Hard Drive

‘Brute’, said my friend at the traffic signal.

‘Yes?’

I was used to being referred to by many epithets in my circle of friends and so had naturally assumed that the remark was directed to me.

‘Not you, you dunderhead.’ he corrected. ‘I was referring to that sergeant over there bullying the old beggar woman.’

And sure enough there he was, the standard Bangalore traffic sergeant with this queer hat reminiscing the past British rule, a rotund belly reflecting the current democratic rule severely censuring the ragged wrinkled beggar woman who had chosen to cross the road at the exact moment when the signal had chosen to change red. From a distance you couldn’t say that the sergeant was actually shouting at the lady. In fact he definitely was not shouting. He was choosing the choicest of epithets that the Kannada language has to offer and employing it on the lady in a poetic fashion.

‘Imagine treating a lady like that, that too an old lady. He must have no heart…’

‘Halt. Thou shalt speak no further.’

My friend attempted to heap more ignominies on the sergeant when he was stopped in this rather chevalier fashion by me.

‘I will never ever allow anybody not even the closest and dearest of kith and kin to speak bad of a sergeant, more so a sergeant who is bullying an old lady. Not after the incident that happened to me.’

‘And what may that be?’ asked my friend. ‘You might as well tell a tale while we are driving back – better than sitting behind and giving me directions on how to drive.’

‘I’m rather disappointed at your inability to make use of expert driving advice immediately available to you. However I shall magnanimously overlook this fault and proceed to entertain you for the rest of the drive. It was a bright and shining summer morning when I full of hope and fortitude…’

‘I might just change my mind you know. You have been reading too much of that Shakespeare stuff…or rather pretending that you’ve read that. I promise you that if you continue one more word in that tone, I shall drive my bike straight towards that electric post there and make sure you the inflictor and me the sufferer both shall perish immediately.’

‘Err… ok. I’ll tell you the story. It started this way…’

And this way is what you’ll read further.

‘It’s harmless.’ my friend said.

He was referring to the bike of his which I was about to borrow. The bike looked nothing like it. I swear it – I’m an honourable manager-fearing software engineer and I swear by all the meetings that I have ever attended that the bike did not look harmless. It looked like a rather rummy street cat that had lost a fight with ten other equally rummy adversaries. And it was this bike that I was to use for a drive through Bangalore. And it was this bike which was at the moment referred to as harmless. Common sense tried her very best to make me revert course and forget all about the trip to be made. Unfortunately (as is often the case with me) lunacy prevailed. I took the bike.

My objective was to take this bike make me to err… bake this mike take me to…make this tike bake me to…wait wait…concentrate, bake a deep treath…no no take a deep breath. That’s better. My objective was to make this bike take me to Malleswaram from Bommanahalli. And in the process I hoped I was in for some thriving drills…err…driving thrills.

It was pretty pleasant actually. The bike sped along like an Arabian steed across one of those fairy tale plains, almost out of a 60’s 70’s feel good musical. And I felt a bit like a knight in shining armour. In fact I was almost willing to change my opinion about the bike – it looked harmless so far…in fact quite likable I must say. I felt a great remorse at having accused it so heavily. Perhaps one should not judge by appearances… I made up my mind to go to one of those pink coloured Archie shops and get something tied up in a ribbon to apologize to this bike.

And this is exactly where I erred. In fact it was this train of thought that led to the singular chain of events that I’m to relate. Bikes as you know are creatures that toil a lot. They run through rickety roads, scream their throats out at nonchalant buffaloes that give them queer looks, literally handle a lot of crap and so on. So one cannot blame them for adopting a misanthropic view of life. They don’t like happy people. And they definitely don’t like happy people driving them. The rule of the thumb when driving a bike is if she runs smoothly, you keep saying in a loud voice ‘Oh, my God, this bike is running smoothly, surely she is going to skid right at that corner leading me to a gory death. I definitely know it…I better call up an ambulance in advance’ or something to that effect. The bike would then go on its way knowing that you are totally scared and worried.

In my sudden happy mood, I had totally forgotten this rule. So, ‘the harmless’ bike decided to teach me a lesson. It stopped.

Stopped as in not sputtered, choked and then came to an end - she just stood still right in the middle of Bangalore traffic. Let me describe traffic in Bangalore to you. Bangalore as most people know is a city filled with thin, weary eyed software engineers and rotund oily house owners. The rotund house owners have nothing to do but sit in their houses and collect rent every month from the weary eyed software engineers. The weary eyed software engineers have to rush to this dungeon called office everyday so that they get a paycheck which they give every month to the rotund house owners. And in order to rush to this dungeon called office, the weary eyed software engineers drive in hordes and hordes of monsters called cars which try to kill the weary eyed software engineers so that their insurance will pay for the car loans. In effect, this has led to the entire Bangalore city have something called roads which have been long buried underneath a pool of the monster cars.

