Lost and Found

As I got in the cab and told the driver where to go, I was surprised when he asked me whether I knew the way to my destination. The whole idea of taking a cab is to leave all the stress of driving and figuring out the best route to the driver. How does a cabbie not know his way around? Maybe he was testing me to see if I was new in town. Was he planning to run up a huge tab by taking me all around the place? Anyway, I was not familiar with the area I was visiting. When I said as much, the driver started calling his dispatcher for directions. I guess he really did not know the route.

Finding your way around in India armed just with the destination address is often an adventure. Street signs are conspicuous by their absence and the few that you find have notices stuck all over them. The houses have numbered and re-numbered a few times so the present one or the one you have may not stand out among all the different ones. In fact, many houses have 'Old No' and 'New No' signs. But all this is only good when you have arrived at the actual street. Normally, I depended on the taxi driver to take me at least to the locale. This driver, I assumed, was new to the city. I was sure that he would get us lost. I sat back and decided to enjoy the show so to speak.

In the US, I have got used to street signs that are prominent and the houses that are numbered in sequence from one end of the street to the other with odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other. You do not have to contend with old and new numbers. In general, it is pretty easy to find your way around. If you got lost, you could stop at a gas station to ask for directions. But then, there are also places like the Los Angeles freeway system which is really intimidating to the uninitiated. With stacked three-level interchanges and winding ramps, it is a veritable concrete maze and can be a nightmare to navigate even for experienced drivers, let alone newcomers. I distinctly remember the time when the middle lane (yes, the middle lane) of the highway I was on suddenly deposited me in the thick of LA's Chinatown.

These days, GPS based navigation systems help us largely avoid getting lost. Back in the days (it seems I am reminiscing a lot nowadays - no doubt, a sign of aging!), one had to rely on maps. Reading maps - now, there's a skill that may be lost forever. I have sometimes seen people driving with a map folded to fit over the steering wheel and trying to figure out their way. A bit scary, that.

With a GPS, it seems impossible to lose one's way. But the thing is, you can be lost and never know it since the navigator constantly recomputes your route. The voice from the box keeps telling you, 'When legally possible, make a u-turn' and makes sure that you are still headed to the destination, never mind that you have already gone a mile past that left turn you were supposed to make. On the other hand, if it pounced on you with, 'You missed that turn, you moron. Are you even paying attention?', you would realize your mistake quickly. I think it is something to consider for the makers of these devices. They should mix it up with the way the instructions are delivered. Otherwise, the dulcet voice giving you directions in a monotonous fashion may end up putting you to sleep. Then you will surely be far worse than being lost. I wonder if the device will still tell you to make a u-turn then.

I am sure all of us have stories of occasions when we got lost on the road. But I once managed to sort of lose my way when travelling by train. It was several years ago when a friend and I were going by train from New Brunswick to Philadelphia, changing at Trenton. I was then to proceed to Washington DC. A mutual friend had dropped us off at the New Brunswick station. We had bought our tickets and boarded the train that just arrived. We were intently discussing something and were puzzled when the train conductor asked us where we were bound after checking our tickets.

'Gentlemen, this train ain't going to Trenton. It's going to Newark', he informed us in a grave tone, when we said, 'Trenton'. We were dumbfounded. How could we be on the wrong train? 'Tell you what', he continued, 'Get off at the next station, cross over to the other side and take the train going the other way'. We had been so lost in conversation that we got into the train going the wrong way! So we ended up getting off, as suggested, at the next station which was Metuchen, NJ. We diligently crossed to the opposite platform and waited for the train. A simple enough task to hop on the next one, you'd think. Well, not quite, as it turned out.

I am sure Metuchen is an admirable place, but while many trains passed Metuchen, only a few stopped there. At least, that was the case that day. We discovered that we had a rather long wait for the next one which meant that we would miss our connections. So we walked out  to see if we could take a taxi instead to a station where more trains stopped. We were pleasantly surprised to find that Metuchen station had quite a large population of taxis. There must have been over fifty of them waiting outside on that lazy Sunday afternoon. I thought maybe it was common for people to find themselves stranded in Metuchen.

Once we got into the taxi, we debated where we should go. We could go back to New Brunswick, but we felt going to Newark would enable us to catch an express. Unfortunately, we realized that we did not have enough cash to pay the fare to go that far. Neither of us had a credit card - I was a visitor and he a newly arrived graduate student. Besides, back then, I am not sure the cab driver could have processed a credit card even if we had one. I had some traveller's checks and had to ask the driver if he would take them. After a brief stunned pause, he interjected, 'Say what now?', with which he somehow managed to convey a mix of an incredulous 'You got to be kidding me' and a worried, 'Am I going to be stiffed by these two?'. It was definitely a first in his experience, I could tell. I have no doubt  that he regaled his bar companions that night with this story. Perhaps even now, he is relating it to his grandchildren, saying, 'You know kids, as a cab driver, you get to see a lot of stuff, but let me tell you...' or something like that.

So we had to settle on going back to New Brunswick. From there, we caught the next train that came by and missed our connection as expected. I had a sneaking suspicion that we could have caught the same train at Metuchen itself, but it would have been too embarrassing to take the cab back to Metuchen!

The sustained loud horn of a bus brought me back to the present with a jolt. My driver had finally stopped the car to ask for directions incurring the wrath of the bus driver behind us. I now saw that I had misjudged the guy. It seemed that he had actually managed to reach close to our destination, but finding the actual street address was proving to be elusive. The good thing was that there was no dearth of people to ask. Getting useful information from them was another matter. One helpful person asked, "Are you sure it is Raman Street and not Rajan Street?". "Yeah, I am not even sure of the street", I muttered under my breath to myself. Another worthy offered to hop into the cab and show us the way but could we please drop him off along the way?

We then asked a vendor who was pushing a cart full of tender coconuts. He shook his head and said,  'Raman Street? I don't think that's anywhere nearby'. He shouted across the street to various people, "Hey, do you know where Raman Street is?" all the while also asking us if we wanted coconut water, with a coconut in one hand and a menacing cleaver in the other, intent on making a sale. After a few minutes of this mid-street drama, with more players joining the cast, and some serious debate on which was the best way to get to Raman Street, someone who actually knew how to get there came around and we were eventually on our way.