Behind the wheel…

Do you like cars?? Do you like to drive them?? Are you one of the crazy perceiver who cares to think how your suspension springs dance when you slam on the brakes or pick up the pace? When you spin your steering? Do you enjoy the sound of your car’s first roar in the morning and when it starts rolling? Do you feel the gears moving in you when you go from second to third gear? Do you like to count zero as the number of cars that overtook yours at the end of the day? Do you feel like breaking of a dream when you have to turn the ignition off? Do you always find yourself looking back in admiration at your car at the first corner you turn after you lock and start moving? Do you feel yourself truly “YOU” when you drive? Well, I do.

But here I want to write about some experiences when the view out of the windshield looked different… when the world outside the car asked for special attention or extra consciousness from inside.

1^st experience is from 1^st July 2007. It was a rainy evening in Ahmedabad. I had to go to the airport to drop a friend. On our way to the airport my wipers stopped working. It was raining heavily and we weren’t in a position to stop. In a few moments the windshield was all foggy and the view was all blurred due to the flow of water. Then we had to open the window glasses and had to see thru the open window. Somehow we reached the airport… at the time of returning to the city the situation was worse. I was alone this time and the water had formed a layer on all the glasses by film condensation. But the good part, there was a friend of my friend at the airport and she also was going towards the city so we decided that I would follow her car. So as we started, I was able to see almost nothing and all my concentration was on two red back lights of her car. It was a good experience, when you are almost blind and following, literally blindly, the only lights in the sight, without thinking what it is or what direction is it leading. And then the flow of the water on your windshield and different patterns formed by it – that gives a feel of a door invisible otherwise but so much existent and in reach, an image to blind you from the reality and still so real in itself.

In a few minutes I had to take a turn from where I had to take a different road. And soon the image lost in reality…the door shut – hidden by the light which refused to come thru it. The patterns united and became a single shade of black. And then my eyes started a search for their existence. They started blinking rapidly for a while and then stopped suddenly; alert and wide open like checking any footstep around or looking for their own footprints in the air. Soon they found themselves breathing as the car reached another corner and we found the street lights to take us home.

My second experience is from 5^th September 2007. We went to a hill station called Mt. Abu. It was rainy season and we enjoyed our two day stay there. We had to start at 5 O’clock in the morning the next day. When we open the door of our cottage we found that we were in a dark cloud. It was so dense that once in the car we weren’t able to see the mark on the road just a couple of meters away, with all our head lights and fog lights. We decided to move on. This was an experience when all I knew was I was moving, on unfamiliar roads, in unknown direction, unaware of the valleys on either sides, unknowledgeable of the possible bears wandering around to hunt. We actually turned a wrong corner and reached a dead end. Moving around in the cloud can make you feel gloomy and lost. Till the farthest point where your sight can reach you see a blend of grey substituting everything that ever existed. With every breath you take you give way to the spreading giant to eat you from inside. And you keep on running into it in to find a way out of it.

We found the correct path and started descending. Soon we left the blurred grey and entered a smiling combination of blue, green, orange and violate. And the joy of living prevailed in the surroundings again.

The third experience is from 27^th September 2007. It was just after the dusk at the industrial south east of Ahmedabad. The silence in the air was so much disturbing. There were many other vehicles on the road but looked lifeless moving objects. The air was still and the yellow in the sky so dull that froze the flow of gasoline in the cars and of blood in the drivers. The view from the glass was of a model of a civilization in a museum, where motionless idols perform a frozen moment in the history. A moment that has taken away the smell from the flowers, withdrawn colors from the rainbow, evacuated the life from the plane of the Earth…
Well, the life was pumped soon and the rainbow was colored again and the flowers were spreading the fragrance again, as the wheels moved on.