Learning to Drive
Photo: Mayur Rawte
Personal Essay: ‘At a time when my family needed me the most, I did not know how to get there. The hospital was only about a kilometre away from my rented apartment, so I picked up my bag and started to run.’
I finally learnt how to drive a car when I had to rush to the hospital late one night, after getting a frantic call from my mother. “Papa is struggling to breathe,” she said.
It was an innocuous matter that had initially led him to the hospital: his 102-degree fever wouldn’t go away, and the doctor deemed it to be a viral fever. Common this time of the year, he said. But he suggested we run all the tests anyway, to rule out anything else. The test results came back in an hour, showing that my father was not suffering from any known malignancy, but his platelets count was just below medically acceptable levels.
We had expected to return with a simple prescription of paracetamol and unnecessary antibiotics; instead, we found ourselves reluctantly admitting him to the hospital. I googled to learn if it would safe to take my 63-year-old father home with a low platelet count, but the results were just as inconclusive. Even then, he seemed to be in high spirits, expecting to get discharged the following day.
And so, when the call came that night, I could not comprehend what had gone so wrong. It just seemed to be a bad misunderstanding and yet it was not so. The call was very real and my mother had made sure that I understood the urgency of the situation.
I was 28 at the time and did not have a vehicle with me when I got the call. I had only recently shifted from Calcutta to Guntur in Andhra Pradesh for my first posting and in the few months that I had lived there, I had not learnt enough Telugu to get by. I also did not know how to drive.
I was found wanting. At a time when my family needed me the most, I was delayed. The hospital was only about a kilometre away from my rented apartment, so I picked up my bag and started to run. It was late in the night and there were no autos on the main road. I kept checking my watch, counting the minutes that I was losing. Halfway, I found a stranger on a motorcycle, to whom I conveyed my sense of emergency; luckily, he dropped me the remaining distance.
With so much of what I loved in stark danger, I was shocked by how little I had to offer to that room in that moment. From the time I had gotten my mother’s call, I had been ignoring the question that lingered and echoed in the back of my head: Is this it? Is this how it all slips away?
My father was heaving when I reached the hospital. Whatever little air that he was able to take in, he was doing so with the assistance of an oxygen mask, which kept fogging up on his face. He was awake and alert, his eyes wide with panic, scanning the room frantically, as if searching to find out the reason behind this failure of his body. I suppose he was caught unaware too. The doctors stood around, urgently talking amongst themselves, as the nurses rushed in and out of the room to make arrangements to shift him to the ICU. They informed me that, The vitals were in order. The prognosis was that it was either a panic attack, which my father did not have a history of, or an allergic reaction to an antibiotic that had been introduced intravenously for the first time. The vitals are normal, they kept repeating, but that did little to alleviate the panic in the room.
How must one act in such a situation? There is the doctor’s prognosis—The vitals are in order—and then, there is the cold reality of seeing your parent’s breath slip away. It is difficult to reconcile the two. I remember holding his hands, not sure what else there was to do, and repeatedly telling him that his vitals were fine. I leaned in, bringing my face next to his, and whispered him to find strength, to find that rock that he needed to hold on. He arched his eyes and locked them into mine, my face next to his, as if in affirmation of what I had said, or perhaps silent admonishment at the ridiculousness of my suggestion.
With so much of what I loved in stark danger, I was shocked by how little I had to offer to that room in that moment. From the time I had gotten my mother’s call, I had been ignoring the question that lingered and echoed in the back of my head: Is this it? Is this how it all slips away? Is this how it goes—the passing away of a parent, at a hospital late in the night in some unknown town, from some strange miscalculation of the body?
I stayed with my father as he was wheeled out to the ICU. About an hour passed, after which, whatever it was that had gripped him passed, and his body calmed down. His breathing resumed its rhythmic pace.
I am not sure what role I had played in helping him in those moments. Probably none. But the important thing was that I had made it in time that night.
He was discharged from the hospital a few days later. And that was when I asked my wife to teach me how to drive.
*
This was not my first attempt at driving. Back when I was in college, I had enrolled myself in a driving school to get my license. A chain-smoking training assistant used to pick me up every morning, and we would take painstakingly slow circles around my neighbourhood. He taught me the most basic skill of driving: how to let go off the clutch without killing the engine. While I learnt this well, there was little else that I learnt that week.
Centuries of surviving on our instincts has taught us to move quickly before others, to catch an opening and seize it. We learnt how to survive at the cost of others much before we learnt the ideas of generosity and forgiveness.
