Amdavadi Auto Rides...

Bangalore has incredible (and unpredictable) weather. And quite frankly, Ahmedabad is no Bangalore. So on the handful of occasions that Nature does decide to endow Ahmedabad with such exquisite weather, you would need to be as obstinate as quite a few Indian politicians to not want to step out and maybe even go skinny-dippy in Vastrapur Lake. Now – the story that I shall thus recount, unfolded on a similarly balmy evening in the former capital city of Gujarat.

Ahmedabad is as well known for its chai-wallas as it is for some of its architectural heritage and for being the home to Mahatma Gandhi’s Ashram. And if your friends come calling on the pretext of wanting to explore ‘true Gujarat’, you have to begrudgingly accompany them while they indulge in their touristy hankerings. Thankfully, the weather was at least on my side as we made our way from CG Road to Alpha Mall to Law Garden.

By the time the day had turned to dusk, a cool and pleasant wind had started blowing, and after a long day of strenuous shopping and Gujarati Thali gorging, it came as a welcome respite. And when I finally managed to drop off my friends at their hotel I, with vehement politeness, refused their proposal of spending the night at the hotel and decided to head back. As I stepped out of the hotel, I could felt the first drops of the light rain which had just started – things couldn’t have gotten any better!

Walking down the dimly lit, foliage festooned street, I spotted a gang of three men in the distance who appeared to be either auto drivers or bus conductors in their khaki uniforms. They were huddled over in a crude circle and seemed to be squabbling over not getting an equal share of whatever that there was in between them. As I approached them, one of them looked up questioningly while the other two surreptitiously slithered the shady something that was there in between them, out of sight. Inferring from the lack of buses in the near vicinity that these couldn’t be conductors, I asked the questioning one if he would take me to my campus.

For a good fifteen seconds he stared back, perplexed, as if I had asked him to calculate the square root of the product of the cube root of 5342 and 25878 factorial. I could almost see the audio waves traveling to his cerebral cortex and lights turning on inside his head before he suddenly stood up. With a sideways glance of “don’t-you-dare-start-without-me” at his comrades, he walked up steadily to the auto parked in front of him. As I had just stepped inside the auto, thankful for some cover from the now heavy drizzle, he stepped out, looking in wondrous astonishment at the auto – almost as if wondering why his posterior no longer fitted into the ass print on the driver’s seat.

Then, with a grunt – which must obviously be the universally sign in auto drivers’ parlance to follow them into the adjacent auto – he went and sat into the next one. This must definitely have been a sign from the heavens above, but I am remarkably thick skinned when it comes to interpreting subtle indications; and I quickly followed suit. With a smart pull of the ignition handle, the auto came to life. After a few seconds of gunning the engine, he suddenly changed gears, and we were off into the night.

The streets seemed deserted, which is quite often the case at 11 o clock in Ahmedabad as the Amdavadis are often busy enjoying their after dinner helpings of butter accompanied with tidbits pav-bhaji at Khao Gali during this time. The drizzle had by now turned into a downpour accompanied by flashes of thunder that illuminated the night sky. (In case you are wondering why people would head out to eat in such belligerent weather, you clearly have never been to Gujarat). I was quite lost in my thoughts about the day that had gone by when I suddenly noticed the auto driver peering quite keenly at the speedometer on the handle, with his greasy nose barely an inch away from the same. Just as I was about to ask him what the issue was, he sat up straight again, now peering at the windscreen, seemingly interested in the rhythmic to and fro motion of the wiper wiping the windscreen.

As I continued to stare at the back of his swarthy neck, I could have sworn that his head was starting to tilt again, unmistakably on its journey towards the speedometer again. And sure enough, three seconds later, he was bearing down on the contraption again, as though urging it to show a higher number. And then he sat up again. This pendulum like motion continued unwaveringly as the auto and its occupants made their way onto the Drive-In Cinema road.

As soon as the auto turned left onto this road, the accompanying motion of the driver also stopped. Quite relieved, I snuggled into the middle of the auto seat, with the heavy rains lashing in from both sides. But now, my vision was completely blocked by the partially bald and piebald head of the driver – and I couldn’t quite see where we were headed. And then quite suddenly, an earthquake struck. Or at least what seemed quite nearly like an earthquake.

The driver’s body was suddenly besieged with a bout of coughing. And with each wheeze that the driver took, his hands quivered violently, sending the auto askew – into multiple directions within a single second. I clung onto the seat for my dear life, my knuckles turning white, not daring to let go, lest I get tossed out of the auto with the next rattle. Then, with a sound like a pig regurgitating a semi-cooked cabbage, he filled up his mouth with phlegm from all corners of his body. He sat there for an entire minute, swiveling the savories within his mouth, before ducking sideways and emptying the contents into one of the now raging roadside drains outside.

This sideways movement momentarily unclouded my restricted vision and I gazed out of the windscreen to realize that we had almost arrived at the final stretch of road, leading to the campus. And then with unabashed confidence, the driver turned the auto onto the wrong side of the road, right into the incoming traffic! This was further accompanied by the aforementioned pendulum like motion. Scared to the end of my wits, I reached out and touched the driver on his shoulder, and announced to him that he had turned onto the wrong side.

Almost as if I had pressed some hidden button, his head started to turn clockwise, almost indiscernibly at first, but as I continued to watch, it was now aligned with his right shoulder. Completely oblivious of the incoming traffic (of which thankfully there wasn’t much) the head continued to rotate, as though almost devoid of all the physical restrictions of it being attached to the rest of his body. Suddenly, there was a flash of lightning, accompanied by a muffled yelp which at first I thought had escaped from my person – had the driver rotated his head by one more degree, the scene would have been reminiscent of the famous scene from The Exorcist.

This was followed by the semblance of an utterance from the driver, which was drowned in the volley of barks that ensued, making me realize that the driver had actually hit a street dog. This, thankfully, made him reorient his head in the correct direction and rev up the engine, leaving the barking dogs behind in a spray of water. He slowed down subsequently as we approached the campus, and this time without turning around, asked me whether I wanted to go left or right.

But I had had enough. I asked him to stop right there and got off quickly. Forty bucks was the call without even glancing at the meter. I fished out a fifty rupee note from my pocket and handed it over. Without even caring to wait for the change, it turned around and walked away quickly, slowly breaking into a run as I neared the main gate. As I was about to enter the campus, I turned around to catch one last glimpse of the auto driver and noticed that he was still standing there, flashing the headlights weirdly – either as a signal to his own kind in outer space or celebrating in ecstasy at having received 10 rupees extra in the land of the Gujaratis…