Around ten years ago I acquired the privilege of being driven to work. It made a significant difference to the quality of my life. No longer was I worried that I might get bumped by an impatient driver, while waiting at a traffic light, nor did I have to look for a safe place to park while I could go about my business without worrying about the car being towed away, deflated, locked, scratched by urchins or boxed in by a monstrous lorry.
So when, on taking up a new assignment after a stint at sea, the staff in the new office politely enquired what time I would like to be picked up, I puffed up with false pride. The next day, having donned my whitest whites, and having finished breakfast, I turned to the paper to wait for my car as I had assumed all important people do. I had visions of a shiny white staff car with a smart chauffer waiting on me. My wife was less impressed and wanted to know why I was sitting around. I’m waiting for my car, I responded a trifle pompously. Wifey looked dubious.
The shiny white staff car turned out to be a maroon Maruti van reeking of agarbatti incense. The interior had upholstery designed to shock the unsuspecting , and enough plastic decorations to fill a long distance bus. The chauffer turned out to be a scruffy, shifty eyed youth, with his foot firmly planted on the accelerator. Nor was the car my exclusive preserve, there were two others as well. Off we went trailing clouds of sweet scented smoke, with the radio belting out the latest hindi film songs.
The driver was a law unto himself. He was convinced that the raison d’etre of the three officers in the van was to bail him out whenever he was in trouble. He considered himself the deciding authority on how much the vehicle could be used during the day, something I didn’t know till one day when I wanted to send the car for a job and he calmly told me he couldn’t go as the vehicle had run too much that day. I was sure that I hadn’t exceeded the daily allowance of 80 km but I let it pass. Later I discovered that the vehicle’s owner had instructed the driver not to drive more than 50 km, so that he could save the remaining mileage for his own use.
On another occasion, while visiting a public office for some long pending jobs, I happened to see our man in a heated conversation with two traffic constables. On seeing me he began to wave frantically, but as I was rushing to catch the clerk before his lunch hour, I carried on without stopping. Later, I returned to find a very grumpy driver, who took a dim view of my not responding to his calls. Apparently he had parked under a NO PARKING sign and was trying to talk his way out, hoping that I would take his side. When the policemen saw that I did not respond, they promptly confiscated his driving license. My reasoning that it was his responsibility to park the vehicle in the right place didn’t find much favour with him. Obviously fed-up with my stubborn attitude, he decided to seek his fortunes elsewhere and said good-bye to our office shortly after. I wasn’t sorry to see him go.
The next driver was a more pleasant person. However the stray dogs that lived near our office didn’t think so, for every morning when we arrived we would be escorted by a furiously barking, growling pack that provided a similarly enthusiastic send off whenever the van left office. The driver had obviously contributed to the dogs’ discomfort at some stage and they made their opinions known in no uncertain terms. He had another peculiar driving habit that I noticed when he once drove me and a friend to an exhibition that was at some distance from the office. I saw that whenever we approached a traffic signal, if the light was red he would speed up and come to a screeching halt before the light. On the other hand, if the light was green, he would slow down and cross it at snail’s pace, evoking a furious cacophony of horns from the cars behind, trying to cross before the light turned red. I could never understand this logic. Fortunately apart from this strange habit, no doubt learned under the tutelage of another equally experienced tutor in the back lanes of UP, he was a cheerful fellow who drove carefully.
One day he disappeared to be replaced by a young boy who didn’t look a day over twelve. The response to my query about the other driver was a laconic, “Gaon gaya hai”. He told me he didn’t know the way to office, which wasn’t unusual, so I began to guide him. Initially I thought he hadn’t heard as he didn’t respond to my directions. But after two missed turns, and a close shave, I realized something was wrong. So I upped the volume a bit, and when he didn’t respond to my hollered, “Left, LEFT, LEEFFT” either, I told him to stop. I discovered that he had absolutely no notion of ‘left and right’. Translating the directions into Hindi was no help either and eventually after a few more near misses and several seat clutching moments, I made it to office. By then I had assigned a whole new meaning to the term ‘road rage’.
