arrived two days ago! The message from my headquarters at Delhi was urgent; I was to reach the capital immediately.
Early next morning, I revved up my trusty Jawa and took off for Delhi. I was a veteran on this route, and my Jawa an old war-horse, devouring distances with practised ease as we zoomed along picturesque Jim Corbett countryside, past Rudraprayag, Sreenagar, Devaprayag and Rishikesh, reaching Delhi around 2 p.m. It was hot and dusty and I was miserably thirsty. Heading for a friend’s place, I halted at the Alps Wine Shop at South Extension to buy some beer. I was just about to swing back onto the Ring Road, when from behind, a fancy diplomatic car, horns blaring and a very excited-looking man at the wheel, almost rammed into me. I swerved violently to one side, thereby averting a major disaster. At the same time, the driver of the car, livid with rage, thrust his face out of the window, bellowed “You bloody Indian,” in an unmistakably foreign accent, and drove off in a haze of petrol fumes. Nonplussed for a moment, I quickly recovered and gave chase. Gesticulating wildly and honking furiously, I finally overtook the foreigner, whom I rather imperiously directed to stop. Dismounting, I swaggered towards him with what I thought was a mean and threatening look. In my best Stephanian accent, I drawled, “Look here old chap, you can’t go driving around these parts at such speeds, you know. This isn’t exactly San Francisco. There are cyclists around, motorcyclists, pedestrians, even bullock carts on our Indian roads…” I didn’t complete my words, but stopped midway through my little homily because I suddenly saw him groping about in the glove compartment and taking out a revolver! He then started waving the weapon about dangerously, pointing it at me and all the while jabbering excitedly in what I thought to be some East European language. Occasionally he would break into “You bloody Indian, I kill you, I kill you!”
I wisely decided to abandon my lofty Stephanian stance. Adopting a more conciliatory tone, I tried telling the man that his driving was too fast for our roads. Meanwhile a smallish crowd was building up, eager to watch the tamasha. I could soon sense that they had very little sympathy for the arrogant firanghee. One particularly ‘spirited’ Sardarji poked his head in through the window of the car, and after burping the contents of an entire brewery onto the hapless occupant’s face, proceeded to tell him what he thought of his ancestry, all in lusty, fiery Punjabi! By now the man, looking distinctly uncomfortable, had begun to show signs of wear and tear. He furtively shoved the revolver back into the shelf and shot off in the general direction of Diplomatic Enclave, while the crowd grinned and cheered. Clearly, Hindustan had won this war!
I do not know how l’affaire Sagarika Ghose finally ended. My own encounter however, had a few strange coincidences to it. The first was that as in Ms.Ghose’s case, my tormentor too was an Algerian, a Second Secretary at their embassy, as I discovered later. The second was that the friend I planned to visit that day, was himself an Arab—Naif Karadsheh, one of my dearest friends, an Indophile if ever there was one, who looked, dressed, talked and even thought like an Indian! He almost wept when he heard about the gaffe committed by a fellow Arab. But most remarkable of all was the number plate of the delinquent car. It was 2 CD 6, the same number that was to traumatize Ms. Ghose many years later!
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