Driving Mad

Given a choice of which vehicle I would want to drive the most, ten times out of ten, I would pick the truck. And no, I would not go for the itsy-bitsy Tata Ace kinds or the sorry-ass soapboxish SUV like things the Americans call trucks or even those pathetic 9-ton lorry things. NO SIR, you can have your ‘last mile connectivity’ and roll weed in it and dip it rabbit’s urine and pray that smoking it will grant you the sagacity of Our Dear Leader. Not for me any of this pansy nonsense.  When I say truck, I mean TRUCK. I want a large 20 ton truck or one of those mammoth container transports or, even better, one of those car transport things.

My reasons are simple. The romance of lugging a mammoth beast thousands of kilometers around the country, night after night, going smoothly on well laid highways watching the beautiful rolling vistas of our hinterland rollingly vist by me in the pale moonlight of the night; hearing nothing but the roar of the engine and swish of tyre on asphalt; and the glorious joy of the lilting voices of Bhojpuri and Haryanvi singers wanting to explore delicately the tender parts of their beloved and seeking to burn themselves in the fires of love emanating from her short skirt; and the occasional friendly exploration of the genealogy of a colleague over a wrong-sided overtake…No, not really.

I think it is time to let it out now. I do not drive. I mean that in the sense I cannot tell that of those three pedal-like things on the driving side floor of the car, which one makes the car go faster, which one slows it down, and which one makes it go out of its mind like a Nana Patekar dancing with Malaika Arora Khan. In addition, I am very very scared of the possibility of damaging my car in the way that I am afraid of being the one careless owner of the car Douglas Adams said had three very careful owners and one recklessly careless one. And last, but not the least, I am patently terrified by the utter irrationality of driving a car in face of the fact that given the speeds people drive at there is a very good chance that a lot of cars could, at any given point in time, be occupying the same geographical and temporal space. As that is rationally impossible, and yet, seems to happen with an alarming frequency, I choose not to drive. Also, I do not drive sounds a hell of a lot better than I do not know how to drive when you are thirty years old. All of which should probably explain a lot about why I want to drive a truck and not some itsy bitsy thing.

There are other reasons. Truck drivers do not have to worry about other people breaking traffic rules around them. In fact, you will find that drivers of pesky little vehicles like cars and SUVs, who are normally as arrogant as Shahrukh Khan at a Wankhede Stadium, suddenly hide their tails between their legs and keep at their best behavior whenever a truck is around, much like a truant student around the headmaster.

Another thing about traffic laws and rules and etiquettes. The Indian populace accords the same importance to traffic laws and etiquette that it does to intellectual property rights. That is, we as a people do not acknowledge the existence of such things. But let us see you misbehave or overtake a truck from the wrong side, you!

Another reason- how you drive when a truck is around in the lane next to you is a measure of the kind of man you are. I mean I am not particularly a coward, but let me tell you this: I once had the good fortune of being driven on the Mumbai-Pune expressway by a colleague, and we did a stretch where we drove for almost a kilometer with a truck on either side. I am telling you boss, my balls were trying to seek asylum somewhere in the vicinity of my liver. I would happily choose an evening with Kareena Kapoor over a repeat of that experience, anyday. Imagine, OTOH, had I been one of the truck drivers at that particular moment. Just the very thought makes a warm glow go through my insides.

 And I see a kind of romance in truck accidents. Let us take a trailor which has jack-knifed on the expressway. Goodluck trying to find your way out of that jam. I call it a way of getting back at the world- my day is ruined, why should yours' be any better? You call it a damn nuisance, boss. I call it poetic justice!

Which is why I say: Let us all drive trucks.

Writing Poems On Flyleaves

Your hostel was two thousand and a few hundred steps

from mine. One day I counted. Useless pursuit in

collecting random data. Had I wanted to reach your hostel

in a hurry, I would have had better luck

from the wine shop in front of it, where I

spent most of my time in college. Of course, it

does not make much sense, now.

If you met me today, I would never admit I

loved you. What happens in college…stays

permanently in the scars of denial. I would today

tell my friends that it was a fling; that two hundred years ago, I fell

for a bimbo whom I gifted a book. The Collected

Poetry of William Butler Yeats. I wonder if

the man laughs at me now. Underlined, highlighted, dogeared,

a personal book given to a personal love. I heard

you did not sell it with the hundred pathology notebooks.

Not that it meant a thing.

And thirty years later now, what would you say, if

we met each other? Hello, I read that poem you

slyly scribbled in the back pages of the

book you couriered. Ahh, I hope you do not mind. It

was a boring flight, or, you know, I am

a cheapskate who gifts secondhand novels. Never knew there was

a poem there. Or maybe

I deliberately wrote that, hoping….

That you would read it.

Romance

There is a time I forget, a time

I cannot live ever in my heart, despite having lived through it

many times. Sometimes, I wait for you, an hour

and few hundred. You do not come. And I write.

For you, maybe, or for me. Who knows? These words were there

to be put forth on the wind, to be heard and forgotten. To be

said, and abandoned. Who knows what kinds of poems we write

in love? What do our deeds matter? The ones we cared about

are long gone, and will not look back. And there are no tomorrows, only

sad poems. Sometimes, we will also get some words together, someday

we will conjure you out of thin air- a few words, a moment not spent.

