We're Innocent.

One way to add a bit of excitement to an otherwise pretty straight forward life is to get to know a couple of friends who make an honest living driving an honest to goodness truck for hire delivering anything from furniture to construction materials.

So here I am riding a pick-up truck, sitting next to Yogeswaren listening to the stories he got coming for me and I figure if I want to get back to where I left my car, I had better listen to everything he has to say or he might leave me in the middle of Kesas Highway where everyone knows if you end up here you might as well end up somewhere in the middle of Isfahan, Inner Mongolia or Qum. He got the stereo turned up loud which makes listening to stories he got coming for me a hard work and it is truly hard work listening to him in between songs I don't understand a word of but I am not all that thick to guess that the songs are about happy people in love and how happy they are to be singing and dancing in the sun, not feeling the heat because when you are in love even the sun is nothing but a huge air-cond with a twin blower.

We are heading toward a middle-class neighborhood where the dogs bark at you non-stop for coming up so close to an electric gate but how else are you supposed to get this bulky sofa into the house if you don't park your truck close to the gate without arousing the dog obviously trained to bark at anything that moves. The dog is getting pretty loud and I ask Yogeswaren if it is okay for me to let go of the sofa so that it will land right on top of the dog. Yogeswaren says don't worry about it, can't you see the dog has been safely secured?

We move the sofa to face north, and then south, and then north, and then south again that in the end the lady who owns this huge sofa says, just put it at the corner there. I feel pretty thirsty in the throat that I feel like going to the kitchen to get me a tall glass of water from a huge fridge that I figure must have weigh at least a ton and can easily hold a ration for a rigging crew for a month. We leave the house to head to an address on the other side of the neighbourhood when a call comes in that gets Yogeswaren pretty excited. I can tell from the way he answers the phone that it is not the kinda call that can make you want to open up a can of soda to celebrate the good news. Yogeswaren says we've got to go pick up a few more things from a store and make the delivery before 6pm.

We are driving around a middle-class neighborhood trying to look for a house with the address Yogeswaren has written on a piece of paper the size of a matchbox. It's close to 9 pm and I figure I've had enough excitement for a day that I can't wait to get back to my straight-forward life, a shower and maybe a bit of TV before calling it a day. But Yogeswaren says we've got to find this house and I know too well that I had better go along with it or he might decide to leave me in the middle of this middle-class neighborhood with confusing street names and the numbering system that must have been worked out by a guy who failed his Maths big time.

We stop to ask for a direction from a guy but this guy starts to make a phone call on his cellphone and before we know it, a couple of guys on motorcycles with police light flock around us talking us down, asking us a lot of questions and demanding that we show some IDs. I say I don't have one on me and a guy with a flashlight starts to talk tough about how he can make things difficult for me if I don't do what he says and so I ask what do you want? Maybe it's a wrong question to ask since it could mean different thing to different people and so this guy with the flashlight says, do you want to get into trouble? I say, no I don't want to get into trouble, me and my friend Yogeswaren here are in the neighborhood to deliver this nice looking fridge to a house we have trouble finding and so if you folks can help us find this house we can leave the neighborhood quietly. By this time we must have created such a ruckus that it got the neighborhood excited that people are beginning to peek through the windows to find out what the commotion is all about. I am getting pretty excited inside too that it feels kinda right to smash the skull of this guy with the flashlight against the truck and see what his friends are made of, whether or not they've been in a fight before so as not to feel uneasy to see blood, broken teeth and eyes bulging black and blue like golf balls. Yogeswaren says, please lemme call my boss to get the telephone number of the the guy who has bought this fridge and if it isn't too much of a trouble the guy with the flashlight and his friends can escort us to the house until this fridge is delivered safely to its rightful owner. Obviously the guy with the flashlight won't have none of it because he believes we've stolen the fridge from a house in the neighborhood and are making our quick exit of the area in a getaway truck.

Yogeswaren must have faced a situation like this many times over that he seems to carry himself like a gentleman that he is that I got nothing but a lot of respect for the man. He gets us out of that situation, and a sorry from the guy with the flashlight and his friends, not to mention a police escort right up to the house of the guy who owns this fridge. He's a nice guy who offers us a drink so he can ask a question whether we got connections that can get two policemen on a motorcycle to escort the delivery of a fridge on a night hot like this.

Sometimes it's not a good idea to add a bit of excitement to an otherwise straight-forward life you're leading.