The beautiful Miss Ambekar

This piece of paper still remains with me.

May 2015. Thanks to Bollywood, Mumbai was already a city I was in love with and some admission related procedure took me there for the second time but for what was my first solo travel adventure. Since I had my final year exams scheduled to begin from the next week, I was supposed to reach the city early in the morning and return by flight the same night. I didn’t have a hotel booking done because the procedure was supposed to take the most part of the day.

Surprisingly, it didn’t. By 10 in the morning, I was waiting for the final part of the procedure which was a medical check-up by a lady called Dr. Ambekar. As I waited outside her room in the Chembur campus of TISS, I was wondering what would I do for the rest of the day. That’s when I was called in. After asking me a series of obligatory questions in a terse no-non sense tone, the lady who was possibly in her late 40s noticed my bag and asked where am I from. When I told her I’m from Delhi, she asked how long I’m in Mumbai for and whether it was my first trip to the city. At this point, I revealed that I had pretty much the next 10 hours to roam around the city but I didn’t have much of a plan.

What followed was something I still remember very fondly. Dr. Ambekar motioned to the man guarding the room to ask the next candidate to wait a bit. She proceeded to tear a page from her diary and clicked her pen. And in the next 15 minutes, she went on to tell me exactly what places to go, what modes of communication to use to reach there, and even how much money would it take. She gave me a set of do’s and dont’s to ensure I didn’t return with a bad memory of the city. At the end of the detailed itinerary, she also wrote her contact number and asked me to contact her if anything goes wrong.

That was the first and last time I would meet her in my life. I did message her about reaching safely when I returned to Delhi but that was it. Squeezed between our meeting and my return to Delhi were some beautiful hours that I spent roaming around Mumbai and falling more in love with the city.

Since then, I have taken several solo trips to different parts of the country. In all of those solo trips, I always think at least once of the kindness of Ms. Ambekar. She had done her job that day and had no business telling a stranger who she would not meet again about how to travel around her city. But she did. Not only did it put a smile on my face but in a city where I didn’t know anyone on that day, it was comforting to know I had a phone number to fall back on in case things went wrong. Thankfully, they didn’t and the solo traveller in me had found its wings, a part of the credit for which I will always give to that lady.

In a world where we keep getting told how dangerous strangers can be and how we shouldn’t trust them, I consider myself really fortunate to have met someone as sweet as Dr. Ambekar on my first solo travel. Her small gesture exorcised the fear of strangers for me before it could hamper my love for solo travelling.It's one of the reasons I still carry this piece of paper with me. For me, It's a reminder of the good that humans are capable of while I wade through the bad.