You know why I write- this hope that you will read it someday- long after

your minstrels are gone, as is your story, you know, some

part of me will live, and you with that. Or is it the other way around? That

I merely write to keep you alive?

In Places Where Time Stands Still

This is a routine lament.

Colors are dear, these days. Yellow flowers

wilt into brown silence; voices fade, there is nothing more

to be said. Someday, all of this might make sense- these

faded days will bear witness, maybe. But not now.

Where is the place where all silences end? Maybe, there are

ways to be objective about very long ago-

there are no answers in long walks, that one

turned out to be a lie.

Last night, I burnt your last photograph, and

my failures. This morning they were back in the mirror.

Maybe, then, it is just you and not I- listening to

the distance, routine tidings coming from a dirty grey ocean, I

can still lay everything on your door. You are my

straw-woman, my imaginary Desdemona.

Growing Old

Around the time I am thirty nine, I

would like to move on from here. No, this is not

a considered thought, just a random number

plucked out of the air; and I do not know

what this moving on entails. But thirty nine,

that would be ten years from now. Surely

a lot of time. To have fallen in love, thrice, to

have found reason to dye my hair, to have

fought and lost the battles about the curtains, and

to have realized

that there is not much point to it, after all.

Ten years from now seems to be a good time, to

have seen life, and for leaving in a blazing summer afternoon-

you know, the kind of day when everyone tells you, better

wait for a few minutes. There will be many unknowns, and

a lot of life will be left uncollected-brown leaves on your favourite road, left

waiting for a walk the next morning-but then, when it all ends,

all the pieces are collected. One afternoon, you merely walk out, and

before they realize, you are gone. And, they replace you.

Stories

When I was something around 3 or 4, my father bought for me the first piece of fiction I ever read. It was a hindi magazine called Nandan, full of stories of sweet little children who obeyed their mothers and never got into trouble, and of impish little children who sometimes disobeyed their mothers, but still managed to cause only so much mischief that everything would turn out all right in the end.

Since then, I have been a sucker for stories.

When I was six or seven, we used to play with makeshift bows and arrows, you know, little bows made of bamboo sticks split down the middle and dried and smoothed so the sharp edges would not cut our hands- 18 inch bows, fitted with the strings they used to sew those jute bags of wheat with, and armored with one and a half feet arrows of reed. Sometimes, just like the kids who like to play with kites and who sex up their manjha, we used to sex up our arrows. A little bit of coaltar applied to the tip of the arrow would give it weight, and would ensure that when all the local Arjunas of the village went into a pissing match of who could shoot an arrow the furthest, you would be affected a bit less by the wind, and your fate would rest more in the strength of you shoulders. And, of course, the level of enthusiasm you had for the chastising that would follow if any of the elders caught you playing with these potentially eye-damaging equipments.

When we grew older (by a couple years), the test of the strength of the shoulders that came into vogue, was kabaddi. As expected, I was a sissy on a kabaddi field, never touching anyone, never killing anyone, doing my best to not get caught, and not putting up a fight, once I did. And then, someone introduced me to a bat and a ball, and since then, that was it. What is the point of it all? Stories. I am telling you stories which might or might not interest you or affect you, the same way they did when I was a kid.

And then I got sent off to a boarding, and thus started my real tryst with stories. But it was not until college that I really began to understand them- the essence of stories which we told or listened to.
What is the significance of stories? And how are they best told? We know that they are mostly written for heroes. The victor always gets his story written. And sometimes, someone stands up to tell the tale of the one who lost, from his perspective. And the wrong becomes the wronged against, or not, depending on how pursuasive the chronicler is. Every fairytale told from the point of view of the orge bears a sad story, or maybe not- how can predisposing factors justify evil? And yet, we have the fairytales of the brothers Grimm. And more importantly, history. What we have lived.

And a rich tradition of oral history, which is the most treacherous and prevalent of all. Anecdotes are not good friends of one in search of superficial pictures, because the ones which are most often told are the ones which are agreeable to most people. And, yet, they might not be the most correct ones. Because, you know, victory might not always be definitive or truthful.

So, why the stories about the bows and arrows then? Simple, really. Whenever we played those games, the arrows would land some seventy-eighty yards away in fields of wheat-stumps. And there would be one person keeping watch where everyone's arrow fell. And some arrows would always, freakishly, get carried away by the wind. A minor form of cheating in children's games.

But you get my point, I guess. Now think about those whose stories are not told.

The Dilemma of Having Time

There are calls I need to make, people
I need to talk to, who are probably waiting for
me to say the things they expect me to say. And I
have nothing-except the silence of white noise
inside my head. Stupid phrase that, clunky way
to express the inability to express anything. But then-how
do you do that, without creating an  oxymoron? Words, like life,
have a way of staring you in the face at unlikely moments.

I do not stand to see the stars these days, there is too
much silence there, and you know what happens
when silence meets other silence. And they are many, I am
one. Cowardice. Or just an inability to turn a bright face on
days that start with cartons of curdled milk and the smell
of stale cigarettes. Seven chores and twenty nine items
on the bucket list. None are getting done, none are
moving on. Alas, there is too much time,
and we age slowly, so we may regret more.