Have you ever seen that movie Just My Luck from 2006? Lindsay Lohan has the best luck in the entire world, and every time she kisses Chris Pine her good fortune gets exchanged for his rotten one (don’t blame me for spoilers, when a movie’s that old there’s only so much you can spoil)!
I’m Lindsay Lohan. Sure, life isn’t always easy but I’m incredibly lucky! Strangers have made drawings of me and sent them over through the barista, and teenagers with great phones have taken photos of me against the sunset then come up to me and introduced themselves and sent me the photos. I’ve even arrived in Mussoorie on a Saturday and found out that Ruskin Bond un-cancelled his book signing at Cambridge Book Depot and met the man himself! But not this week. This week everything went to shit - figuratively. But a lot of things blew up in my face - literally.
This series of unfortunate events began after I picked up my teenage cousin sisters and immediately realised that the car AC wasn’t working. So we drove through traffic and trucks in this summer heat with our only saving grace - a bottle of frozen water. We ate fried chicken with daal rice, watched Shrek on the projector and took a nap. We left the house at 5.45 pm because it was a Monday and even though it was election day, it was half day at work for most people. Gorai beach would be relatively empty and the sunset was worth catching! We’d have some fish at one of the shacks and return with some sandy-dandy memories. We breezed through the entire drive! Perfect, right? Wrong.
In the last 200-metre section that takes you from the main road to the beach, there was a traffic jam that we got stuck in. An hour later, we hadn’t even gotten halfway which means our pace was an hour per 100 metres! This was after shifting inch by inch, passing other cars only by closing our mirrors, honking at bike riders to move to the extreme left and a stampede of pedestrians inching forward like centipedes. A lot of the villagers had assembled to help out. Unfortunately, we had no option but to be stuck in the non-AC car that was now collecting mosquitoes post-sunset because there was no space to reverse and another hour of going back 100 metres if we somehow managed. Our saviour was some villager I overheard about a small road that led out of this mess - we took it immediately (god bless our tiny car) and sped back to the city.
It didn’t end there. On the way back, a symbol started blinking on the dashboard. A symbol that confirmed my fears that the car was out of coolant, and considering how our luck was turning out - what if the engine seized? I called dad to inform him of this only for him to tell me that due to overheating sometimes cars catch on fire. You didn’t know? Now you know. Josh remembered that they sell coolant at the petrol pump, so we made our way to one. Dad told me to check the radiator and put water in the coolant tank. We used a bedsheet (intended for the beach) to open up the boiling bonnet, saw the warning that said “Coolant tank - do not open when hot”, looked at each other and opened it. And we regretted it immediately. The pipe started spewing green liquid in our face so we quickly managed to close it back up. The steam rising from the engine got the manager of the petrol pump to ask us to get the hell out. Fair enough I think, if anything was going to blow up then it might as well be our car and not the entire petrol pump. Debating about what to do and complete nervous wrecks, we decided to drive home slowly. We were 15 mins away, we were hungry and the car would take over an hour to cool down before we could attempt this again. So we drove the car slowly, on the left side of the road in case we needed to stop in emergency and on neutral as much as possible.
We made it home. I called a cab to take us to a restaurant called Brittos so we could eat good fish at least and end the day on a good note. Of course, it didn’t. While it felt good to sit in a car that had an AC, it dropped us off in a residential area with no restaurants of any kind in sight. The restaurant's phone number was unavailable on Google so I managed to hunt it down on Zomato, and then spoke to the same restaurant person in 3 languages before I understood a landmark. We walked 15 minutes to get there, but at least we kept it light. I explained to the older cousin what a coolant is and its role in a car, while Josh regaled the younger one with stories of his teenage shenanigans. We also bought coolant on the way to put in the car when we got back home. We finally got to the restaurant, had the place to ourselves and got the AC going.
You thought this was the end of it? The restaurant had no drinks (beers or milkshakes) so - tired and resigned to our fate - we stuck to nimbu soda and ordered a bunch of seafood. And while we waited, we played a few rounds of Uno and laughed about our luck. At least the food was good. I honestly didn’t know if anything could get worse but we got home safe, added the coolant without burning our faces off, took our dog for a walk, and fed the cat. No further mishaps occurred, and all the children (including us) fell asleep without a fuss.
I have no pictures of the day, so here’s a picture of Doobie and Kulfi.
Until the my luck turns,
Vedi
Kiss your boyfriend, maybe your luck will come back!
This deserves to be an animated episode, the opening The coolant part was my fav lmao 🤣🤣🤣