In the name of father, son and holy car

Gitanjali Sharma

I CRINGED when my son said a few months ago: “Mom, when are you teaching me driving?” I had been putting off the inevitable but now with him in college there seemed no getting away from the dreaded task. Yea, dreaded. At the risk of sounding hackneyed, I must say that our days were different. When I learnt driving some 20 years ago, the roads had room to breathe. Now, it appears downright dangerous to have a greenhorn armed with just a learner’s licence step out on to hostile congested roads where just about all are racing against nanoseconds.

To escape the role of a petrified teacher to an overconfident novice at the wheel, I quietly presented sonny with a 15-day course at a driving school. He, of course, wasn’t too happy with the overprotective lessons where the teacher apparently had all the controls.

So, it was back to: “Mom, come let’s go for a drive.” Blame it on some primordial fear working overtime, but as I reluctantly slid into the passenger seat my heart all but stopped and the stomach got all knotted. The knots got tighter and the heart more stressed as we moved past menacing buses and frighteningly slow rickshaws and cyclists. “Go slow, learn to go slow,” I kept admonishing my impatient pupil as he took me in circles around the city.

The learning had its share of scrapes. A knock on the rear bumper was passed off to a young woman driver who was driving rashly. The second “thud” I was witness to. As sonny was manoeuvring the car inch by inch at an overcrowded roundabout, an edgy driver hit our already flattened bumper. The knots only got knottier and more painful. Looking at my grim face, sonny grinned: “C’mon mom, you are now worried your Maruti Dzire is turning into a Swift.” The knots eased a little as the mind couldn’t help but note: the car may not be intact for long but his humour is!

My knotty predicament took a turn for the worse when my father decided it was time he had something in addition to his 30-year-old vintage beauty which could also be driven by sonny. One day before I was up, sonny had driven off in the new car with his grandfather, who wanted to get acquainted with the latest features. With one learner barely over 18 and the other enthusiast nearing 80, God alone knew who was teaching whom! No melodrama here, but before I was about to pass out from 40 minutes of excruciating anxiety and the sickening knots, the two returned, cheerily exchanging some driving notes. The fireworks that followed with my mother raking up their safety is another story.

Since both were novices at handling the new car, I was left with the task of taking it for the first servicing. A worker at the service station, after taking down some notings, came to me smilingly: “Ma’am do you know your chassis number ends with the sacred ‘786’. It is considered lucky. Such cars fetch a good price… in fact, people don’t sell such cars.” I smiled, simply taking it as a godsend message: “For Heaven’s sake, stop worrying. Let the stomach breathe easy. Live and let live.” Amen to that!