Gaadi Chalaana Seekhein – Indian Road Philosophies

I finally learnt how to drive a car.

At 36, coming from my socio-economic location in India, this is rather late. But a bunch of circumstances made that the case, and so, finally, I know what to do when you put me behind a steering wheel.

I knew from the beginning of “let me learn driving” discussions that I would learn best from a driving instructor; none of this “learn from your family member” or “learn from a driver” would work for me. I had – have – questions about what goes when and where and how and only a driving instructor would probably answer me patiently (I was kind of wrong about that, but more about that later).

And so it was that I googled the name of a driving school whose gaadi chalaana seekhein (Hindi for learn to drive) boards seemed ubiquitous in my locality, whose training cars I’d find every now and then going slowly, carefully, with a nervous driver trigger-happy to honk at every passerby.

The first morning, loaded with a bunch of nerves and excitement and best wishes from the near and dear, I walked to the car. The instructor asked me to sit in the driver’s seat and buckle up. “Already?” I thought, and looked at him quizzically. I’d told him that I’d never driven anything before, so wouldn’t he have to tell me something before I sat in the driver’s seat?

But it was get-go from the start. After the A(ccelerator)-B(rake)-C(lutch) introduction, and explaining that accelerator was also called “Race”, he made me start the car (something I learnt for the first time) and drive. I WAS STEERING! My mind shrieked with joy that something I was doing was making the car move. Half an hour sped by. In the coming days, gears and the clutch came into the picture. U-turns, racing to get out of potholes or controlling the car down a gentle slope. How not to freeze when I made a mistake that stopped the car in the middle of a turning. I asked him questions, a lot of them: “What will happen if I move from first gear directly to the third?” “Is it enough to press the clutch this much?” “But you told me to do this earlier, why are you changing it in this instance?” He answered some, ignored some, and explained some in a way that I didn’t understand.

Fifteen classes later, I could confidently manage clutch-brake-race-gear and had even stopped making my turns in a wild, panic-stricken way, the steering wheel flying about and my arms getting themselves up into a knot.

On my third class, the instructor and I had our first fight. He chided me for not doing something and I yelled at him, saying it was only my third class, I’d never driven a car or ridden a two-wheeler before so excuse me, but could he please do his job of training me?

We both sat in stony silence after that, me regretting the outburst but feeling defiant about my retort. By the end of my thirty minutes, we both softened up and I quietly thanked him and fixed the time for the next class.

That third class was a turning point in our relationship. He probably realised I was a student who needed to be praised occasionally and so took pains to point out when I got something right. I learnt to read his moods by gauging how he talked to a woman in a neighbouring locality who regularly brought him a package (food? documents?), to reach whom we would drive through a busy local market. On days this package-collection went well, I asked him about license procedures, telling him about the car I wanted to buy, asking if someday he would let me drive all the way to my office (to which he said no even though he was in a good mood). We talked about our hometowns, about ruling governments, and how people spend absurd amounts on dogs. When I told him I worked in an NGO, he said he guessed so, because “aap sochte bohut ho” (you think too much), and I wanted to laugh, because I’d heard it from strangers on at least two other occasions when learning something new. On other days, we drove quietly, me doing my darnedest best to not mess up. One morning, to my surprise, he called my reversing “first class”, and I walked around that morning beaming, a warm glow in my chest.

And so it was that when one day he said I had “zero road sense”, I didn’t want to yell back at him; I laughed and accepted that it was true. My sense of walking and driving on roads is unfortunately defined by my time in Singapore that it has taken me years to handle the disorderliness that is rampant on Indian, and specifically Delhi, roads. When I go abroad and can cross the road safely or walk on a pavement, I bemoan the lack of such facilities in most Indian cities I’ve lived in or visited. When I’m travelling somewhere and the roads are so quiet that someone sounding a horn jumps out of the silence, I want to shed tears of joy; in Delhi, I’m so jumpy that hearing loud or continuous honking makes me angry and scared, that on many occasions I’ve turned to yell at the driver and once even got into a nasty argument that a traffic police officer had to intervene.

Nothing has helped me edge closer to acceptance of Indian roads as these driving lessons, as I navigated unmarked speed bumps, took treacherous turns in narrow streets flanked by cars parked on both sides, and pushed the car unknowingly into potholes and then worked out the gear-brake-accelerator combination to make it move.

One morning, realisation dawned on me as I honked to get a crow to fly away. I don’t know if it responded to the horn (I knew dogs and cows did), but I had learnt by then to honk to alert pedestrians, cyclists, handcart pushers and rickshaw pullers. “I understand now why we have to honk so much in India,” I told the instructor. “We have so many kinds of people and vehicles that there’s no other wa!.” He chuckled as if I’d finally understood the golden rule of driving. “That’s why India is called sone ki chidiya”,he said in a leap of logic that I didn’t understand but hmm-ed along to anyway as he started talking about India’s colonisation.

To be continued (I hope).