Of mishaps and misfits

I won’t be exaggerating if I said it was really the first time I did not care about the flies resting on my hands folded quietly in my lap. Neither was I worried the gaping hole in my sweatshirt revealed my fawn undergarment. At 7 in the morning, when the only sight you’d witness on the otherwise crowded Mall Road right in the heart of Ooty would be either lungi-clad men carrying milk and bread loafs, or hurrying children in school uniforms, or the groggy tourists religiously dragging their step towards the Botanical Garden, a “must visit” as per every tour guide; the place where I sat looked like the Pied Piper had just taken his revenge, this time by luring women from around the area.
We were seated in an open yard; me and almost fifty, 20-something women, awaiting our turns to be called into a cramped room at the far end that occupied about one-tenth of the area. I may have found this ratio agreeable had it not been a maternity clinic; but right now, it was an inconvenient place to be, especially for a 19-year-old girl some 2000 Kms away from home, accompanied by her mother and a visibly terrified tour guide, who had been driven there in a fancy, silver SUV sporting flags and pictures of a certain (in)famous politician, by a man with a most unscrupulous gaze and a moustache so long you could almost tie its ends behind his head.
I was too zoned out at the moment to register the curious stares and the sympathetic glances I drew from those women. I was either a prodigal child, or a victim of an obvious mishap, they seemed to think. And yet, I imagined their soft gasps form tiny, puffy clouds inside them, making their bellies rise a bit more.
As I heard my name being called, I gathered my wits and walked towards the nurse. Like a programmed robot, she pointed carelessly to a weighing machine set in a corner. My eyes met those of my mother’s, and we walked out of the yard without meeting the doctor, a gynaecologist.
Until an hour back, I was just another ‘groggy’ tourist trying to cross an early-morning empty road to the phone booth on the other side, not foreseeing a reckless SUV speeding out of nowhere and ramming into my petite frame. The next thing I know, I was inside the SUV, a glass of water in my hand, a picture collage in my head, our tour guide on his interpreter mode and a hunt for a hospital or a clinic.
Luckily, it was only an abrasion that I had suffered; we were later assured by an elderly physician we chanced upon outside a barber shop.