This became plainly obvious to see when I took my father’s new car for a drive. I got stuck, as I was later told that even the most experienced drivers are prone to, on an uphill climb, with both feet pressed to the floor, one on the clutch and the other on the brake, unable to accelerate forward without sliding backwards. The traffic quickly piled up behind me, and when they had honked themselves enough to realize that I was not willingly holding them back, they took turns to go around me. After the last one had overtaken me, I reversed slowly and made another go at it, this time a little more successfully.
A couple of minutes later, while driving cautiously and slowly in the second gear, I became painfully aware from the incessant honking coming from behind me, that I was once again holding up the traffic. Overcome with the guilt that comes from failing to perform one’s civic duties, I tried to accelerate, and in doing so, the front of my father’s car gently grazed against the rear wheel of the cyclist in front of us. Fear ran through my body like a bolt of lightning, freezing me in cold anticipation. Luckily, she was not knocked off balance, and rode on after directing some well-deserved obscenities in my direction. I drove back that last kilometre home with trembling limbs.
I didn’t touch the car again after that.
It took me a decade to get back behind the wheels again, a decade that saw me complete my education and land a job in a new part of the country where I did not—and still don’t—speak the local language. I had also gotten married in the meantime. As for my father, he had recently retired from work, closing that chapter behind him. It was by all accounts, a time of new beginnings. If I was told at the start of this decade, that at 30, I would be learning how to drive in the highways in and around Guntur in Andhra Pradesh, I would not have been able to see it coming.
And yet, I cannot think of a better place to start.
The roads here are wide and relatively free of pot-holes, and the highways in and around Guntur offer a panoramic view of the prosperity enjoyed by the state. Andhra is beautifully green and its people educated and monied. Everyone has a favourite actor and a favourite politician—oftentimes the same person. Everyone seems to have a political connect and everyone has invested in land. Most middle-aged couples you speak to will tell you gladly that their children are either already working abroad, or are studying something to get there. The temples here are clean and well-kept, and the food absolutely delicious. And yet despite all of it, property disputes and caste affiliations come to the fore with little prodding, vile innards of a patriarchal, feudal society spilling out for all to see. In this regard, this place is no different from any other place in the country.
Popular culture equates driving a vehicle with freedom. It is that moment when one crosses the threshold into adulthood, the taking of the wheel synonymous with the taking control of our own lives. I have seen those movies and heard those songs but I have not found much truth in that in the last one year of driving myself around. Perhaps I was late to the party. Maybe I too would have stuck my head out of the window and yelled out into the night sky if I had learnt how to drive as a young teenager.
Anyway, by the time I got to it, I realized that driving a vehicle is not all about long meditative drives on the highway. It has its own set of mental chores: whether it is the search for parking spots or traffic cops armed with a long list of statutory violations. And worst of all, driving a vehicle, whether in Andhra Pradesh or elsewhere, means having to spend a lot of mental energy negotiating with other commuters on the road.
*
The collective IQ of a group of people can easily be measured by the way people conduct themselves on the road. It is not a coincidence that it takes little for our worst selves to come out while in a vehicle. Centuries of surviving on our instincts has taught us to move quickly before others, to catch an opening and seize it. We learnt how to survive at the cost of others much before we learnt the ideas of generosity and forgiveness.
Nowhere is this more on display than on the road: Rarely does an individual think twice before jamming his vehicle in a small nook, to gain a small and often insignificant advantage, and in the process entangling hundreds of other individuals into a knot that could have otherwise been avoided if each of us had shown some restraint. And yet, we do this repeatedly. Driving myself to work and then back every day has continuously and repetitively ingrained the idea that those who get ahead, do so at the cost of the ones left behind. It is a zero-sum game in that regard. I always thought that when I would eventually get behind a wheel, I would be more composed than my counterparts. However, just a few months into driving, I realized that my ideas of my own grandeur came not from experience but from ignorance. I often found myself spitting with anger at my fellow commuters, competing, and chasing small advantages, my overall demeanour shaped and coloured by those of the traffic lights. In that sense, learning how to drive quickly rid me of my elevated self-esteem. I was both disappointed and relieved to know that I was no better and no different.
A recent visit to the doctor however, has brought an end to this exercise. I have been told to stop driving for a couple of months to rest my neck. Thirties are a weird time in that regard. This is when our bodies show us that the summer of our twenties do not last forever. Visit a doctor with one issue, and end up finding another one. Accidental findings, they call it.
