On Saturday, I visited family spread all through Hyderabad.

In turn, the visits served up a smorgasbord of family dynamic – pleasant surprise; genuine affection; guilt trips; polite, but disinterested cordiality;  joy, which is sweeter for being unexpected; voluble, and surprisingly articulate grief of family that lost its matriarch suddenly, and too young; the inchoate sadness of the old ones, struggling against the fade out of everything, including, the most heart-rending of all, memory of the lived life; love, only nurtured fitfully and carelessly, yet still alive; the crushing awareness of the limits of what people can do for each other; and a few surreptitious tears.

As you might imagine it was exhausting.

But that was the least of my problems.

Every visit means food.  Food that is very hard to refuse, and not necessarily because it is just plain good.  With every mouthful, you get nutrition, and a dose of apprehension about the next.  After all these years, you know the feeding will be relentless, and unending – it started at 7:30 AM and ended at 11:00 PM.  See, you can ride the emotional roller-coaster with some grace.  You are older now, and you have learnt to fake maturity with the best of them.  But where can you ever hope to fit all that food?  That space is limited, and inexorably decreasing with age.

Nothing diverts them from the feeding.

So wonderful to see you.  Eat.   How have you been?  Eat.  We are getting by as best we can, like everyone else.  Eat.  It has been such a struggle since your aunt passed.  Eat.  So sorry to hear about your Dad’s health.  Eat.  You know, I am also diabetic. Eat.  What, you too?  Eat.  I don’t remember things so good anymore.  Eat.  What’s her name, my grand-daughter’s oldest, your niece?  Eat.  Real estate prices went through the roof, and I am told we are now, like, millionaires.  Eat.  Pity you did not hold on to your old house.  Eat.  Young people these days, they have their own ideas about everything.  Eat.  Who knows when she will have kids, I’ve stopped asking.  Eat.  Why are you still single, you doofus.  Eat.  You can’t leave already!  Eat.  So glad you stopped by.  Eat.   Make sure you visit again before you leave town.  So sad, you hardly ate anything.

In the middle of all this, there is a moment of frisson, and Chinese water torture is no longer a mystery.

At the end of the day, all consideration of weighty matters like life, death, the inevitable, self-made purgatory that awaits us all, and so on, had drowned, and disappeared in a sea of food.   The pain in the tummy obliterated the pain in the heart.  Knowing that more visits remained, my head hit the pillow around midnight, with only one clear thought.  Holy crap, I have to get up in the morning and eat again.

There is this thing, a box, a basket, a very minor burden, at my feet, and it has to be moved a 100 feet or so.

I can do the thing myself, in less time than it will take to complete this thought.

Or.

I can summon a gofer whom I will instruct to perform the same work.

In India, in some circles, the latter is the way to go.  There are always gofers; if you cannot find your own, you must use someone else’s.  I can have all the time in the world, but I must not do the work myself.  I did what came naturally a few times, and caused significant consternation up and down the totem pole.

I had always fetishized a sort of low footprint self-reliance.  Get through the day with a minimum of dependence on other folks.   Here, an entirely opposite skill is prized.   I must be able to acquire, maintain, and drive, a small crew of gofers, who will do all of my personal work, except of course, the very personal ones.

This morning, I noticed cobwebs at a couple of corners in our house.   I stood there looking at them, and then called the young lady gofer that works for my parents.  I showed her the cobwebs and started to turn away before it occurred to me to raise my arms 45 degrees and clear away the cobwebs myself.  Predictably, the lady gopher said, “Don’t, don’t, I will take care of that”.

In the past couple of weeks, I have continued to drive on and off. Daytime driving has become significantly easier, while driving at night remains a lost cause.

Don’t think, just drive

During the day, driving has become almost instinctive. Naturally, the traffic has not changed, but it seems to bother me less. I am noticing more. If there are 10 vehicles in front of me, I am now able to, almost unconsciously, plot a way through them.  You can guess the relative speeds of the various types of vehicles, judge who is about to make what move, and in turn make a decision yourself.   The blind spots exist, but I don’t seem to worry about them.

How all this happened is not clear.  I don’t consciously understand what it is I am seeing, and what I am not seeing.  Now and then deliberate thought suddenly intrudes, which, to little surprise, kills the fluency.   Do you remember that advice Kevin Costner’s catcher gives Tim Robbins’ talented but green pitcher, in Bull Durham?  Don’t think, just throw, or something to that effect.   That is where I am with the driving, I think.

Remember, one of the two simple rules that govern driving here – if you see a space in front of you that will fit your vehicle, you must fill it.  There is a little bit more to it.  You must fill that space fast.   You see a hole, gun the motor, rush into that hole, and slam the brakes. This is how our driver does it, which I found puzzling, until now.   If you don’t fill that space when you have the opportunity, somebody else will, which slows you down.   Moreover, being decisive in that manner provides clarity to the vehicles around you. Remember, you are constantly surrounded by other vehicles, each confronting the same problems you are.   Several times, I could clearly see my hesitation cause confusion in the other guy – he is forced to slow down and wonder what the heck is going on with me.  When this spreads to several vehicles, you have gummed up the works.

3 …. 2 …. same difference

I’ve driven on the Chennai Bypass a few times now.   This is a 6 lane highway, 3 in each direction, with a divider in between.   As you can imagine driving on this road is a little less challenging, but not entirely without the Indian touch.    I noticed that the larger vehicles rarely used the far left lane.  It would be largely empty, save for a few slower, smaller vehicles, like the two and the three wheelers.   It is not like folks maintain any kind of lane discipline; they usually drift into whatever space is available, so that almost free lane was incongruous.   I realized what the answer was this morning (we are on the road again this weekend).

Some sons of India drive down your side of the highway, in the opposite direction.  That far left lane is the one they use.  You don’t mind that; you must leave room for bending the rules, because someday you will need to do that yourself.

Even more interesting, at night, large, cargo carrying trucks simply park themselves on that lane.  We were on the bypass early this morning, and large stretches of the far left lane had become a rest area.   Perfectly reasonable position, if you ask me.   You take two lanes, and we’ll use one, for whatever.  Didn’t your Mom teach you to share?

The problem isn’t the sharing.  The issue is that this is a violation of the promise that a ‘three lane highway’ makes to you.  When they built that highway, a civic contract came into being, which said what you could expect from a ‘three lane highway’.  Such promises are almost never completely kept.  These civic contracts are satisfied only partially.  If you cannot temper your expectations accordingly, God help you, and the people around you.

So it goes.

Done with the night

At night, I am okay as long as I am on one of those roads where opposing traffic is hidden from view by a divider.   When I am forced to deal with the lights of the oncoming traffic, I am toast.   Maybe my eyes have just grown old, or maybe the creeping diabetes has rendered them less effective than they could otherwise be.  I can barely see the road in front of me.  On a drive from Alwar Thirunagar, to Kelambakkam, through rush hour traffic, around 8:00 PM, my eyes became tired by the time we hit Vandalur.   I have never felt that before.   I had to fight the urge to shut my eyes, and lay my head back on the seat.  We still had about 15 kms to go.

I went walking one night, on Vandaur road, which turned out to be exactly like driving at night.   You don’t really have a sidewalk, and hence you are virtually part of the traffic on the road.   I could barely see 5 feet in front of me sometimes.   It was unsafe.

I will drive at night only if I absolutely have to.