Activa(ting) talk

Imagine a day comes when you make an entry in your gratitude journal that reads like this: “Today, I was able to place an order with bigbasket.” It was truly a miracle. While making the online payment, I half-expected to see the familiar message that has been popping up on my screen all week, “All slots full. Please try again later.” But my order went through. After trying for nine effing days, my order went through. Delivery day was the day after tomorrow.

I was so excited, I called mom to share the news. Then for the next twenty-four hours, I kept staring at my order list, mesmerized. So what if they have stopped supplying meat and fish and eggs? So what if only about 60% if the items were available? So what if they showed delivery time between 6 am to 3 pm, which meant waiting in a limbo for the doorbell to ring and not being able to get to work in the morning? In forty-eight hours, I would have all these items in my fridge. The fridge that was starting to look so empty these days. I never thought that the biggest joy in my life would be to wait in anticipation for two kilo apples and two large watermelons to arrive.

On delivery day, the guy called and told me that the company has asked him not do a door delivery. I would have to go meet him at the main gate and get my stuff. The same order list that gave me a dopamine high not too long ago was now going to give me nightmares. Imagine lugging two kilo of apples, one kilo of pomegranates, two large watermelons, four liters of milk, one kilo of bananas, half a kilo of cucumbers, and other such heavy things from the main gate to home. No worries, I told myself that in this 42 Celsius heat, at 10 in the morning when the sun was already high up my head, I am off for my army-training. The kind of training they show you in movies where you carry heavy bags on your back and crouch and crawl on the ground. I can do this!

One look at the stuff and I knew that I cannot do this. In a bad attempt to use the poor defenseless woman card, I made a sad face and said to myself, loud enough for the security guards to hear, “No problem, I will make four rounds in this heat to lug everything!”

One of the security guards took pity on me and asked me to hand him all the stuff. He had a scooter (Activa) parked nearby. On a side note, I did not know what an Activa is when I moved here. Someone asked me if I have an Activa and I told her that I now eat Amul Masti yogurt (and wondered how she knew about Activia, the brand of yogurt I ate in the US). Anyway, the security guard was nice enough to drop my heavy bags home. That army-training I was fantasizing about never happened.

I told this story to my family on the phone, amid much gasps and oo-maas and ahaares from mom and grandma. Of all the things, my dad asked me somewhat suspiciously, “Did you sit behind him on the scooter?”

“I can walk just fine,” I shouted at him. Ridiculous!

sunshine