Grim Portents, Bespoke Suits, and Night Drives.

4th November
We've come on holiday by mistake. With one exception, friday has been a disaster. It started innocuously enough for CMC with the removal of a huge abdominal mass from the elderly woman who'd presented with it. The initial incision exposed part of this thing, but wasn't big enough to get it out, so Dr. Peedicayil extended it almost to her ribcage; the lump was about the size of a basketball. However, the longer cut let him get hands under it, and heave it free, whereupon it burst spectacularly, spilling five or six litres of yellowish fluid all over the surgeons, the floor, the patient, and a poor student nurse who'd been made to scrub in for her first ever surgery and looked like she was going to pass out as she was showered in ichor. Even after the thing had burst the remnants of the ovary it had grown from were the size of eight or so stacked dinner plates.

This was the first of two omens, the second being the colossal thunderstorm which broke shortly thereafter, and soaked us all on the way to lunch - which would be the last meal we'd have for a while. Around 3pm, after we'd seen a nun have a hysterectomy for her endometrial cancer (which is very common in nuns, in case any of you were considering donning the habit), Ben and I headed to the tailor's for the second stage of our suit fitting. I've neglected to mention this before, but we realised early on that having clothes tailored here is pretty reasonable, so we'd both been and ordered suits fitted. This turned out to be what I understand to be a fully-bespoke service (although I'm sure my lawyer acquaintances will correct me if I'm labouring under a misapprehension here), involving a measurements and specifications session at which we rapidly devolved all decision-making to Charlotte, and then a second fitting with the suits at the not-quite-made stage. This followed the same lines as the first, with Ben and I meekly obeying orders and the tailor rapidly skipping directly to asking Charlotte what adjustments we needed. This was the exception to the disasters of the day.

Our final CMC appointment of the week was back at the university campus for a meeting with the vice-principal, Anand Zachariah, and the other elective students. Spectacular though his name is, I was disappointed not to meet the principal, Molly (not a woman) Jacobs. However, the meeting reinforced my impression of the general loveliness of the doctors at CMC, and their desire to make everyone's time here as enjoyable and beneficial as possible - it was a full-on "what could we do better?" conversation, and the tea and samosas also helped.

Then it all started to go wrong. Knowing the meeting would finish after five, we'd booked a car to drive us the 3-4 hours to Pondicherry that night, meaning (worst case) we'd get in at half nine and have plenty of time to check in somewhere, and begin the weekend's eating, and would then have a full day there on saturday.

It didn't show up.

After waiting half an hour or so in the monsoon rain, we took a rickshaw back to the chemist where we'd booked it (there was a sign outside saying "tourist cars", in our defence) to shout at the man behind the counter. He seemed rather baffled by Ben's open hostility, but did eventually call the driver who he quite clearly hadn't bothered to organise in advance or tell to meet us where we'd agreed despite our deposit. Toyin's ruthless negotiation got us a bit off the fare - but we still left more than an hour and a half late.

You'd think the worst of this would be a late arrival in Pondi - but you'd only be half-right. First there was the drive itself to contend with, the first unsettling part of which was the lack of seatbelts in the car. Second was discovering that the driving on Big Roads in India is very similar to the driving on Little Roads - but when you're in a car doing 60kph and are up against lorries, the stakes are higher than when you're in a rickshaw doing 20kph against other rickshaws. It was also pitch black, and Samson our driver tends to drive in the middle of the road until he sees something heading for us, whereupon a game of chicken ensues to see who ends up swerving into the potholes at the side of the road. The game is made all the more exciting by the cunning use of headlights (it being pitch dark by now) - some oncoming drivers just leave them permanently on full beam, which makes it impossible for either driver to see the road while they pass one another, but the clever ones dip their lights at the normal distance, then flick them back to full beam at the last minute, completely dazzling you. Passing another vehicle in either direction, or sitting behind one, is done to a score of horn usage, with painted signs on the back of lorries inviting this, often just below "DANGER - HIGHLY INFLAMMABLE", or advice on what to do if you get the toxic material inside on your skin ("wash in warm water", it appears). Many conversations were interrupted by a sharp intake of breath, by hitting a pothole or one of the vertical speed bumps at pace. Particularly brutal are the triple humps, which - especially sans seatbelt - are close to chiropracty. Even when you fall asleep, as I did briefly, the victorious blare of a horn would make my eyes start open just as the juggernaut bearing down on us flicked its light back to full beam. This went on for four hours, and about three hours in three bad things happened:
(1) We realised the fuel gauge was just above empty (it later turned out it was just broken)
(2) Samson's headlights failed for a couple of minutes, so we were driving blind
(3) Our ETA slipped past 11pm, when everything would be shut.

When we did eventually make it, the place we wanted to stay in was shut, so we got Samson to tour Pondicherry until we found somewhere to stay. In the process he tore up the bottom of his car on a particularly ropey section of road, and we finally reached a place called Soorya International, whose marble exterior started incongruously enough from a debris-filled drainage ditch, and sat opposite a sign saying "Don't urinate here". The marble floors throughout, including in the rooms, belied the shifty, rude receptionist, and the pack of lies they fed us about restaurants which were open until midnight and when we began to check in but had mysteriously shut when we came back to order food, and about 24-hour bakeries. So I tramped up to my room, where the A/C didn't work, the windows didn't close, and my pillow appeared to have been run over by one of the lorries we'd passed on the way here, tired and hungry.