I firmly announced to the Master Chief that I refused to ride in the vehicle till the driver was changed. Master Chief Sa’ab proceeded to haul him over the coals and discovered that he had a license that was exactly two days old, issued from some remote town. The driver was sent packing and the contractor received an earful, but I could have strangled the RTO inspector who had awarded him the license, no doubt for a consideration.
Another driver whom I nicknamed the ‘Champ’ was a virtual reservoir of quirky habits. He would drive along placidly, till someone overtook him. That was the trigger to turn him into a speed demon. Unmindful of the fact that the car he was driving was a puny Wagon R or occasionally an Indica, he proceeded to take on hulking SUVs and mean looking BMWs as he raced after the offender, with a determined expression on his face, shooting out bolts of black energy from under arched eyebrows at any other driver who dared overtake. Fortunately the Mad Max effect rarely lasted beyond the next traffic light and within a few seconds he would revert to his usual bovine, cud chewing self from a remote village in Bihar.
The Champ had as much sense of direction as a mud-pie and expected us to guide him every step of the way, unmindful of the fact that he had driven us to INOX or Atria Mall a dozen times, while he drove along mechanically in a semi-somnolent state. On reaching the destination, he would recline the driver’s seat as far as it would go, with his feet propped up on the window and would be asleep in a minute. One merely had to look for a car with two unwashed feet dangling out of the window to locate him. While driving, he occasionally forgot to shift beyond third gear even on an open highway, till I’d remind him that he had a few gears left. The Champ could then be seen to glow with embarrassment. Equally, while driving uphill, he would refuse to downshift, even with the car slowing to a crawl, preferring instead to urge the car on with the strange mannerism of arching his back and trying to push his seat forward! Probably it had something to do with a childhood spent riding bullock carts.
Eventually when I would be unable to stand the misery of the engine any further, I would voice a suggestion to change gears. The Champ would then awaken from his reverie and could be seen to visibly bristle at the perceived slur on his driving skills and experience.
The Champ had the knack of selecting the most unlikely candidate when he needed to ask directions. Chances were that the person picked would be either drunk, or a complete stranger or otherwise unable to comprehend the question spoken in a thick Bihari accent through a mouthful of paan. Stopping the car at the edge of the road, he would first hope that I would oblige him by asking directions, so that he wouldn’t have to exert his gray cells. When occasionally that didn’t work, he would struggle to lower the left side window, by which time the targeted person had usually walked away. It would take some stubbornness on my part to force him to stop the car, spit out his paan and walk across to a rickshaw stand to seek directions. Invariably by then we would be a few kilometers off course.
In due course, I graduated to a white staff car, not as shiny as I had hoped, but entirely my own. It didn’t matter that the car wheezed and rattled along, the door had to be slammed shut with force, winding the window glass up or down was a test of strength, the a/c required me to imagine cool air wafting through the vents and during rains, the wipers would wearily trudge their way up to the top of their arc and then flop downwards as if exhausted by the effort. The driver was pleasant, courteous and experienced, who not only knew his way around the city, but also knew how to get the maximum out of the car. The vacation ended all too soon. He was soon hijacked by an officer senior to me. The replacement was equally well trained, but he had the bad habit of jumping red lights, probably taking advantage of his uniformed passenger and the bonnet flag and star plate. I suppose it was my fault, I ought to have pulled him up sooner, for one day the inevitable happened – he jumped a traffic signal as was his habit and was promptly flagged down by a traffic constable. The policeman was very polite and although he addressed his concerns in no uncertain terms to the driver only, I was convinced that I had faulted. Thereafter I made it a point, whenever assigned a new driver, to make it clear that he was expected to obey traffic rules in letter and spirit and that he could expect no support from me if he broke the rules.
All of us who have the privilege of being driven to work, have to realize that the men who work as drivers have not had the benefit of higher education and while some of them are undeniably brash and incorrigible, many of them drive the way they do only because they know no other way. Others have acquired the bad habit of using the car’s official status as a shield for breaking traffic rules and displaying road arrogance only because their passengers enjoyed the juvenile fun of breaking rules with impunity, when actually they should have checked the trend. As for the rest of their driving habits, its better to bury yourself in a magazine to avoid getting blood pressure by getting too critical of their driving habits.
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