A riding partner

Last night, I stayed up until an obscene hour at the institute chatting with a visiting professor, and my two good friends here. We may or may not have killed an entire bottle of rum. I'm not saying whether or not we did, just that there isn't any left today. That's ok, it was Mardi Gras, or as we anglicans call it "shrove tuesday."

Our conversation ranged over all the topics in the world; sports, international politics, travel, women, booze, science, and other things of less importance. I think the main focus was the Italian trying to convince the Indian to go pursue his dream girl in Romania... This is an incredibly long story, but I'll leave it at that. After much prodding and convincing (and some more rum) I think he/we finally convinced our indian friend of the necessity of this move. After that, I left the office ~4. Oof.

Well, I decided to take my friend's bicycle again and ride back to my apartment. Well, the traffic had already started picking back up. Like I'd said once before, Chennai is all about the morning life. By the time I returned to my neighborhood ~4:30 a few restaurants had already opened for breakfast and there were several young men running around and playing in the street. I guess they were setting up for some other cultural festival, but I have no idea what it is. In any case all this really was happening at 4:30 AM.

Well, before I returned to my neighborhood's buzzing morning, I was riding through a relatively quieter area of town known as Adyar. This is where I generally hang out in the evening because it has the closest approximation of a night life for indians that I have found. It also happens to be halfway between work and apartment. So at Four in the morning it was still quiet, except for one kid. I was riding my friend's undersized overweight bike with a low back tire (and no place to pump it up in the middle of the night) and a much smaller kid zooms by me on his nice new back with a basket. He gets a good long stare at me (no worry of being hit by a car at this hour) and then slows dramatically to ride with me. It pleased me so, that he should want to ride WITH me at this ludicrous hour of the morning. He didn't speak a word of english. But nonetheless I said my 6 words in Tamil and he said his (perhaps 2 words he actually speaks) bit in "english." He said "Where going?" Good question. I told him R.A. Puram (which sounds in tamil more like "AR yay purdum") and he nodded. I returned the question, of course in english. He said "paper" which is a tamil adoption from english for "newspaper." He is a PAPERBOY! I was up late enough to ride TO WORK with a paperboy. Oh man, happy mardi gras. I guess now should be my season for penance.

Or perhaps, if I wait around to go home with the working crowd in america, I might run into the paperboy again and next time say a couple more stupid things in tamil and continue to embarrass myself thoroughly.