There is no telling what funny experiences you might have in Mumbai. A few days back I was returning home after an afternoon of shopping with a friend and his family. The cab was minutes away from my home when it stopped at a traffic signal.

There was a girl (who appeared to be from a well-to-do family) who was checking each of the halted cabs to see if any was empty. She looked at the cab driver first and then at me and named a place which was pretty close to my place. I thought that I was anyways going in that direction so might as well give her a lift. So I said yes.

Thereupon the girl said that her family of 4 was close by and would I be able to accommodate them all? I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. A cab can sit 3 slim people comfortably at the back - 4 at the most if one of them is a child - and one next to the cab driver. Only if the girl's family had 2 children and 3 slim grownups in all, we could have managed to accommodate 5 adults (including the cab driver and I) and 2 kids in that cab.

I consider myself pretty helpful by nature but I have my limits and sitting in a cramped position in my own hired cab to accommodate 5 members of a stranger's family (which may or may not contain children!) is definitely out of those limits. Fortunately for me, the signal turned green at this moment. I told the girl that I was sorry I couldn't help her because I had to pick up someone.

It was only when the cab sped away that I realized that I hadn't given much thought to the safety aspect of giving a lift to a total stranger, even if she was a girl :-(