The shadow on the road

The Survey of India has a very old and significant position in the history of the world.

It is reported the mapping of India took 40 years and cost more in terms of rupees spent and lives lost than all the wars fought by independent India. But before the advent of satellites, the global positioning system and Google maps on mobile phones there existed up-to-date Survey of India maps of India and its major cities including Delhi.

When my daughter Bhavya was three years old she had a mild seizure, as a result of which we were referred by the ONGC doctors at Dehradun to the neurologist at Delhi.

The ONGC, which had given me a new lease of professional life in 1982 (and which I proudly served till I attained the age of 60 in 2015), had enabled officers having three years service to own a car. We got our Fiat through Dr Anil Agarwal a kind and capable doctor primarily a psychiatrist who treated me with care and competence.

The car was constantly under repair and I was spending many of my weekends on understanding the mechanism of the automobile.

Well coming back to our trip to Delhi the first one was with Bobby,( the man who had sold me the car) at the wheel. He told me that before going out on a drive I must ensure that there was water in the radiator, engine oil level was okay as well as that of the brake oil.

On our way to Pilani from Dehradoon we used to change buses at the Inter State Bus Terminal (ISBT) at Delhi and didn’t need to know the layout of the city. But for my first two years at BITS (1971-73) I had to travel by train from Lucknow to Old Delhi and then proceed by auto-rickshaw to Kashmiri Gate where the ISBT was located.

As was our bad luck auto drivers aware of our ignorance of Delhi took us all over the capital showing us the sites of India Gate to New Delhi and then overcharged us when we were finally dropped at the ISBT, which was in fact only a few kilometres from Old Delhi railway station.

I shudder on recalling the apprehension we felt in the long duration of our transhipment from Old Delhi railway station to the ISBT at Kashmere Gate.

Coming back to our journey on our Fiat ( it was a white one with a cracked steering wheel and bore the registration number of DIC 7705 ) I have to mention that after the first trip when Bobby had driven us to my brother-in-law’s place in Tilak Nagar we carried a Survey of India map of Delhi which to our relief never let us down. I used to pull the car to the side and spread the map on the bonnet. I then looked around for the street name board, which was always to be seen no matter where we stopped. Further to our relief we always found the name of the street in the index which clearly revealed the coordinates on the map to which the location belonged.

What was left was to reckon in which direction was the north. For this I looked at my watch, to see the time of the day; it was normally in the afternoon and the direction of the shadows pointed towards the east; what a relief to never be lost in what could have been an unfriendly city.