My father also first developed a back issue when he was in his early 30s. He traded in his motorcycle for a TVS Scooty after he underwent a surgery to rectify the error. I have pictures from my childhood—astride that grey Yezdi motorbike—in my blue school uniform, wailing in terror at the prospect of going to school. A couple of years back, my brother, four years my elder, also found himself on the wrong side of an MRI Scan. And so, when I sat waiting in the doctor’s chamber last month, nursing a three-week-old neck crick, I wasn’t surprised to see him nod disapprovingly at my scan results. The spine was curving too much, causing compressions and bulges, he said. What might have caused it, I had asked. Plenty of things, he said. What might cure it? Learn to live better, he had replied. They don’t teach you these things when you are young.
As I navigate my thirties, I am noticing that the handbook of the rights and wrongs and how to go about our lives, which was passed down to us when we were younger, is missing a few pages. The checklist that we’re often presented for life—the completion of our education, that all important first job, marriage—are usually ticked off as we enter our 30s. There is not much literature to guide us for the decades that come after that.
A couple of months ago, I sat in the living room with my parents, discussing the same. I asked my parents, in equal parts contemplation and exasperation, that the road map which was given to us middle class children: study hard, get a good job, start a family, all came to an abrupt conclusion once these boxes were ticked. There was no roadmap for our thirties.
The checklist that we’re often presented for life—the completion of our education, that all important first job, marriage—are usually ticked off as we enter our 30s. There is not much literature to guide us for the decades that come after that.
My father said that by the time he finished his education and settled into his first job and got married, which was around the age that I am now (a few years younger, actually, but I refuse to acknowledge that), my brother had come into their lives, followed by me four years later. And so, there was no lack of direction in their lives. As with all middle-class households, their lives revolved around their children and their jobs. And here I am, thirty years later, not getting up on that bus my parents took three decades ago, and therefore a little lost, laughing at the irony that, by the time I learnt how to drive, I didn’t know where to go.
In essence, that passed-down handbook is good only for a thirty-year cycle, playing on repeat, one generation after the next, till the next batch of children come in to our lives. But now we have turned thirty, and they sixty, and the next generation of children are not here to occupy our lives. My father, recently retired, plays chess on his phone as I sit at the dining table, pretending to write, our lives surprisingly intertwined by a common question: What comes next?
What does modern society expect of people once they reach 60s? My parents come from humble beginnings. They were the first generation of their family to get a good education and land a good job in corporate India. Their success, quite unlike ours, did not come from privilege. They have had to work extremely hard throughout their lives to make something of their lives. That kind of effort does not leave much space for a life outside of work, and it grinds out any interests or passions that they might have had in the beginning.
I am sure there were things that they wanted to do, for which they couldn’t make the time. If Prufrock’s life was measured out in coffee spoons, their lives have been measured out in their red bhoi khattas, planning their monthly budget to that last minute detail, trying and accommodating competing needs and interests.
And suddenly, they turn a year older, just like the year before that, and the lights are turned off. They are told to pack it all up and call it in. You are retired now, and all the handbooks in the world expect you to get back to the things that you couldn’t make time for earlier.
Suddenly, my parents are expected to have a life to go back to, to have friends to meet up with, to have hobbies and to have books to read. But there are no books that my father wants to read, and his friends are scattered all over the place. So where do they find themselves in this landscape? Where do they fit in? They try their best to stay relevant. My mother follows pop culture and fashion and my dad knows about ChatGPT, and has a smart watch that tracks his sleep cycle. They have gone over the handbook, repeatedly looking for that page that might give some insight into what to do next.
As for me, I don’t know what comes next. I suppose I should count my blessings. The handbook did not fail me—it just ran out of pages. At the start of this decade, I couldn’t have pictured myself living in this part of the country, navigating the dense traffic of the cities of Guntur and Vijayawada. And so, I am confident that whatever ideas I may have of what the coming decade might bring, it would most definitely be completely off the mark.
All I know is that should the phone ring again in the middle of the night, I will not be found wanting. I will be able to drive myself there.
***
Saurabh Kumar is a bureaucrat currently posted in Andhra Pradesh. He have completed my B.A and M.A in English Literature from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, and Jadavpur University. I am currently in my third year of service. He has been working on fiction and non-fiction works for the last couple of years, hoping to find a larger audience. You can find him on X: @sk1392.
