Blizzard and The Black Man

It was a blizzardly morning - a heavy wind and snowfall supremacy time. At around 8-45 am, I was on my way back to my apartment from the train station as services were suspended due to the snowstorm. What's better news on monday morning than a nature-gifted chance to go back home and rest in peace. All roads and rail tracks were buried deep under the snow. Hardly anyone around. I could only hear and feel the strong and potent sound of wind (imagine two people standing on either side and blowing air right into your ears through a PVC pipe of about 3 inches in diameter). The feel and sound were cinematic, reminiscent of icelandic war movies. For once, I felt I was on some abandoned land in Antarctica.

Now, that being a Monday, who doesn't want to go back and 'work' from home, especially when one has a Netflix subscription? So I made two quick phone calls to inform my colleagues and client about the current crisis and my 'work-from-home' plan for the day.

It was way too cold, windy and specks of snow were shooting right into my eyes while pipping other exposed parts of my head. I could also hear indistinct sounds of horns in the distance (I would have loved to describe the clouds too to sound like Arundhati Roy. Alas, I learnt, during a blizzard clouds wouldn’t show up at all. Thanks). Despite being geared up in my winter paraphernalia and my limbs and torso being reasonably covered, in that bone-chilling weather my sensory faculties were so numb that it could have successfully ignored even a trouser malfunction.

I was wobbling in the snow along the main road, pregnant with desperation to reach home. I saw a blue toyota innova-like vehicle that was being slowed down passing by me and finally pulled over at the nearby signal. A well-built black man with clean-tonsured head, who was driving the vehicle kept waving his hand at me until the vehicle came to a full stop. He then signalled me to come over for a free lift. In that moment of my struggle against atmospheric inconvenience, I saw a cheerful Mother Teresa in him (discounting anatomical and size-related dissimilarities betweeen the two). I quickly sprinted upto the vehicle, narrowly missing a nosedive, opened the front door and sat in the passenger seat.

Me: (Panting, and gently showing my teeth staging an official boardroom smile) "Thanks friend, thank you so much" I said while gently tapping his right thigh (just a courtesty tap, with no specific motive)

Black man: "Maen, I dhin' kawl yo to sith here"

Me: (was trying to analyse what he is actually trying to say)

Black man: "Maen, yo ge' wad-i-say?

Me: (No clue - this reminded me of my CAT paper. While the skeptic in me said this is how potential muggers start conversing before mugging the innocents)

Me: (*Wink*) SSS...Sorry, What ??

Black man: "Maen, yo' draapt yo' glav bac ther" (pointing his hand in the direction I came from)

‘Glav’ was the only word that sounded somewhat closer to my limited vocabulary. I double checked my palms. Left-hand glove was missing.