Now, when my bike stopped, the hundred vehicles behind me started wondering why I chose this particular moment to stop my bike and give in to serious contemplation about life. And this wonder they communicated to me by a series of horns which would have put any canon shot to shame. I’m a person of strong nerves… I’ve come through watching Hollywood movies, status meetings and appraisals with my sanity completely intact. But nothing in life had prepared me for the sudden blare of a thousand horns hitting my cochlea. I frankly lost it. I began to frantically start my bike by kicking the clutch, revving the gears. After about 3.14 minutes of perfect chaos the bike decided it had had enough fun with me for now and got going.

The incident had affected my nerves badly. The bike was now overcompensating for the time lost. It now began to run like a fat lawyer who had his wife, a dozen of his customers with deadly weapons and a huge pack of hounds at his tail. It was perhaps an odd coincidence that an old woman chose to cross the road at this exact moment. Old women are a queer species on the road. They never cross a road when the signal says they can – that is like being submissive to the signal, almost autocratic. They never cross the signal when the road is free and they can reach the other end safely even if it would take them a decade to get there. No, they’ll have to wait till a young bachelor comes in his bike which is running about like a psycho killer and then…and then they jump right in the road and say ‘Boo’.

The particular old lady who jumped in front of my bike and said ‘Boo’ looked like she was from one of those badly made horror flicks. My bike was hoping for something like this to happen and promptly forgot the fact that it had something called a brake and the brake worked. The general plot that my bike had in my mind was possibly to bump the old lady a bit, smile gleefully at both her and me after which it would speed of at maniacal pace. But my bike had not expected the old lady to say ‘Boo’. This ‘Boo’ totally threw my bike off its mental balance. I was thrown off balance from the bike and before you could say ‘Boo’, the bike was on top of me panting heavily, the wheels trying to escape the consequence of what happened. My spectacles I realized were on the headlight of the bike which was trying to send out an SOS in Morse code. One of my slippers had, by some queer twist of fate (and my feet), got onto my right hand.

But all these details I noticed only later. At the given moment I was only aware of a high pitched wailing from some source nearby. I was for a moment convinced that I had died and gone to heaven where some Banshee was announcing my arrival gleefully. However this explanation was not very convincing because I was sure of my bike sitting comfortably on my thigh and I know it for a fact that dead bikes don’t go to hell. I opened my eyes and looked around. The road which about 5 seconds ago had nothing save me, my bike, the old lady who said ‘Boo’ and a completely bored buffalo was now filled with people of all shapes and sizes. It is difficult even now to believe that so many people existed in Bangalore and even if they did, they all assembled at that very moment at that very place. I was a bit unsettled, but I’m sure I counted 54 bald men, 35 old geezers with walking sticks, 65 ladies with a lunch bag and 9 and a half kids with half trousers and no shirts.

Out of this crowd, a bald man (the usual bald man who tries to help in accidents, you know the kind that I talk about – the guy with a bushy mustache, dirty shirt, oily face who tries to get you and your bike up while he’s actually trying to pick your pocket) came forward saying ‘Its all ok saar, no problem saar, just small accident saar.’ My instinct cried out loud and hard – ‘Stop this man from touching you or your bike. Stop him before he kills both of you.’ I did save my person, but my bike unfortunately could not be saved. Before I could blink he had lifted the bike and held my front brake and left indicator (or rather what was left of them) in his hands. Both of them I swear were attached to the bike even after the accident. I still can’t figure out how he managed to remove them by pressing the horn to see if it worked.

The crowd by this time decided they were not having enough fun, so they did what they usually do when old ladies try to commit suicide using young guy’s bikes. They attempt to lynch the young guy. I looked about for my pen to write my will when I had the chance. But the old lady, wile old lady let out another high pitched wail. Upon this the same old bald man suggested that I should take the old lady to a hospital. I looked upon him like he was some slimy toad run over by a heavy duty truck…in fact if he had been a slimy toad and I had a heavy duty truck, I would have gladly run him over. I conveyed to him in clear terms that I will not take this Banshee in the guise of an old lady to a hospital even if that act would make me a billionaire. I would not do it because I did not wish to harm myself, the bike or a hospital. No, I would not do it.

Then the bald guy suggested that if I did not take the old lady to a hospital, the crowd might want to lynch me. He then engaged in some rather graphic imagination of how much I would look like a slimy toad run over by a heavy duty truck after the mob had had its way. The guy would have made another Tarantino. After five minutes he had won me over by the sheer force of his argument. The old lady had seated herself very comfortably on the pillion and was wailing and howling while defaming my family and anybody connected to me remotely. I still don’t understand why she was wailing when I recall that she had not as much as a scratch on her scaly body.

So I was driving with a rather crestfallen bike retracing my route so that I can head to a hospital, get rid of this bawling witch in my pillion and get back to Malleswaram. When you travel in the reverse direction, by a law of science (something told by Newton I believe, he's the one who generally makes all these laws) your left hand becomes your right hand and your right hand becomes your left hand. But the actual places remain the same way. So, wherever you took a right turn, you need to take a left turn. If you take the right turn, it becomes a wrong turn because the right turn is the left turn which was the right turn when you were driving the in the forward direction. If reading this is confusing, imagine a man driving with this running through his mind (to say nothing of the old lady). No wonder I took the wrong turn a.k.a. the right turn. When I came to realize this, I had to take a U turn.

