After the Palolem headphone party where Brighton got ruffied and Leeds awoke the next morning with a blue whale hickey on his neck, we had an evening as civilized as the Puritans.
As we gorged ourselves on pumpkin squash and beetroot smoothies at an organic vegan restaurant, rain tramped the tin roof and a city-wide blackout emanated.
With two flashlights between nine of us, we tip-toed through two-foot deep floods over the juiced concrete to the nearest bar we could find. We wanted hot chocolate. Cuba, the bar, didn't have hot chocolate. We sedated ourselves with chai, India's diabetes in a glass.
An hour later, two Brits headed home on foot while Tarzan, Tarzan's girlfriend Jane, Brighton, and Manchester flagged down a taxi with contortionist dexterity. The cab shuddered to a stop two blocks later. It didn't restart. Blackness soaked the street. The moon sprinkled light as effectively as a mentally handicapped child with an iPhone. Another taxi tripped by. Tarzan and Brighton vaulted in. Manchester stretched to open the taxi door. Jane ducked to get in. Genius, the taxi driver, accelerated. Jane flying-frog-leaped away to avoid head collision. Manchester's hand, fumbling for the door, connected with the window. His hand went through the window with sloth speed. The cab shrieked to a stop as Manchester withdrew his blood-sprung hand. Genius emerged a neurotic Indian man on a rampage.
"You punched my window!" he bellowed.
"I didn't punch your window! Why would I do that? You drove away and destroyed me hand!"
Twenty spewing Indian men surged from all directions and stormed towards the offensive goras. Vocalized Hindi rants and gesticulations erupted like the swine flu over their heads. Tarzan and Brighton exited the cab. Within seconds thirty men surrounded the four foreigners. They backed towards the bar, and candlelight. Arms raised in surrender, one streaming blood, Manchester repeated, "I didn't punch your fucking window! You drove off, smashed my hand, and almost took Jane's head off!
Twelve Indian men eye-raped Brighton.
"Run!" she screamed, as panicked as if the government released a study educating parents that socks can kill children.
The four sprinted down the sloshed street followed by a mob of rabid raging Indian men.
Two Aussies and I sat in Cuba Restaurant and Bar playing Connect Four when we heard a commotion as loud as a chorus of gorilla farts.
Tarzan stood in front of Jane at the bar's entrance facing a sea of irate Indians. We cheetah-raced to them.
"I didn't fucking do anything!" Tarzan yelled.
"Come into the street. Step into the street," one of the mob demanded.
"Fuck you! I'm not coming into the street," Tarzan responded.
Asshole fired a glass beer bottle at Tarzan's face. The bottle punched his cheek but ricocheted onto the concrete. The Aussies and I plummeted between the Indians and our South African friends.
Jesus surrendered a cell phone for Jane to call the police. The horde grew. Tarzan and Jane told us Brighton and Manchester were across the street at Cheeky Chapati, an English-owned restaurant we had patronized the night before. They then snuck out the back with robber stealth. The rickshaw mob raged at our Cuba entrance as well as Cheeky Chapati's.
Manchester, the gushing hand handicapped by the English owner's personal gauze supply, was blitzkrieged by enraged Indian men.
"Will money help? Can I pay you to leave me alone?" he asked with five-year-old wisdom.
The owner demanded two hundred rupees, equivalent to four dollars, as compensation. He paid and the forty-person posse dispersed.
Ten minutes later Manchester, Brighton, the two Aussies and I sat in Cheeky Chapati with quieting beer and cigarettes. Brighton was still in hysterics. She commanded her boyfriend's presence. We called him.
"Manchester got run over and Tarzan got bottled," she hysterically sobbed into the phone.
"Oh my God! What the fuck?" we heard his voice exclaim through the mobile.
We ruptured into laughter. Manchester wrestled the phone away from her and assured Boyfriend that we were fine. Boyfriend and Leeds returned and we unreeled from frantic pursued sober foreigners into tipsy blockheads. Upon Brighton's insistence, we slept seven in one room.
The next morning we found out a cyclone was headed for India.
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