Alright, before I go in any deeper into this specific story, I think it’s absolutely critical that I walk you through the geography of our city back in the day. To be fair, it’s going to be a slightly elaborate, not very significant walk through, so buckle up…

Our city is roughly built along three arterial roads. The coolest and least significant of those basically got onto the list purely because it cradles the beach.

The second one runs the entire width of the city, starting from a Once-Was hamlet that the Dutch or Brits or French or whoever decided to first stop by the city for a chilli bajji* docked their boats at a couple of centuries ago. Over time, the hamlet evolved into “that place” where you could get international goods like Adhi-das shoes and Raye Bann sunglasses for cheap. At the time of this story though most people had apparently purchased slightly better sensibilities, so all that was left were a bunch of shops selling pirated DVDs of debatably horrible movies.

On the other end of this road is a village that doesn’t really matter. All along the course of this road are neighborhoods in the city whose only mark of importance is the fact that they lie close to neighborhoods which are close to neighborhoods that are slightly more important.

Mount Road, though, is the most significant of the three. It starts far far away in the netherlands, where trains full of hungry travellers get their first waft of burnt oil and stale human effluents as a welcome to our great city**. And it stretches all the way down to a never ending other end of the bustling metropolis I call home. Nobody has a definite answer to where Mount Road really ends — some say it curves ahead at a hillock and turns back into the city it grew and raised in a humbler disguise. Some say it goes further, on and on, through the city, and then the next and then the next, taking on a different alias to suit the local taste… Some say it stretches all the way across the Indian Ocean, cutting through Australia and one very annoyed kangaroo.

What’s important is that it basically cuts the city in two — the aristocratic east and the sub-urban west — making it a common point of reference for every single person in the city, right from the hungry traveller to the human effluent.

Which made Vimal’s assumption that I didn’t know this defining feature of our city’s landscape rather insulting.

Sure, I wasn’t a great traveller. I hadn’t ventured much into the scary northern corners of the city. My internal compass always pointed towards the beach. And I was (still am) kind of paranoid about any piece of metal at least the size of my apartment hurtling at me with questionable brakes. But of course I knew Mount Road!