U turns are the most vicious things in the road. The general process involved in a U turn is this - U start off the U turn at the leftmost lane, which happens to be the wrong lane to start off with. But then, in order to preserve tradition, you don't take the right lane, which is the right lane. After having come within about 50 meters of the U turn, you realise you are in the wrong lane and then drift slowly towards the right side - if you do this in Europe, it is called the continental drift. In order to have an effective drift, you must have about 50 vehicles honking at you in fury with at least twenty-five riders making loose-ended remarks that insult everything and everybody connected to you in general. Having thus lost all sense of ego, you execute the U turn in a state of complete placidness and detachment while remembering the Gita - 'Do your duty and do not worry about the result.' If executed exactly as per procedure, you would be cruising at 40 kmph with a fat traffic policeman running behind you while the driver you pushed off balance a few seconds ago is trying to find some heavy object to stun you.

And thus having executed the U turn, I ran straight into the broad belly of a traffic sergeant. I cannot be accused for running into his belly mind you. I was already unsettled and so was my bike. So naturally both of us mistook his corporation maintained paunch for a speed breaker. And it did do well as a speed breaker. I halted with sheer terror in my mind. I panicked. The bike panicked. The old lady panicked. Everything panicked around us. This shook up the sergeant so badly that he came and began to shake the bike which shook an already shaking me. Overall, the entire world at that moment felt a bit like a glass of badly made Martini – shaken and stirred.

Did I mention a traffic sergeant? Let me digress. Traffic sergeants are very much like tigers – interesting and funny to watch from a distance when they are in a cage, but very scary when observed in close quarters. In fact National Geographic has offered an award to anybody who can get a close up photograph of a traffic constable when he is stalking his prey. The prey in this case was my bike and me. I had no camera with me.

The language of traffic constables is interesting as well. It mostly involves single words such as – ‘License?’, ‘R C Book?’, ‘Drunk?’, ‘Alive?’ (This is mostly directed at the biker who has just been run over by a truck), etc. The most interesting thing about this language is all these words and any other new words that might be added in the future all have a single meaning – ‘Pull out 100 rupees from your packet and place it in mine.’ The amount varies depending upon how many people were murdered by your vehicle, your knowledge of the native language and how much of your purse is exposed to the constable.

My friend’s bike had murdered nobody (I seriously wished it had murdered the old lady – she was stilling lamenting loudly.). My purse was nowhere within the visible range of the constable. So I should have got off easily, but that never happens with me. I failed miserably on the native language count. I knew one word in the native language and uttering that would possibly result in the constable murdering me and filing a defamation case against my ghost. So I had to shell out 100 rupees.

After having pocketed the money, the constable suddenly assumed a fatherly tone and began dishing out advice. ‘You should always carry the R C book with you sonny; even if it’s a friend’s bike (I had a good mind to carry the postmortem report of my friend with me next time). You should be more careful in the future.’ I had borne everything that had happened with a strong heart and iron will. But this really took the biscuit. Free advice by itself is obnoxious, but here I’m paying 100 rupees for free advice!!!!

I broke down and cried. Then followed an act which would have got me the Oscar, the Grammy and whatever other awards they have. In the next five minutes I crafted a heart wrenching tale of an epileptic friend admitted in hospital with severe injuries (which was not entirely false – I had exactly that in mind for my friend when I met him again.), an epileptic bike that was supposed to get me there to save his life and the epileptic traffic that was preventing me from getting there. And I added to this the villainy of the old lady who had jumped in and said ‘Boo’ to my nervous bike and was now hanging on to it like the VetAl hanging to VikramAdityan’s behind. The whole story was told in such a shaking fashion that by the time I finished it the constable himself had become epileptic.

He called me aside and said there was a hospital just fifty paces ahead which would always remain closed. He said that it gave an appearance of being open from the outside but was always closed. It was built as a sick joke by some misanthropic doctor who had no patients and lost his patience. He suggested that if I convinced the lady to get off the bike to take a look at this hospital, I might be speeding of to meet my friend. He said it was a perfectly legal and ethical thing to do with such wailing old ladies who jumped in front of bikes and say ‘Boo’. And then he did something that stunned me into silence and my bike into a start.

He pulled out fifty rupees from his pocket. ‘Fifty rupees.’ he said to accentuate the fact. And then he put that into my pocket. And then the heavens opened up and poured their joy and flowers were strewn all around in honour of this man who had done an act unheard of.

Exactly ten minutes later I was riding my bike with both me and the bike sporting a totally calm and tranquil smile over our faces. The bike had no Banshees in her pillion. I knew that there was an old lady standing in front of a hospital mouthing every possible obscenity at me and ruing her chance to swindle a software engineer out his annual salary. But the knowledge no longer affected me. I was at peace, one with my self, the bike and the universe. The traffic sergeant had led me to self-realization and my bike to self-ignition.

‘And that is why I will never ever allow anybody not even the closest and dearest of kith and kin to speak bad of a sergeant, more so a sergeant who is bullying an old lady.’ I concluded my tale.

My friend who had been listening with rapt attention all through never spoke a word after that. However I know it for a fact that at the next signal when he looked at a traffic sergeant he had a tear or two in his eyes.