Red tape

For reasons that I've kept aside as material for another post, A & I found ourselves in the office of the District Commissioner of Chikkaballapur. The office is in the middle of nowhere and has a corridor which also serves as the waiting area. I can now vouch for the fact that that place is a proven time warp. The corridor was full of people whose frustrations were clearly written the faces. Uncomfortable nervous energy prevailed. As if somebody was challenging the piqued lot to make the situation a little more absurd, there was an unguarded AK 47 lying on a chair, waiting for someone to pick it up. We waited there but we can't tell you for how long. All I can say is that when we eventually got out, we came into a less-innocent epoch where a bomb could take you out anytime. There had been 8 bomb blasts in Bangalore and A's car was a victim of the paranoia that ensued. We had parked it at Bangalore Central. The police had had the place vacated some time in the afternoon, and they got suspicious of this one car that hadn't moved. That's all we knew. We had no clue whether the car was still there or it had been towed away. As we ran from one police station to another trying to figure out the whereabouts of the old zen, we developed a deeper understanding of the term "Kafkaesque". Getting home, when it eventually happened, never felt so good.