The Driver - Part 1

TODAY

I have been driving all night. The winds have brought the trees down and it hasn’t stopped raining since last Wednesday, which was when I visited my son at his Georgia Tech dorm. The highways stayed open, but many of the inner roads have been flooded and closed to traffic.

It is on such nights that I make easy money.

People stranded at airports, train stations, tourist spots- all need to be transported to different locations; not quite to their own homes maybe, but sometimes hotels and motels and friends’ of friends’ houses, bring the feeling of being loved and cared for, especially in an unfriendly, pouring night like tonight’s.

So in a way, I take people to cozier places. Homes, coffee shops, lover’s dens. Malls. Brothels, taverns, prisons. Wedding Halls.

Perhaps that is why I like to drive all night long, all week, except Sundays. That, and the satisfaction which the insanity of endless driving gives me. Like a favorite record, playing again and again and again. Like a marathon runner’s training for a race, or the fanatic priest’s never-ending chants for salvation.

I drive to run, not towards a place but away from it. A place, as I will reveal, was once very dear to me.


ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES

I arrived in my embroidered powder blue sari, laden with gold jewelry, smelling of Ponds cold cream, and red-eyed but wide-awake after the 24 hour journey. The lady officer at the customs smirked at my gold ornaments because the metal detector went berserk. It was just wedding jewelry, not heavy artillery, but annoying nonetheless to people not used to wearing gold on a daily basis, I guess.

We were received by friends, who were going to drive us to our apartment, 20 miles from the Airport.

The sky was still orange at 9 in the night, something unseen in my hometown, as the sun reluctantly withdrew from the picture-perfect horizon. Tall buildings began to appear rapidly, as we approached the center of the city. Trees, well manicured and tailored to compliment the surroundings, glistened in the evening hue sharpened even more by the magnificent city lights.

On the highway, cars ran at an amazing speed. Faster than I had ever imagined. Faster than I wished they would. I was told that everyone has to learn how to drive in this country. However, just at that moment, I made up my mind to never attempt to sit behind the steering wheel trying to tame a car, because it would undoubtedly lead to a crash, which, observing the insane driving speeds, would quite likely be fatal.

I nodded myself out of that horrible thought. The tail-lights of the cars in front of us snaked ahead, leading curves of light- only to be followed by another, and another….and yet another. In my jet-lag induced haze, this felt like an almost-dream.

That was 20 years ago.

Life, like air, just expanded. There was no reverse option, no shrinking back into a tiny ball of carefree anticipation, no turning back to the beginning. You cannot get rid of the experiences, even when the people who were a part of them, were gone.


SOLO

At twenty-five, I was too old to learn new things. Or so I thought.

Sitting by the pool with my 7-month baby on summer days was more comfortable than inching nervously in a bathing suit, albeit too conservative for most, but which still made me feel naked among strangers too busy to notice my awkwardness in water. My grandmother used to say a proverb in Bengali, "Jékhané jèmon, shékhané temon", which transalates to - Wherever you are, behave according to the local customs. But however much I tried, decades of conditioning wasn’t going to take just a few months to shed away. What I did not know back then, was that shedding itself was a useful tool to learn, and once mastered with the craftiness and cunningness of a peacock preparing for the next mating season, would bring me back to where it all started, a vulnerable and exposed, but invariably lighter version of the feather-burdened self.

If I remember correctly, it was some time between Dev's teething and the first time he spoke a complete sentence, that I overcame my fear of cars. Not driving a car, just the thought of driving a car.

Just the thought was enough. For a nine month old baby, taking that first step required just the thought. At ten months he would walk, moving ahead with just the thought, and forgetting all those times he had fallen down during the past month trying to keep the balance standing up without support under his tender hands.

By the time Dev began his endless chant of  "I want Panda bear" and "dushtu dushtu", my neighbor and I already had an agreement- I make her favorite Indian dish every Friday(should have expected that!), and in return she supervises my driving, riding with me in my car , which I called mine only because it was left in the garage the rest of the time, waiting for me to breathe in life on Saturday mornings. Later that day, Dev would lay his head on my lap and fall into a nap, and my triumphant feelings from the morning would nebulize into softer emotions, like a victorious warrior returning home after a battle and melting into the floor to sleep.

Months later, after taking the driving test, and having heard the wonderful words- "you have passed the test", those amanranthine emotions from the Saturday afternoons would return; and I would hug a stranger for the first time in my life.

The first solo ride was to a thrift store and back. There was no money to actually shop anywhere else, but the thrill of the ride was perfectly complemented by the exhilaration of a splurge, however small it might have been. The rush through me was the same that I felt while racing with Zin and 20 others at an off-road racing event several years later; when I beat all but one. That one, was Zin.

~to be continued